Search -
Woman's Life in Colonial Days (Large Print Edition)
Woman's Life in Colonial Days - Large Print Edition Author:Carl Holliday Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II Colonial Woman And Education /. Feminine Ignorance Unfortunately when we attempt to discover just how thorough woman's mental training was in c... more »olonial days we are somewhat handicapped by the lack of accurate data. Here and there through the early writings we have only the merest hints as to what girls studied and as to the length of their schooling. Of course, through- | out the world in the seventeenth century it was not customary to educate women in the sense that men in . the same rank were educated. Her place was in the (home, and as economic pressure was not generally such as to force her to make her own living in shop or factory , or office, and as society would have scowled at the very idea, she naturally prepared only for marriage and home- 'making. Very few men of the era, even among philosophers and educational leaders, ever seemed to think that a woman might be a better mother through thor- ,ough mental training. And the women themselves, in 'the main, apparently were not interested. The result was that there long existed an astonishingly large amount of illiteracy among them. Through an elcammatioSTinaojBtof "tBe TT. S. Department of Education, it has been found that ajmong women signing deeds or other legal documents in Massachusetts, Trom 1653 to 1656, as high as fifty per cent could not write theirname, and were obliged togign by means of a cross; wKileT as late as .1697 fully thirty-eight percent were as illiterate. In New York fulTy"sixty per cent of the Dutch" wOmen were obliged to make their mark; while in Virginia, where deeds signed by 3,066 women were examined, seventy-five per cent could not sign their names. If the condition was so bad among those prosperous enoiigtrto ownjproperty,. what mustTit have been amon...« less