Anna Green Winslow

Anna Green Winslow (November 29, 1759 – July 19, 1780), a member of the prominent Winslow family of Boston, Massachusetts, United States, was a girl who wrote a series of letters to her mother between 1771 and 1773 that portray the daily life of the gentry in Boston at the first stirrings of the American Revolution. She made copies of the letters into an eight-by-six-and-a-half-inch book (20 cm × 17 cm) in order to improve her penmanship, making the accounts a sort of diary as well. This diary, edited by 19th-century American historian and author Alice Morse Earle, was published in 1894 under the title Diary of Anna Green Winslow, A Boston School Girl of 1771, and has never gone out of print. It provides a rare window into the life of an affluent teenage girl in colonial Boston.

Anna was born in 1759 in Nova Scotia, where her father, Army officer Joshua Winslow, had moved to serve as commissary-general of the British forces there. In 1764, he was named a judge in the Inferior Court of Common Pleas in Nova Scotia. He also represented Cumberland County in the Nova Scotia House of Assembly from 1770 to 1772. Her mother, born Anna Green, was the daughter of a wealthy merchant and Joshua Winslow's cousin. They married 10 months before Anna's birth.

On the Winslow side, Anna's great-great-great grandfather was the older brother of Pilgrim Edward Winslow, who arrived on the Mayflower, as did Anna's great-great-great grandmother, Mary Chilton. On the Green side, Anna was a direct descendent of another Puritan, Percival Green, who arrived with his wife at Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1635.

The Winslows, unable to find in Halifax the society or the advanced schooling that would "finish" their daughter Anna, sent the then 10-year-old girl to Boston to live with Judge Winslow's older sister, Sarah Deming, and her husband. With her "Aunt Deming", as Anna referred to her, she worked on the skills needed for a well-brought-up lady of the day: penmanship, deportment, sewing, embroidery, lace making, and, as Anna wrote, "dansing; danceing I mean." While staying with her Aunt Deming, Anna attended sewing, dancing, and handwriting schools. Unlike reading (since 1642, the colony of Massachusetts required that all children be taught reading and a trade), writing was optional and mostly taught to boys. It was common throughout the 17th century and into the early decades of the 18th century for even wealthy women to be unable to sign their own names, reduced to scribbling their initials.

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