The Elizabeth Drinker Marker

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“What if Shakespeare had had a sister?” Virginia Woolf raised that question a century ago, and that quotation, along with her equally wise “For centuries, ‘anonymous was a woman,” allows us to focus on a core fact of literary history: women’s writings were private, often ignored, discarded, deemed insignificance. Scholarship in the last fifty years has sought to correct this gross omission. Within this transformation, women’s writings, many of which survive only in unpublished manuscripts or anonymous brief published passages, have emerged as cornerstones of the world of letters. Within historical studies, many of these women’s writings are now seen as the essential sources to comprehend historical moments, idea, and developments.

Elizabeth Drinker is an outstanding example of this trend. While her large family carefully preserved the dozens of manuscript volumes of diary passages that she wrote daily, from the 1750s through the early nineteenth century, those pages received little attention beyond the merely quaint until they received scholarly attention from a team of historians in ????, resulting in the publication of Drinker’s entire diary by Northeastern University Press in 1991. That three-volume publication inspired an avalanche of scholarship; a 2017 search of America: History and Life (the standard search engine for research in American History, resulting thousands of ‘hits’ for the diary and diarist. Elizabeth Drinker has achieved a position as one of early America’s most significant literary characters. The scholarly database JSTOR characterizes Drinker’s diary thus:

“The journal of Philadelphia Quaker Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker (1735-1807) is perhaps the single most significant personal record of eighteenth-century life in America from a woman's perspective. Drinker wrote in her diary nearly continuously between 1758 and 1807, from two years before her marriage to the night before her last illness. The extraordinary span and sustained quality of the journal make it a rewarding document for a multitude of historical purposes. One of the most prolific early American diarists-her journal runs to thirty-six manuscript volumes-Elizabeth Drinker saw English colonies evolve into the American nation while Drinker herself changed from a young unmarried woman into a wife, mother, and grandmother. Her journal entries touch on every contemporary subject political, personal, and familial. Focusing on different stages of Drinker's personal development within the domestic context, this abridged edition highlights four critical phases of her life cycle: youth and courtship, wife and mother, middle age in years of crisis, and grandmother and family elder. There is little that escaped Elizabeth Drinker's quill, and her diary is a delight not only for the information it contains but also for the way in which she conveys her world across the centuries.”

This marker seeks to connect Public History to this scholarship. While researching my 2012 book Independence: A Guide to Historic Philadelphia, I used the Drinker diary countless times. As I sought personal, first-hand accounts, Elizabeth was one of my primary guides. The city’s role as a Quaker haven, as a rising commercial center, as a revolutionary capital, a contentious neighborhood suffering growing pains and crises of community in the early national period, and as a changing, growing nineteenth-century port city were all in the pages Elizabeth left behind. Her account of watching the British Army invade the Quaker City in 1777 is chilling; her recording of the patriot leaders executing one of her co-religionists is, too. She provided careful records of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic and concomitantly, the emergence of the city’s African-American community of leaders. No account of early Pennsylvania is complete without the evidence provided in her diary.

Public history has begun to tell the Drinker story. The newly opened Museum of the American Revolution includes a recreation of a room in the Drinker home, and a display of the objects Drinker recorded being confiscated in 1779 when her Quaker family refused to pay taxes that supported war efforts. Some months earlier, at the dedication ceremony of the PHMC Elfreth’s Alley Historical Marker, one of the questions I was asked by a local politician was “what other stories aren’t we telling in Old City?” Elizabeth’s was the first that leapt to my mind. The audience was enthusiastic, and this research began then.

A marker to commemorate Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker will tell an essential story, and connect to the narrative of history in Philadelphia’s Old City neighborhood. Nearby sites that connect to this story include the Elfreth’s Alley historic site, the Anthony Benezet PHMC marker on Chestnut Street (site of the home of Elizabeth’s teacher), and the Arch Street Meeting House (where she worshipped, and where she and her family are buried in traditional, unmarked Quaker graves). James Oronoko Dexter, the free Black leader whose home site was researched as part of the construction of the National Constitution Center, frequently appears in the Drinker diaries.

-George W. Boudreau, Ph.D.

Nomination to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission