Founding Writers: The Ladies

Overview

Adapted from Cambridge University Press
When we think of women writing in early America, three names usually come up immediately: Anne Bradstreet (1612–72), an immigrant to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who published The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America, a collection of her poetry, in 1650, and a posthumous collection with new material in 1678. Mary Rowlandson (1637–1711) who spent nearly three months of captivity with the Narragansett tribe in 1676 before returning to her settlement in Lancaster, Massachusetts; her book describing these events, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), is the best-known example of the captivity narrative genre. And Sarah Kemble Knight (1666–1727), who kept a journal of her journey from Boston to New York in 1704–5, describing in lively and humorous detail her adventures on the road, an account first published in 1825 as The Journal of Madam Knight. The isolated voices of these three writers alone have long sustained the myths that 1.) early American women wrote little and 2.) “early America” was the same thing as the present-day northeastern United States. In the past few decades, those myths have been overturned and are further debunked when we read further: Elizabeth Drinker, whose remarkable Diary gives us a day-to-day account of “real” life in early America; Phillis Wheatley, a slave who wrote poetry and challenged long-held beliefs about African-Americans; and Susanna Rowson, who writes Charlotte Temple, the first best-selling novel in America. Scholars of women's literature have identified important women's writing spanning the full range of New World experience, levels of literacy, social position, wealth, and national orientation. At the same time, those working in post-colonial and hemispheric studies have redefined the terms “colonial,” “American,” and “writing.”

Recommended Media

1. Ann Hutchinson

2. Anne Bradstreet

3. Mary Rowlandson

Hutchinson on trial
Bradstreet Poems (1678)
Rowlandson captivity

4. Sarah Kemble Knight

5. Elzabeth Drinker

6. Phillis Wheatley

Knight's Journal
Drinker Diary
Wheatley family

7. Susanna Rowson

8. Mercy Otis Warren

Rowson Geography
Warren History of American Revolution
Murray Equality of Sexes

Honorable Mention

Elizabeth Ashbridge
Judith Sargent Murray
Hannah Webster Foster