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