The 2026 Maurice and Muriel Fulton Lecture, featuring Mary Sarah Bilder — Catharine Macaulay's Constitution of Liberty

The Perils of Sex: Catharine Macaulay's Constitution of Liberty

The influential constitutional historian Catharine Macaulay published the first female-authored constitutional plan in 1767. A mysterious revision offers a glimpse at Macaulay's desire for women to have the same independence as men in a democratical political state. Her family's rise to wealth taught her that the male constitutional state was built on the perils of sex and maternal morbidity. Her plan reflects constitutional liberty as imagined by a woman and suggests a historical foundation for an expansive conception of constitutional liberty.