The first professional woman of letters in the United States, Hannah Adams was the first woman to conduct research in the Boston Athenaeum, an early petitioner for national copyright, and a serious and scholarly writer of church history, comparative religions, and New England history. Most important, perhaps, was her role as an influential model for the next generation of female authors. Under a veneer of diffidence and self-effacement, Adams aggressively pursued her intellectual development, remained firm in her protofeminist convictions, and built a career writing on theology, comparative religions, and American history.

Like other women of her generation--including Judith Sargent Murray, Mercy Otis Warren, and Emma Willard--Adams was motivated by Enlightenment republicanism, whose principles posited the equality of women and men and whose rationalism tended to set forth the notion that "the mind knows no sex," that male and female faculties were equally grounded in universal reason. For...