Literacy among New England's transient poor, 1750-1800

Journal of Social History, Summer, 1996 by Ruth Wallis Herndon

These literacy rates for poor, transient women and men are much lower than those usually derived from signatures and marks on property-related documents. The difference is very striking, in fact: female literacy among the poor is half of the most conservative previous estimate of female literacy; male literacy among the poor is two-thirds of previous estimates. These dramatic differences suggest two things. First, literacy and property-holding are positively related; people who own property are more likely to be literate. And second, property-related documents skew literacy rates substantially upward and present an inflated view of New England literacy. To present a less biased view of literacy in 18th-century New England, we must make a wider search for documents (such as transient examinations) that reflect the experience of unpropertied people. If we take these poor into account, we must conclude that literacy was not all universal in New England by 1800, neither for women nor men.

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ENDNOTES

This research note arises out of a larger, forthcoming study by the author on transience and warning out in New England.

1. Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York, 1974); Linda Auwers, "Reading the Marks of the Past: Exploring Female Literacy in Colonial Windsor, Connecticut," Historical Methods, 13:4 (Fall 1980): 204-14; William J. Gilmore, "Elementary Literacy on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution: Trends in Rural New England, 1760-1830," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 92:1 (1982): 87-178; Ross W. Beales, Jr., "Literacy and Reading in Eighteenth-Century Westborough, Massachusetts," in Peter Benes, ed., Early American Probate Inventories, The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings for 1987 (Boston, 1989), 41-50; Joel Perlmann and Dennis Shirley, "When Did New England Women Acquire Literacy?" William and Mary Quarterly, 48:1 (January 1991): 50-67; and Gloria L. Main, "An Inquiry Into When And Why Women Learned to Write in Colonial New England," Journal of Social History, 24:3 (Spring 1991): 579-89. See also E. Jennifer Monaghan, "Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England," American Quarterly, 40:1 (March 1988): 18-41, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, "The Schooling of Girls and Changing Community Values in Massachusetts Towns, 1750-1820," History of Education Quarterly, 33:4 (Winter 1993): 511-42.

2. Beales, "Literacy and Reading in Westborough," 43.

3. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England, 38; Gilmore, "Elementary Literacy," 114; Main, "An Inquiry," 585, Table 4, Row 3.

4. Auwers, "Reading the Marks of the Past," 204; Perlmann and Shirley, "When Did New England Women Acquire Literacy?" 54.

5. Gilmore, "Elementary Literacy," 98.

6. These fourteen towns are Cumberland, East Greenwich, Exeter, Gloucester, Hopkinton, Jamestown, Middletown, New Shoreham, Providence, Richmond, South Kingstown, Tiverton, Warren, Warwick. Together, they form a stratified sample that fairly represents the wide range of age, wealth, population, economic orientation and geographic location of the 27 towns that existed in Rhode Island in 1770.