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This essay addresses a gap in our understanding of the social forces promoting female literacy in New England between 1750 and 1820. Historians generally agree that a rapid expansion of female literacy occurred during that century. Measuring literacy by the ability to sign one's name, studies have shown that in many communities only half as many women as men were literate in 1750. An example of this differential is the case of Elbridge Gerry, who courted but did not marry a young woman who, though she was the daughter of a Harvard graduate and state legislator, could neither read nor answer his letters to her from the Continental Congress. Yet by 1850 when the first federal census measured literacy by gender, both white women and men in New England were almost universally literate. Since older women were also universally literate, the change appears to have been complete among girls by 1820. After Kenneth Lockridge first pointed out the discrepancy between male and female literacy rates in colonial New England, scholars have amended many of his findings, but they have not yet found a way to explain the rapid increase in female literacy that occurred in New England after 1750.

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