Anna Green Winslow

Anna Green Winslow (November 29, 1759 – July 19, 1780), was an American letter writer. A member of the prominent Winslow family of Boston, Massachusetts, United States, she 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. It provides a rare window into the life of an affluent teenage girl in colonial Boston. They married 10 months before Anna's birth.

On the Winslow side, Anna's great-great-great grandfather was John Winslow, the older brother of Pilgrim Edward Winslow, who arrived on the Mayflower, as did Anna's great-great-great grandmother, Mary Chilton.

The Winslows, unable to find in Halifax the society or the advanced schooling that would "finish" their daughter Anna, sent the then 10-year-old girl to Boston to live with Judge Winslow's older sister, Sarah Deming, and her husband. While staying with her Aunt Deming, Anna attended sewing, dancing, and handwriting schools. It was common throughout the 17th century and into the early decades of the 18th century for even wealthy women to be unable to sign their own names, reduced to scribbling their initials. One of Anna's friends, Martha "Patty" Waldo, later married future US Attorney General Levi Lincoln Sr. and gave birth to two future governors.

Little is known about Anna after she stopped keeping her diary in 1773 when her parents moved the family to Marshfield, although it is known that she was in declining health. In one amusing entry, dated May 25, 1773, Anna reveled in her "famous roll," an elaborate wig concocted out of "a red Cow Tail" and very coarse horsehair and blonde human hair, a wig that was a full inch longer than Anna's face. Her aunts did not approve of what they clearly saw as a foolish vanity: "I had my HEDDUS roll on, aunt Storer said it ought to be made less, Aunt Deming said it ought not to be made at all." for she referred to herself as "a daughter of liberty" and enthusiastically embraced making homespun in order to eschew imported British goods.

While making some changes for contemporary readers, Earle kept the original fanciful spelling and capitalization in the 1894 publication. A version of the diary used by Earle is held by the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History in Smith College Special Collections. Facsimiles of Earle's edition were published in 1970 and 1996. The Meeting House provided 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.