Most schools had a single schoolroom, which could hold up to 80 pupils, were taught by a single schoolmaster. There might be smaller adjoining rooms for the teaching of infants and girls. There was sometimes with a schoolmaster's house in the same style nearby. Many burgh schools moved away from this model of teaching from the late eighteenth century as the new commercial and vocational subjects led to the employment of more teachers. From the 1790s urban schools were often rebuild in a more imposing classical style, from public subscription, or a legacy, and renamed academies. One of the effects of the extensive network of parish schools was the growth of the "democratic myth", which in the nineteenth century created the widespread belief that many a "lad of pairts" had been able to rise up through the system to take high office and that literacy was much more widespread in Scotland than in neighbouring states, particularly England. Historians now accept that very few boys were able to pursue this route to social advancement and that literacy was not noticeably higher than in comparable nations, as the education in the parish schools was basic and short and attendance was not compulsory. By the eighteenth century many poorer girls were being taught in dame schools, informally set up by a widow or spinster to teach reading, sewing and cooking. From the mid-seventeenth century there were boarding schools for girls, particularly in Edinburgh or London. These were often family-sized institutions headed by women. Initially these were aimed at the girls of noble households, but by the eighteenth century there were complaints that the daughters of traders and craftsmen were following their social superiors into these institutions. Among members of the aristocracy by the early eighteenth century a girl's education was expected to include basic literacy and numeracy, needlework, cookery and household management, while polite accomplishments and piety were also emphasised. Female illiteracy rates based on signatures among female servants were around 90 per cent from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries, and perhaps 85 per cent for women of all ranks by 1750, compared with 35 per cent for men. Overall literacy rates were slightly higher than in England as a whole, but female rates were much lower than for their English counterparts. There were some notable aristocratic female writers, including included Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw (1627–1727) and Lady Grizel Baillie (1645–1746). There are 50 autobiographies extant from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth century, of which 16 were written by women, all of which are largely religious in content.