Dear Ms. Davidson

October 4, 2011

Fort Worth, Texas

Dear Ms. Davidson,

I have really enjoyed my time reading Revolution and the Word again, especially under the guidance of Dr. Dan Williams and my esteemed colleagues. I especially enjoyed reading chapter 4, "Literacy, Education, and the Reader” since it reminded me a lot of Dr. Sarah Robbins book Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women’s Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century. Like you, she also writes about women as educators and readers. After reading her book and yours again I have had time to reflect on my own literacy and how the written word has shaped my identity. Last week I wrote to you about my experiences as a reader. I told you about how fictional heroes like Laura Ingalls, Caddie Woodlawn, Lucy Pevensie, and Anne Shirley all taught me important lessons about being a strong girl and woman. 

Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery

Today I would like to reflect on women who taught me to be a writer and how that has shaped my identity. But first I must challenge a point you make about women writing, and the need for writing in the early republic. First of all, you point out that scholars claim many women left school (those few who had a chance at schooling) before they had learned writing. They only learned reading and therefore were unable to sign a name, only an X, when required to sign any kind of document. You say, "Women, after all, had no legal status, and so, since their signatures proved nothing, there was no real reason for them to learn to sign or, by extension, to write" (125). An interesting claim, that women would learn writing only to participate in the male-centered sphere of business and politics. But knowing what I know about women's lives, this claim disturbed me. So I looked at your end note 18 to see what other points you might make; I was very disappointed with what I found. You make the assertions about women in the early American republic and writing based on a BRITISH study. You even undercut your assumption yourself by saying, "While all these studies illuminate aspects of English education, it is not at all clear that generalizations based on English data apply to the different tradition of American Puritan education" (403). This was a move I would expect from an undergraduate student – but not from you, my idol and the champion of women authors. What can I say? Simply this: I am crushed. How could you ignore the rich history of women's texts? And I don't mean just novels, poems, songs, histories, and other printed texts. What about women's letters and diaries? What about a hand-sewn sampler, like this one pictured here? 

http://stenton.org/index.php/history-collections-and-interpretation/the-ins-and-outs-of-the-stenton-collection/

What about recipes? (They called them receipts in the early republic.) Don't you know that many mothers and daughters would make their own cookbooks, carefully copying down favorite family recipes?  A young bride would take this book to her new home and rely on it in her mother’s absence. What about your own points about women writing in the margins and end papers of their few precious books? It seems to me that your explanation about women and their inability to sign more than an X is resting on a very shaky foundation. Perhaps you have not seen databases like North American Women's Letters and Diaries. TCU has access to it, and it contains, according to its welcome page, “the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters. […]  The materials have been carefully chosen using leading bibliographies, supplemented by customer requests and more than 7,000 pages of previously unpublished material. The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.” This is, I am sure, just a small sampling of the women's writing out there. So, please, if you ever expand upon the expanded edition, please expand this point.

Now, I did promise you a little bit about my experiences as a writer. While Paul Starr would probably call me an exceptional case, I have been a prolific writer ever since I can remember. I started by writing letters to my grandparents and aunts and uncles who lived far away. That came about as a response to the cards and letters they wrote to me and my family. This was when long distance phone calls were expensive (the 1970s) and postage was cheap (13 cents). It was wonderful to get a birthday card, especially from Grandma Schumann since hers usually included 2 dollars. And when my first grade teacher, Mrs. Gunn, sent me a letter before school started, I thought that was wonderful! And of course I could read it all by myself since I had learned to read in kindergarten. As I got older, and began to learn writing in first grade, I crafted stories and letters of my own. I would write to my grandmothers and they would write back! My own personal and private communication with them – what a gift to a child in a large family who had to share everything. 

http://www.nps.gov/safr/historyculture/c-a-thayer.htm

By fourth grade I was keeping a journal. Mrs. Garrity taught me about journal keeping when we had a unit about ships and California history. Each child in our class had to keep a personal "log" of what we did every day. It was a cheap a handmade book out of blue construction paper and lined newsprint. But I still have it along with all the other journals I have written since then – more than 30 years’ worth. And while they are all full of too many details about my relatively serene/melodramatic life they are important records that illustrate the value of literacy for an American girl and woman. Many of them record my reactions to the books I was reading. They also record details like how awkward it felt to be 5 foot 8 when I was only 14. Or how much fun it was to have new adventures like living in New Zealand as a missionary, or to go to school in Hawaii, or visit Costa Rica, or be a nanny for quadruplets. 

Along with my journals and letters, I also have an extensive collection of recipes, written out by hand by myself, my mother, grandmother, or women friends. I just inherited my grandmother’s recipes after her death in February and was so tickled to find mixed in with the recipes various lists, like shopping, things to-do, and even little inspirational quotes. So even though my grandmother never went to college, she still was a writer, as I suspect many women in the early republic were-- even if their families did not save their shopping lists and other ephemeral texts.

All in all, it has been fun revisiting your text. I am sorry to say goodbye, but hope for now it is just "see you again real soon.”

Larisa