Some time before 1830, girls in New England began to attend town schools more or less on par with boys, and women's mastery of basic literacy in the region rose to levels comparable to those of men. Women also came to assume increasingly important teaching roles. Each of these changes had some bearing on the other two and establishing the timing of the changes with some precision is important. First, the timing of the changes in levels of female literacy, school attendance, and teaching matter for their own sake. More especially, these changes are important because historians, insofar as they have attended to these changes, have seen them as reflections of wider cultural shifts—changes in views of women and women's roles.