When Did New England Women Acquire Literacy

Bibliographic Data

ID3219835
AuthorsJoel Perlmann (corresponding author), Dennis Shirley (0000-0003-1292-9039)
Year1991
Volume48
Issue1
Pages50
Publication date1991-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2937997
OpenAlexW2327956940
LanguageEN
Citations received6

URING the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the proportion of New England women with some education increased substantially. Historians have studied this phenomenon at two levels. One level concerns advanced education-the development of female academies and colleges with serious academic curricula. The other concerns the acquisition of basic literacy. Recently, much more attention has been accorded to the first topic, perhaps because sources are more familiar and accessible or because the growth in advanced education and the arguments in its favor seem germane to the concerns of our own time. 1 The study of women's literacy, by contrast, has not profited much even from current interest in women's history. Nevertheless, advances in basic literacy for women were no less noteworthy than advances at the higher levels of learning, to which they were to some extent preparatory. Most of what we know about women's literacy in early British America has come through studies of colonial literacy generally-studies of the long-term evolution of literacy levels and the relation of literacy to such social characteristics as region and wealth. In conducting these inquiries, however, scholars have concentrated on male literacy. One reason is that evidence for women is scarcer: documents with signatures or marks of women are far fewer and perhaps less representative of the population than documents signed or marked by men. Women's literacy merits attention in its own right and on its own terms, for it is clear that generalizations about male literacy do not necessarily hold for females. Literacy rates were lower for females than for males throughout the colonial era, and the timing of the rise of female literacy, particularly toward universal literacy, was different and must have been affected by

Literacy · New england · Pedagogy · Political science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub