American Colonial Women and Their Art: A Chronological Encyclopedia by Mary Ellen Snodgrass (review)

This encyclopedia offers a blend of biographical and topic-centered knowledge for almost five hundred women who lived in the thirteen original colonies in the period from 1610 to 1789. As we learn about women’s creative engagement, we also gain a brief knowledge of their lives. Mary Ellen Snodgrass is the author of an astounding number of encyclopedias such as the American Women Speak: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection of Women’s Oratory (2016), The Encyclopedia of World Folk Dance (2016), and World Epidemics: A Cultural Chronology of Disease from Prehistory to the Era of Zika (2nd ed., 2017). Remarkably prolific, Snodgrass also authored a number of McFarland Literary Companions and Cliffs Notes. As a former high school teacher, Snodgrass typically writes for a middle and high school audience, and American Colonial Women and Their Art is oriented toward this audience as well.

One of the most refreshing features of this book is its expansive definition of art. Women’s activities (Snodgrass refers to them as “art genres”) are listed alphabetically in one of the appendices, along with the names of their practitioners mentioned in the book. In this case, alphabetizing is less useful than grouping the genres in more general categories. For the reader’s benefit, I offer another version of this list as an aide for navigating the book: various forms of writing (ad writer, aphorist, autobiographer, letter writer, diarist, poet, dramatist, essayist, novelist, short story writer, pamphleteer, editor, calligrapher, captivity writer, hymnographer, journalist, political/religious writer, protest writer, reference writer, satirist, humorist, science writer, travel writer, writer, textbook author, translator, printer, publisher); performance (actor, orator, storyteller); visual arts (artist, miniaturist, watercolorist, cartoonist, painter, artist’s model, art teacher, sculptor/wax worker, makeup artist); handmade crafts (basket weaver, broom maker, bead worker, dollmaker, dressmaker, fan maker, glove maker, flag maker, tie maker, tailor, milliner, upholsterer, weaver, embroiderer, knitter, lace maker, dyemaster, patchworker, potter, quilter, puzzle maker, shoemaker, shadow box maker, coat of arms maker, blacksmith/gunsmith, stitchery teacher); music and dance (guitar-ist, pianist/organist, singer, songwriter, dancer, dance instructor, choir director, music educator); and design (coffin designer, city founder/planner, landscaper/gardener, fabric designer, fashion designer, food innovator). Snodgrass further extends the concept of art to beekeeping, catering, and mapmaking; her art genres include scholarly pursuits (history and theology) as well as the peculiar genre of gallows confession. While the most populous genres are those of embroiderer and letter writer, and some genres include only one or two names of practitioners, the range and diversity of colonial women’s creative pursuits is in itself educational. With this encyclopedia, Snodgrass invites the reader to appreciate the creativity of women within and outside the male-dominated categories of “high art.” While the lists of known practitioners are not exhaustive (many American colonial needleworkers, for example, are missing from this encyclopedia), they nevertheless begin to outline the wealth of self-expression of women in the American colonial period.

Writing an encyclopedia is a truly formidable enterprise. Among other decisions, the book’s usability is a major concern, and each author or editor has to decide what features would contribute to making the encyclopedia easy to use, and to what purpose. Snodgrass’s decision to organize the material chronologically by year (and, in some cases, months or even exact dates) makes this book a reference resource most easily used for tracing women’s creative expression within a specific timeframe or finding the correlations between their recorded artistry and larger historical and cultural context with some precision. A chronological structure also produces fragmentation, dividing women’s lives and even dismissing the chronological principal within the entries: after describing an event in a woman’s life that occurred in the year under discussion, Snodgrass details the woman’s life from birth up to that point. Women’s biographies are also scattered across several entries (in some cases, this number is...