Existing comment:
Mary Katherine Goddard
From the outset, women in America were involved with printing as a craft and as a business. Women such as Dinah Nuthead, Anne Franklin, Elizabeth Timothy, and Anne Catherine Green assumed the task of printing and the management of the family business upon the loss of their husband or father. Two women became printers in their own stead: Jane Aitken, daughter of the printer of the first American English Bible, Robert Aitken, and Mary Katherine Goddard (1738–1816), who conducted the family printing business in Baltimore from 1774 to 1784. Goddard also served as Baltimore's postmaster from 1775 to 1789. In 1777 she was chosen to produce "an authentic copy of the Declaration of Independence, with the names of the members of Congress subscribing to the same," which for the first time revealed the names of all of the signers to a wider public.
Declaration of Independence. Baltimore: M. K. Goddard, 1777. |