Reading - 18C American Woman with a Book

1758 John Singleton Copley (American colonial era artist, 1738-1815) Mary Alleyne Mrs James Otis with a book in her hand

For more on Colonial American Reading, see:
F. W. Grubb, “Growth of Literacy in Colonial America: Longitudinal Patterns, Economic Models, and the Direction of Future Research,” Social Science History 14, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 451–82.
Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England (New York, 1974).
E. Jennifer Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America (Amherst, MA, 2005).
Joel Perlmann and Dennis Shirley, “When Did New England Women Acquire Literacy?” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 48, no. 1 (Jan. 1991): 50–67. Jeffrey H. Richards, “Samuel Davies and the Transatlantic Campaign for Slave Literacy in Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 111, no. 4 (2003): 333–78.