How can we use these materials to understand women’s ideas about gender and imperial politics on the eve of the American Revolution?
Women and reading. Use these sources to write a short essay about the different kinds of reading and writing that elite women were doing in eighteenth-century Philadelphia. How many kinds of literary work did Hannah Callender mention in the diary excerpts? What do the connections she makes among the Spectator essay, Susanna Wright’s poem, and her conversations with friends suggest about the role of English literature in eighteenth-century elite society?
Women and politics. The sources have two clear themes: the emerging tensions between the colonies and England, and the potential for tensions between men and women around courtship and marriage. How do the writers address these two kinds of political relationships? How do they describe them as different or similar?