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By Eleanor

In Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: Documenting Culture and Connection in the Revolutionary Era, Karin A. Hunt makes several interesting observations on the culture of elite, educated American women during the Revolutionary Era.

It is common knowledge that colonial America was a highly patriarchal society. Despite that, Wulf writes of several women who were educated in Quaker schools and had learned to read and write. These women formed literary circles which “mirrored the more formal institutions” among men.

“Particular women’s intellects were highly praised, although often in terms that reinforced traditional ideas about the innate intellectual abilities of men as opposed to a woman’s innate physicality. Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s mother, for example, was celebrated by Benjamin Rush as possessing both “a masculine mind, with all those female charms and accomplishments which render a woman alike agreeable to both sexes.” ” (Wulf, 30).

Even though these women seem to be highly intelligent in their own right, these quotes show us that because of their contemporary historical context, they were often overshadowed by men.

On page 33 of Milach Martha Moore’s Book, Wulf describes the circulation of texts in manuscript form as “more intimate” than printed literature. Hand-written copies could not be spread as widely or as quickly, and as such, the intellectual salons that were beginning to be formed in colonial America were the perfect setting to share these manuscripts: letters, poetry, personal diaries, and the like (Wulf, 23). The people who were interested in reading these daily accounts and thoughts were most likely already close friends of the author. In Moore’s case, “the Despite — or perhaps because of — this intimacy in relationships and scholarship within circles of people, Wulf’s example of Milcah Martha Moore’s personal commonplace book managed to become quite widely read. Rather that having a mass-market, printed edition distributed, Moore’s collected writings were spread from friend to friend. This method of information transfer reminds me in a modern context more of how information spreads over the internet than how we deal with physical printed writings. If you find something interesting, you email it to a friend or share it on a blog, maybe with your own commentary, for a circle of friends to read. That process is much more like how Moore’s writings were passed from friend to friend than if today a thousand separate people were to read the same newspaper article or the same book of poems, for example.