February 13, 1732 – April 7, 1758
Esther Edwards was the daughter of Windsor Farms (later to become South Windsor) native Jonathan Edwards (son of Rev. Timothy Edwards), the renowned theologian of the Great Awakening. In 1752, she married Aaron Burr, the first president of Princeton University. Their son, Aaron Burr Jr. was the third Vice President of the United States.
While history remembers the men surrounding Esther during her lifetime, her experiences, like many women of her time and throughout history, were almost lost were it not for a journal she began to write on October 1, 1754.
Her journal takes the form of letters that she writes to a friend, Sarah Prince, in Boston. Because Esther’s family had provided her with an exceptional education that was unavailable to most women of colonial times, she was able to record not only the events happening around her but to engage in self-reflection and comment on how she felt about her circumstances or even many times, record how she believed she should feel about them.
Esther’s descendants carefully preserved these documents, although they were of little interest to scholars or historians for many years since they recounted the details of the public and private life of an eighteenth century woman who was “only” the daughter/wife/mother of the men that history focused on. Even with Esther’s social status as a member of two of New England’s most prominent families, her journal was still not thought worthy of publication until, more than 200 years after it was written, in 1984, it was edited by Carol F. Karlsen and Laurie Crumpacker and subsequently published. Esther’s journal is the earliest known ongoing record of a woman’s daily life in the colonial United States. It is because of her that we have a rare glimpse of a woman’s experiences and perspective of this time in history.
Esther Edwards Burr’s original 354 page letter-journal is housed in Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University Yale.
The image below of page 84 is courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
