Observations on the Real Rights of Women and Other Writings

Preface

Preface In doing research for Signs of the Times in Cotton Mather’s Paterna: A Study of Puritan Autobiography (2000), I traveled to Boston to consult “Biblia Americana,” Mather’s vast commentary on the Bible, at the Massachusetts Historical Society . While there I also worked at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, where I came upon a reference to Cotton Mather’s granddaughter, Hannah Mather Crocker, in the Mather Family Papers. That bit of serendipity led me to the collection of her many unpublished texts at aas and her unpublished “Reminiscences and Traditions of Boston” at the New England Historic Genealogical Society, in addition to her published texts, A Series of Letters on Free Masonry (1815), The School of Reform, or Seaman’s Safe Pilot to the Cape of Good Hope (1816), and Observations on the Real Rights of Women (1818). Although I found a few scattered references to Hannah Mather Crocker in the secondary literature, the dearth of material about her made it clear that the project of reclaiming neglected women authors is not yet complete. To give Crocker the attention she deserves I first wrote entries about her for The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 222–23, and The Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Women Writers to , edited by Carla Mulford et al. A more recent piece appears in An Encyclopedia of American Women’s History, edited by Hasia Diner (New York: Facts on File, forthcoming). I have also given papers on Crocker at meetings of the Society of Early ix x preface Americanists, the American Literature Association, and the Transatlantic Studies Association and contributed to the scholarly conversation about her in print. See, for example, my essay about Crocker’s participation in the transatlantic culture of creating catalogs of illustrious men and women in “Making the A-List: Reformation and Revolution in Crocker’s Observations on the Real Rights of Women,” Resources for American Literary Study 29 (2003–4): 67–88. An important step in my project to recover the writings of Hannah Mather Crocker is to make her work widely available in a modern, annotated edition. Of the three texts published during her lifetime, only Observations on the Real Rights of Women has been reprinted in its entirety but without the benefit of an introduction or notes. Most of Crocker’s texts, however , have never appeared in print. I am grateful that Sharon Harris and Cindy Weinstein, general editors of the Legacies of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers series at the University of Nebraska Press, believed in the importance of the project, which gives readers unparalleled access to the broad range of Crocker’s writings for the first time. Editing the writings of Hannah Mather Crocker is a project that has taken me many years to complete, in large part because of the challenges presented by her unpublished manuscripts. My debts to others are many, especially to staff at the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the New England Historic Genealogical Society, as well as the Hollis Library at Harvard and the Beinecke Library at Yale. The generosity of Iowa State University, including grants from the Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Department of English, made it possible for me to travel to collections and to have time to write. For their encouragement and helpful xi preface suggestions about my work on Crocker I especially want to thank Kathleen Diffley, Mary Kelley, Carla Mulford, and Priscilla Wald, as well as Sacvan Bercovitch and the late Emory Elliot. I owe a special debt to my colleague Matthew Wynn Sivils for his knowledge of the intricacies of textual editing and to my copy editor, Judith Hoover, and project editor, Sara Springsteen, for their careful attention to detail. The insights of my husband, Danny, into the politics of the period as well as other matters have greatly enriched this volume, and I am grateful to him for this and so much more. ...