An Expanding Public Sphere: Women and Print in Colonial Virginia; 1736–1776

Abstract

Women in colonial Virginia had a greater role in the eighteenth-century world of print and the public sphere than previously recognized. This article focuses on less-elite printed matter: books for women, newspapers, and popular almanacs. Women went so far as to ask for equal treatment under the law and were indeed involved in public debates in print even before the Stamp Act controversy. This participation goes beyond the elites to the middling sort. The conclusion here is that colonial Virginia women were involved in the debates that prefaced the Revolution, a discovery that has implications for understanding how people of the separate colonies conceived and formed a new nation.