Reply To: Martha’s diary

January 18, 2025 at 9:18 am #33098

I loved this quote. Martha is right to wonder what secrets might have been revealed if more women had been able to read and write! It makes me wonder how different the history we learn in school would be if there had been more women’s voices for historians to draw on. What stories would we as a culture value? I think literacy is very much tied to human rights.

When I think of the history of literacy in the Western world, I think it gave rise to the middle class, it brought about political movements that significantly changed societies. Our countries have been shaped by the spreading of knowledge and shaped the democracies we live in. I think it also keeps the powers of autocrats and elites in check. There’s a reason autocrats and dictators are quick to burn books and then jail and kill the people they view as the “intelligentsia” – the teachers, the scholars, the scientists. Simply put, reading provides people with the means to help comprehend the world around them, to question the status quo, and to be curious. It improves the mind and opportunities. Limiting its reach has also been a tool to suppress people because keeping them ignorant means you can control them by controlling how they think and what information they can access. Just as Libby expressed so well.

There was a reason that it was primarily only those in the church or royal court who could read and write in medieval times – it kept the power with the church and nobility. When the printing press was invented, it ushered in huge changes because it democratized reading.

I looked up the literacy rate in Canada and sadly, 48% of adult Canadians have literacy skills that “fall below a high school level, which negatively affects their ability to function at work and in their personal lives. 17% function at the lowest level, where they may, for example, be unable to read the dosage instructions on a medicine bottle.” Every study has a margin of error, but that’s not a really great number considering we’re living in an age where so much written information is available. I don’t know what the US statistics are. I’m sure the literacy rates in 1789 America were not very high. But knowing there was a Martha back then makes me think that there was a sliver in society who valued reading and writing and nurtured it. And that step by step we ended up with reading and writing taught in schools and to girls!

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