Mary Katherine Goddard
1738–1816
WHY SHE MADE HISTORY a newspaper editor, printer, and postmaster. First to publish the Declaration of Independence with the printed names of the signers.
Mary Katherine Goddard was born in 1736 in New London, Connecticut. As a young woman, her brother, William, moved to Providence, Rhode Island, to set up a printing press. Goddard and her widowed mother followed William and helped him run the print shop. After William moved to Philadelphia in 1765, mother and daughter ran the Providence print shop themselves, printing the weekly newspaper Providence Gazette and the annual West’s Almanack. In 1768 Goddard and her mother joined William in Philadelphia, where again he had established a printing business. For five years Goddard helped William publish the Pennsylvania Chronicle. When William moved to Baltimore, Goddard took over the Philadelphia print shop. In 1774 she moved to Baltimore and worked with her brother once again, publishing Baltimore’s first newspaper, the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser. She also opened a dry goods, stationery, and book store. Although she ran the Journal beginning in 1774, it was not until the following year that she was recognized as the paper’s publisher on its title page. During the Revolutionary War, Goddard maintained the printing business and managed to publish the newspaper regularly, even when paper was in short supply. During this time, she also became the Baltimore postmaster, the first female postmaster in the US. Goddard edited the Journal from 1775 to 1784. Willing to print criticisms of both the British and the Patriots, Goddard attracted controversy. In May 1776 she complained to the Baltimore Committee of Safety that she was receiving threats from a man angry about stories printed in her newspaper. Later a group of radical businessmen took issue with the Journal’s articles and twice raided the newspaper’s offices. Each time, Mary Goddard appealed to the state legislature for support and, in important victories for freedom of the press, received it, even getting a public apology from the businessmen.
In 1777 Goddard printed the first copy of the Declaration of Independence to include the signers’ names. The inclusion of the names was significant because it publicly identified the signers, who were considered traitors by the British. The punishment for treason was hanging. In solidarity with the signers, Goddard printed her own full name—not the “M.K.” she usually used—at the bottom of the document. She continued to run her store and also a bookbinding business. In 1789 the U.S. Postmaster General decided that the Baltimore postmaster needed to be a man because the job required too much travel for a woman. Goddard protested her removal and was so greatly admired in the community that approximately 200 businessmen signed a petition to have her reinstated. But even Goddard’s petitions to the U.S. Senate and President George Washington could not win her job back. Mary Katherine Goddard continued to run her bookstore until just a few years before she died at age 78.