The financial records in the diary are particularly useful because they provide a ground-level picture of what the lecture tour actually produced economically. The tour was not a triumph that resolved the Gannett household’s financial difficulties. It was a working woman doing the financial math of travel, accommodations, and speaking fees while managing a chronic disability. The income was real and needed, and the effort it required was substantial.
The lecture format she used has been described in accounts that draw on the diary: she would speak about her service, framing the gender-transgressive elements of it in ways that acknowledged the cultural conventions of her audience while insisting on the legitimacy of what she had done. She would then change into military uniform and demonstrate drill. The combination of conventional feminine self-presentation followed by military competence was, in its way, a performance of exactly the complexity her life contained: she was not proposing to abolish the gender conventions of her era, but she was insisting that they were not the whole story.
Whether the tour was, as some accounts claim, the first national lecture tour by an American woman is a distinction that depends on what one counts and what records have survived. The claim is not impossible — it may well be accurate — but it is the kind of superlative that requires more systematic documentation than is currently available to establish definitively. What is established is that she conducted a public speaking tour that reached multiple cities and drew substantial audiences, and that this was an unusual and historically significant use of public presence by a woman in the early American republic.