III.  Brilliant Exceptions

In the middle colonies, as in New England, schools for all classes were established at an early date.  Thus, the first school in Pennsylvania was opened in 1683, only one year after the founding of Philadelphia, and apparently very few children in that city were without schooling of some sort.  As is commonly agreed, more emphasis was placed on education in New England than in any of the other colonies.  A large number of the men who established the Northern colonies were university graduates, naturally interested in education, and the founding of Harvard, sixteen years after the landing at Plymouth, proves this interest.  Moreover, it was considered essential that every man, woman, and child should be able to read the Bible, and for this reason, if for no other, general education would have been encouraged.  As Moses Coit Tyler has declared, “Theirs was a social structure with its corner stone resting on a book.”  However true this may be, we are not warranted in assuming that the women of the better classes in Massachusetts were any more thoroughly educated, according to the standards of the time, than the women of the better classes in other colonies.  We do indeed find more New England women writing; for here lived the first female poet in America, and the first woman preacher, and thinkers of the Mercy Warren type who show in their diaries and letters a keen and intelligent interest in public affairs.

It seems due, however, more to circumstances that such women as Mercy Warren and Abigail Adams wrote much, while their sisters to the South remained comparatively silent.  The husband of each of these two colonial dames was absent a great deal and these men were, therefore, the recipients of many charming letters now made public; while the wife of the better class planter in Virginia and the Carolinas had a husband who seldom strayed long from the plantation.  Eliza Pinckney’s letters rival in interest those of any American woman of the period, and if her husband had been a man as prominent in war and political affairs as John Adams, her letters would no doubt be considered today highly valuable.  True, Martha Washington was in a position to leave many interesting written comments; for she was for many years close to the very center and origin of the most exciting events; but she was more of a quiet housewife than a woman who enjoyed the discussion of political events, and, besides, with a certain inborn reserve and reticence she took pains to destroy much of the private correspondence between her husband and herself.  Perhaps, with the small amount of evidence at hand we can never say definitely in what particular colonies the women of the higher classes were most highly educated; apparently very few of them were in danger of receiving an over-dose of mental stimulation.

A few women, however, were genuinely interested in cultural study, and that too in subjects of an unusual character.  Hear what Eliza Pinckney says in her letters: