The writing world lost a giant August 9, 2019. Lea Wait
passed away after a long and valiant battle against pancreatic cancer. Long
battle and pancreatic cancer do not usually appear in the same sentence. In
Lea’s case, the phrases are apt. Lea did more than battle. She wrote an entire
book, and got it through final edits. The book, the last in the Mainely Needlepoint
series, is titled Thread and Buried.
The publication of Thread and Buried struck a chord.
I wanted to honor this woman I had never met in my own way. Anyone who could
remain creative and upbeat while undergoing cancer treatments deserved
something. I had read some of Lea’s books, and enjoyed them. To honor her
memory, I bought the Mainley Needlepoint series and set out to read them in
order. The books are well-written, characters engaging, and the plots satisfying.
I’ve read reviews where readers commented that Lea, knowing this would be the
last of the series, should have tied up all the storylines. I’m glad she
didn’t. It’s much more fun to imagine how life in Haven Harbor continues.
Midway through book two, I made a surprising discovery. Each
chapter of the books is introduced with the quote and a description of a
sampler. I’d been reading the quotes and enjoying them, but not giving them
much thought. This time the sampler was done by a six-year old girl and
contained three alphabets. That’s when the penny dropped. Somehow in my
education, and I have a degree in history, I’d decided that common folk, and
women in particular, were not educated. How is it then that they were stitching
alphabets and sayings at the age of six? I went back and studied the earlier
samplers, and paid attention to those that appeared in future chapters.
Young women of all social classes in New England, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and to a certain extent in Maryland and Delaware were taught
needle arts. And those needle arts clearly promoted literacy. Intrigued, I
tried to find some history of female literacy in the United States. I was fully
expecting to find that illiteracy was the rule, and literacy the exception. Apparently,
I was not alone in my misconception.
The Foundation
for Economic Education suggests that 50% of the women and 80% of the men in
New England were literate by 1795. Those figures are based on the signatures on
Wills, which may skew the statistics. Not everyone had a Will then, or now. The
first hard figures I could find on literacy were not broken out by sex, but
were just as startling. The National
Center for Educational Statistics quotes statistics beginning in 1870 when
the illiteracy rate for the adult population of the United States was 20%. Sadly,
the black population at that time was 80% illiterate, a statistic that is
attributed to the lack of education afforded blacks in the pre-Civil War south,
and a lack of educational opportunity in the north.
All of these figures were a revelation to me. I would have
expected to discover that the illiteracy rate in the United States was in the
80% range in the 1700s and anticipated a similar figure in subsequent years.
Lea Wait’s Mainely Needlepoint series opened my eyes to more than a good story.
I think Lea would have been pleased that her books not only entertained, they
educated.
Fascinating. I've seen many colonial era samplers and knew that girls attended dame schools until the age of twelve or thirteen, but never put it all together.
ReplyDeleteYou have me thinking, Kait! One thing that always interests and impresses me is the eloquence of the people of those times. I came across the will of a woman from the 1690s. The language was so elevated. It may have been boilerplate, but she must have been educated enough to understand it.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know Lea, but she was definitely a profile in courage and determination.
Thank you, Kait. A lovely tribute to Lea. There is so much illiteracy even in this day. As an avid reader, it breaks my heart to think that there are adults who can't read.
ReplyDelete@Margaret, Shari, and Grace. I too have been amazed by the eloquence of the language. I am more amazed by my own ignorance in never putting it together. Grace, yes, it is heartbreaking that there is still illiteracy in today's world.
ReplyDeleteLovely tribute, Kait. Leaving a legacy that educates as well as entertains is what every writer, be it fiction or non-fiction, strives for.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Polly! Lea was an amazing inspiration.
ReplyDeleteEmbroidered "samplers" were just what they sounded like--a guide created for and by a girl (or young woman.) She could refer to her sampler for not only types of stitches, but how the alphabet and numbers looked.
ReplyDeleteI was recently at lunch with an assorted group of friends. One, who is a judge, was talking about how lack of opportunity for some segments of the population curtailed their achievements. The example he used was the education of the black children when he was young. They were not permitted in the public school system and there was no alternative set up for them. Some of the retired nuns in a local convent held classes trying to teach basic literacy and arithmetic, but the children could only attend sporadically, since their labor was needed to support the family.
That is so sad, KM. I went to grade school in New Jersey. We attended schools based on where we lived in town. The town itself as effectively segregated so I attended school with other middle class white kids like myself. Black children attended in their district, but much of their district was also white, so the school for that region was integrated and educational standards the same. How do I know that? Girl Scouts, softball, tennis, and other groups drew from the entire town, and that led to interaction and friendships among the groups, and of course, shared homework sessions. When I moved to the south full time in 1970, educational segregation had ended two years earlier in Dade County. It was clear that separate did not mean equal, and although educational segregation was officially ended, it continued in more ways than it ceased.
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