Access to formal instruction in writing was severely limited for girls in early modern England: few schools offered writing for girls until the second half of the seventeenth century, and those that did usually charged fees. As a result, only small minorities of women were able to write before the later seventeenth century, especially outside of London. Still, from the later sixteenth century, printed writing manuals provided models of the different styles of handwriting in common use, making study easier for determined students. The Roman and italic hands were thought to be most appropriate for women because they were simpler and easier to write than the gothic cursive script called secretary hand, but in practice, women used a wide variety of hands. Secretary hand was often used by literate noblewomen in the first half of the sixteenth century and then fell out of favor among elite women, who were drawn to an elegant non-cursive italic hand with prestigious humanist associations. Among middling women in towns, secretary hand continued to be used in the first half of the seventeenth century, however. Initially rare, cursive became more common among women as the seventeenth century drew on. By the later seventeenth century, writing had become a less specialized skill, and the multiple elaborate hands of the preceding century fell into disuse as all English people gravitated increasingly to a practical cursive round hand that combined aspects of italic and secretary.