Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814) is an American poetess, dramatist, historian, and letter-writer who played an active role during the colonial period in America. The aim of this paper is to highlight the role Warren played in the American Revolution. The paper will adopt a post colonial feminist approach to show how Warren was an influential female playwright. Two of her plays, namely The Adulateur (1773) and The Group < /em> (1775) will be examined to emphasize her contribution in the process of liberation from the British colonizer, and to illustrate how her writing was used as a tool to arouse patriotic feelings in Americans during the period of turmoil that preceded the Revolution
Postcolonial feminism emerged as a result of the marginalization of women and their works in Postcolonial theory, which was "a rather masculinist field" that focused on male "subjects" (Mills 99), ignoring "women and their important roles in the resistance movements" (Jones 23). Arguing against the postcolonial theory and calling for the recognition of women as postcolonial subjects, feminist theorists “concentrated on the constructions of gender difference during the colonial period, in both colonial and anti-colonial discourses, [and] concerned themselves with the representations of women in postcolonial discourses, with particular reference to the work of women writers" (McLeod 172).