only the merest hints as to what girls studied and as to the length of
their schooling. Of course, throughout the world in the seventeenth
century it was not customary to educate women in the sense that men in
the same rank were educated. Her place was in the home and as economic
pressure was not generally such as to force her to make her own living
in shop or factory or office, and as society would have scowled at the
very idea, she naturally prepared only for marriage and home-making.
Very few men of the era, even among philosophers and educational
leaders, ever seemed to think that a woman might be a better mother
through thorough mental training. And the women themselves, in the main,
apparently were not interested.

The result was that there long existed an astonishingly large amount of
illiteracy among them. Through an examination made for the U.S.
Department of Education, it has been found that among women signing
deeds or other legal documents in Massachusetts, from 1653 to 1656, as
high as fifty per cent could not write their name, and were obliged to
sign by means of a cross; while as late as 1697 fully thirty-eight per
cent were as illiterate. In New York fully sixty per cent of the Dutch
women were obliged to make their mark; while in Virginia, where deeds
signed by 3,066 women were examined, seventy-five per cent could not
sign their names. If the condition was so bad among those prosperous
enough to own property, what must it have been among the poor and
so-called lower classes?

We know, of course, that early in the seventeenth century schools
attended by both boys and girls were established in Massachusetts, and
before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth there was at least one public
school for both sexes in Virginia. But for the most part the girls of
early New England appear to have gone to the "dame's school," taught