"

 Female Literacy 

It might be a case of the exception proving the rule, but at least in the greater Boston area, there are several examples of women writing and reading and speaking publicly, so the line ""forced to scribble their initials"" sounds a bit too ""poor-me"" for me. In fact, other documentation I've seen suggests that, based on the ratio of signatures to ""x's"" in legal documents, it's possible that the NE colonies had something in the range of a 70-90% literacy rate, women included. (Spelling variants should not be read as examples of poor literacy, since standardized spelling was something that was only later observed, beginning in the late 18th/early 19th c., also.)108.20.74.63  "