Rebecca Dickinson: Independence for a New England Woman (Lives of American Women)
Dickinson, a western Massachusetts “tailoress,” never married (though she had opportunities). Sadly, she destroyed her more “worldly” early journals in her forties and focused instead on spiritual topics. Readers will wish those earlier pages could be reconstructed so they could watch this smart, very pious eighteenth-century woman wrestle with the anomalies of her (relative) personal independence through the years when her fellow colonists debated national independence, fought a war to win it, and then struggled to define their country’s new role. To fill that gap, University of Massachusetts–Amherst historian Miller has pieced together the Revolution-era history of Dickinson’s region with observations from her neighbors and clients and more than 200 pages of Dickinson’s spiritual journal (1787–1802) that have been preserved. Dickinson bitterly bewails her loneliness, often viewing it as a punishment for her religious shortcomings. At other times, however, she recognizes that marriage and motherhood bring burdens as well as joys and that her relatively independent path has had its own compensations. Most appropriate for libraries where interest in women’s history and eighteenth-century U.S. history is strong. --Mary Carroll