18C American Woman Reading

1797 Gilbert Stuart (American painter, 1755-1828) Mary Willing Clymer holding a book

University of Delaware’s F. W. Grubb wrote in 1990: Of all European countries perhaps only Scotland surpassed America in literacy by 1800. Not only had the European literacy revolution been transplanted to the American periphery during the colonial period, but colonial literacy had somehow leaped past that of northwestern Europe.