No tes/Introduction
^Virginia Woolf, "Professions for Women," Death of the Moth and
Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), pp. 235-236.
2 Useful anthologies of colonial poetry have been provided by Harrison
Meserole, ed., Seventeenth-Century American Poetry (New York: New York
University Press, 1968), and by Kenneth Silverman, ed.. Colonial American
Poetry (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1968). But even in these period collections, the only women represented are Anne Bradstreet and Sarah
Knight.
^Cotton Mather, Awakening Thoughts on the Sleep of Death (Boston:
Timothy Green, 1712), pp. iii-iv.
^Cotton Mather, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion (Cambridge,
Mass.: Samuel and Bartholomew Green, 1692), p. 74.
5G. Hayden, "The Choice of a Husband," North-Carolina Magazine
(September 7, 1764), p. 108.
^Benjamin Rush, Thoughts Upon Female Education (Philadelphia:
Prichard and Hall, 1787), p. 25.
^Mary Astell, Reflections on Marriage (London: R. Wilkin, 1706), preface. ^Several useful studies of colonial education are available for further reference, the fullest and most recent being Lawrence A. Cremin's American
Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (New York: Harper and Row,
1970), which includes a lengthy bibliographical essay. Bernard Bailyn's provocative Education in the Forming of American Society (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1960) was among the earliest studies to expand the definition of education beyond public school systems to encompass other transmitters of culture such as family, church and community. A more concise account of colonial concern for education is provided by Louis Wright's The

324

Women Poets in Pre-Revolutionary America

Cultural Life of the American Colonies 1607-1763 (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1957), pp. 98-U5.ThomisWoody's A History of Women's Education in the United States (New York: The Science Press, 1929), 2 vols., surveys the origins of schooling for women. Educational opportunities for working class and poor children are detailed in Marcus W. Jernegan's 1931 study Laboring and
Dependent Classes in Colonial America 1607-1738 (New York: Frederick Ungar
Publishing Co., 1960), pp. 59-171.
9Ann Eliza Bleecker, The Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleecker in
Prose and Verse. . ., ed. Margaretta Faugeres (New York: T. and J. Swords,
1793), p. 240. lOQuoted by Roger Thompson, Women in Stuart England and America:
A Comparative Study (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 10.
11 Among those historians favorably comparing the position of American women with that of British women are Ann Gordon, Mary Jo Buhle and Nancy
Schrom, "Women in American Society: An Historical Contribution," Radical
America, 5 (July-August, 1971), 3-74; Thompson, Women in Stuart England and
America; Page Smith, Daughters of the Promised Land: Women in American
History (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1970); Mary S. Benson, Women in
Eighteenth Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935); and Elisabeth Dexter, Colonial Women of Affairs (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin
Co., 1924). Richard Morris' more specialized Studies in the History of American
Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), pp. 126-200, details the legal advantages (especially recognition of the marriage contract as a reciprocal agreement and greater proprietary capacity) that distinguished American women from their British contemporaries.
12Thelma M. Smith, "Feminism in Philadelphia, 1790-1850," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 68 (1944), 243-268. See also Ann
Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1977).
l^Patricia Branca and Peter Stearns, "On the History of Modern Women, a Research Note," AHA Newsletter, 12 (September, 1974), 6.
14"Advice to a Young Lady," The American Magazine, or General
Repository (July, 1769), p. 224. The poem was reprinted as "Advice to the
Ladies," Virginia Gazette, ed. Purdie and Dixon (May 16, 1771), p. [4].
j