The Ladies
Click one dot, then another, to compare two women.
About this view
This graph draws only the women in the collection and only the letters they wrote to one another. It is a small, close world: far fewer women than men appear in our collection, drawn from edited volumes of correspondence, and most of their letters went to husbands, sons, and male colleagues rather than to each other.
Circles. Color sorts the women into "circles", clusters who exchanged letters more heavily among themselves than with others. The grouping is done by the data (modularity-based community detection), not by hand, so two women share a color because of the pattern of who-wrote-to-whom, not because anyone placed them together.
Comparing two women. Click one dot and then another (or search two names). If they corresponded, the readout reports how many letters passed between them. If they did not, it names the women they both wrote to. This a statement about shared contacts, not a claim that the two knew each other.
A note on the data: the Rotunda collection in this period is heavily weighted toward the Papers of George Washington, so women are under-represented relative to their real correspondence. Find out more about these papers here: https://washingtonpapers.org/.