About the Letter Books Project
Our Goals: • To transcribe and publish Judith Sargent Murray’s letter books • To add her observations, thoughts, and anecdotes to the founding story of the United States • To restore a defining voice for women’s rights Women didn’t do this — why did she? Women in eighteenth-century America didn’t keep letter books. They just didn’t. It was time consuming, expensive, and required a fairly high degree of literacy. But along with the practical reasons was this: a woman at that time would have had to believe that her words were worth recording — and most did not. Nor would their families. George Washington kept letter books (or, rather, a male secretary did), for which history is grateful. In its introduction to the George Washington Papers, the Library of Congress defines letter books in this way: Long before there was email or even carbon paper, people in business, government, and private life kept copies of their outgoing mail in blank books called letterboo...