southern colonies were lacking.  As Dr. Lyon G. Tyler has said; “Under the conditions of Virginia society, no developed educational system was possible, but it is wrong to suppose that there was none.  The parish institutions introduced from England included educational beginnings; every minister had a school, and it was the duty of the vestry to see that all poor children could read and write.  The county courts supervised the vestries, and held a yearly ‘orphans court,’ which looked after the material and educational welfare of all orphans."[54]

Indeed the interest in education during the seventeenth century, in Virginia at least, seems to have been general.  Repeatedly in examining wills of the period we may find this interest expressed and explicit directions given for educating not only the boys, but the girls.  Bruce in his valuable work, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, cites a number of such cases in which provisions were made for the training of daughters of other female relatives.

“In 1657, Clement Thresh, of Rappahannock, in his will declared that all his estate should be responsible for the outlay made necessary in providing, during three years, instruction for his step-daughter, who, being then thirteen years of age, had, no doubt, already been going to school for some length of time.  The manner of completing her education (which, it seems, was to be prolonged to her sixteenth year) was perhaps the usual one for girls at this period:—­she was to be taught at a Mrs. Peacock’s, very probably by Mrs. Peacock herself, who may have been the mistress of a small school; for it was ordered in the will, that if she died, the step-daughter was to attend the same school as Thomas Goodrich’s children."[55] “Robert Gascoigne provided that his wife should ... keep their daughter Bridget in school, until she could both read and sew with an equal degree of skill."[56] “The indentures of Ann Andrewes, who lived in Surry ... required her master to teach her, not only how to sew and ‘such things as were fitt for women to know,’ but also how to read and apparently also how to write.” ...  “In 1691 a girl was bound out to Captain William Crafford ... under indentures which required him to teach her how to spin, sew and read...."[57]

But, as shown in previous pages, female illiteracy in the South, at least during the seventeenth century, was surprisingly great.  No doubt, in the eighteenth century, as the country became more thickly settled, education became more general, but for a long time the women dragged behind the men in plain reading and writing.  Bruce declares:  “There are numerous evidences that illiteracy prevailed to a greater extent than among persons of the opposite sex....  Among the entire female population of the colony, without embracing the slaves, only one woman of every three was able to sign her name in full, as compared with at least three of every five persons of the opposite sex."[58]