Catharine Macaulay
This is Rachel's tattoo.
I got this tattoo the summer after I graduated from college. I wrote my senior thesis in history on Catharine Macaulay, the woman in my tattoo. Macaulay was a historian, political pamphleteer, and a philosopher in 18th century England. After spending a year writing, reading, thinking, and dreaming about her, I came to understand her as a woman of strength and spirit. I admire her--the fact that despite societal expectations and pressures she wrote what she believed in, and that independence seeps through into her very words. She was considered scandalous--but didn't seem to mind. I have always struggled to find my own independence: from socially prescribed roles, from my fear of "what will people think?," and from family and even friends. I took the image from the frontpiece of the first volume of her The History of England
, and had it placed on my left shoulder to give my heart strength and to always remind me to be strong and true to myself.
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