Sarah Wentworth Morton

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SWM , poet of the American Revolution, is remembered for the long, sentimental, narrative poems in which she considers the make-up of the new nation, inter-racial relationships (equal male friendship, unequal heterosexual love), the relationship of history to topography, and heroism both male and female. Her more personal and occasional poems, and her essays, are also of interest. Though too invested in the idea of submission to be a feminist, she has the status and role of women much at heart.
Half-length painting of Sarah Wentworth Morton by Gilbert Stuart, c. 1802. She sits in a red chair looking at the viewer in half-profile, her dark hair and dress merging into the black background and only her face, décolletage, and forearms standing out dramatically, with a gold shawl at her elbows. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA.

Milestones

29 August 1759

SWM was baptised in Boston, Massachusetts, where she had been born the same month into a family that eventually numbered eleven children.
Pendleton, Emily, and Milton Ellis. Philenia. University of Maine Press.
21
American National Biography. http://www.anb.org/articles/home.html.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.

1823

SWM 's My Mind and its Thoughts, in Sketches, Fragments, and Essays appeared by subscription in Boston. It was her last publication, and the only one to bear her name.
Pendleton, Emily, and Milton Ellis. Philenia. University of Maine Press.
97, 99, 113

14 May 1846

SWM died at Quincy, Massachusetts.
Pendleton, Emily, and Milton Ellis. Philenia. University of Maine Press.
106

Biography

Birth and Family

29 August 1759

SWM was baptised in Boston, Massachusetts, where she had been born the same month into a family that eventually numbered eleven children.
Pendleton, Emily, and Milton Ellis. Philenia. University of Maine Press.
21
American National Biography. http://www.anb.org/articles/home.html.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.

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