Although we can imagine an oral tradition of children's literature by indigenous women of North America, there is scant to no record of these compositions. The written record of American female writing for children begins with the first American poet, Anne Bradstreet (1612–72). Arriving in the New World with the first generation of English settlers, Bradstreet speaks directly from female experience in poetry and letters addressed to her offspring. The tradition of children's literature continues through diverse voices in every genre, from traditional folk and fairy tales, to historical fiction, realism, fantasy, picture books, and young adolescent fiction. Multi-dimensional and enduring, this literature begins in the seventeenth century with the Puritans and reaches full creative flowering in the early to mid-nineteenth century, in concert with the development of American literature generally. It continues to flourish today. Following its arc from the colonial period to the present, we see aesthetic and social forces that helped to shape various understandings of American children and the literary visions of women who wrote for them.

Anne Bradstreet is a germinal figure whose life and writing exemplify the tensions facing women who both care for children and write for them. Provided with a Renaissance education in England, she boarded the Arbella with her husband, Simon Bradstreet, preacher and soon-to-be-governor John Winthrop, and other English Puritans seeking relief from religious persecution. She arrived in Salem in 1630. Bradstreet did not set out to be a writer.