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A fairly large number of Virginia women were able to read by the mid-
eighteenth century. Many scholars have suggested that women had a literacy rate
half as high as that of men, and that the South had much lower rates than New
England. 14 In closely examining Middlesex County, Virginia, Darrett and Anita
Rutman found a higher rate than was previously estimated for women of the same
period. They also calculated that literacy actually declined from about thirty-three
percent in the seventeenth century to twenty-nine percent in the mid-eighteenth
century. The Rutmans suggest this is an artifact from women retiring into the
domestic sphere, no longer needing to sign names on legal documents. 15 Notably,
this does not necessarily demonstrate an actual decline in reading, not at a time
when printed material was becoming more widely available and the novel was just
gaining popularity among women. What it suggests is a very modest decline of
women signing their name in public, which may—or may not—suggest a decline in
writing. In examining readers in England, J. Paul Hunter disagreed with a similar
theory of decline in women’s literacy, and suggested that about forty percent of
English women could read in the 1750s. 16 Most analysts believe that American
numbers were higher than they were in England. While the accuracy and
applicability of these numbers is uncertain, these statistics do suggest that in the
early eighteenth century, approximately one-third of women in Virginia could
write, and it is quite likely (although not statistically demonstrable) that even more
women could read. That number is likely to have increased over time.
Massachusetts Press, 2005), 5, also support the idea that use of legal signatures is inherently biased
against women and likely deflates their literacy rate. On seventeenth century, see Hall, Cultures of
Print, 124-5
14 See for example, Gilmore, “Literacy, the Rise Of An Age Of Reading,” 23-46.
15 Rutman, A Place in Time Explicitus, (New York: Norton, 1984), 165-170.
16 Hunter, Before Novels, fn 19 and 20, page 364, also citing David Cressy, Literature and the
Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980), 176.