is not surprising that literacy was narrowed down to males. Lockridge, who examined the signatures of wills from this period and claims that these signatures prove "casual sources of literacy in colonial New England" says that the religious drive of protestantism was responsible for the expeditious rise in the level of literacy by the end of the colonial period. While Lockridge says that it was rather slow to achieve a universal literacy, it was the male population who became literate by the end of the colonial period and in the meanwhile "women were always at a distinct disadvantage in obtaining basic education." Lockridge says the reason for it might have been, most likely, that men maintained the traditional perspective about women, which, as well as education, was based on religion (8). This, again, seems to be an acceptable reason as we already pointed out that protestantism had no considerable respect for women.
             Concerning the curriculum of schools in the seventeenth-century New England, we have to take a loo
             ...