Anna Green Winslow

Who was Anna Green Winslow?

Anna Green Winslow, 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 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. The diary provides a rare window into the life of an affluent teenage girl in colonial Boston. While making some changes for contemporary readers, Earle kept the original fanciful spelling and capitalization.

The Old South Meeting House, at which the Boston Tea Party was born and planned, has had programs on Anna Green Winslow since the 1990s. The Meeting House provides an "Anna's World Activity Kit" to parents on request, "filled with hands-on objects and activities that explore the 18th century meeting house through the eyes of 12-year-old congregation member Anna Green Winslow." Some of the programs have focused on introducing Girls, Inc. participants to journal writing, reading and a better understanding of women in history through Anna and poet Phyllis Wheatley.