The writings of Hannah Mather Crocker have received little attention. Although her Observations on the Real Rights of Women (1818) has been called the first "feministic" book in America, she has been omitted from most histories of American feminism. The neglect of Crocker's writings might be the result of her habit of relying on passages extracted from the writings of others; yet her texts that resemble commonplace books are valuable for what they reveal about reading practices of the period. Crocker's significance as a writer chiefly rests on her status as a "sublime amateur," a phrase applied to women writers of the period who wanted to avoid the criticism that professionalism was unfeminine. Crocker was no exception. By asking the reader of Observations on the Real Rights of Women to "gently draw the mantle of charity over all its imperfections," she adopted a pose of modesty that enabled her...