Abstract
What can be deduced from the suturing of two lines from a poem that ran in the September 1794 issue of the Massachusetts Magazine into a poem that ap- peared over three years later in the March 1798 issue of the Independent Chronicle and the Universal Advertiser, a Bostonian newspaper? The earlier poem was pub- lished anonymously, the later under the pseudonym of Betty Broadface. Both de- fend a woman's right to remain single, "to die an old maid." Differences between the poem texts and publication histories reflect the intensity of the debate about marriage norms, the interactive nature of poetry writing, and the circulation of poems between early national publishing centers in the 1790s.
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