Woman's Life in Colonial Days Part 6

North and South women complained of the lack of educational advantages.

Madame Schuyler deplored the scarcity of books and of facilities for womanly education, and spoke with irony of the literary tastes of the older ladies: "Shakespeare was a questionable author at the Flatts, where the plays were considered grossly familiar, and by no means to be compared to 'Cato' which Madame Schuyler greatly admired. The 'Essay on Man' was also in high esteem with this lady."[73] Many women of the day realized their lack of systematic training, and keenly regretted the absence of opportunity to obtain it. Abigail Adams, writing to her husband on the subject, says, "If you complain of education in sons what shall I say of daughters who every day experience the want of it? With regard to the education of my own children I feel myself soon out of my depth, dest.i.tute in every part of education. I most sincerely wish that some more liberal plan might be laid and executed for the benefit of the rising generation and that our new Const.i.tution may be distinguished for encouraging learning and virtue. If we mean to have heroes, statesmen, and philosophers, we should have learned women. The world perhaps would laugh at me, but you, I know, have a mind too enlarged and liberal to disregard sentiment. If as much depends as is allowed upon the early education of youth and the first principles which are instilled take the deepest root great benefit must arise from the literary accomplishments in women."[74]

And again, Hannah Adams' _Memoir_ of 1832 expresses in the following words the intellectual hunger of the Colonial woman: "I was very desirous of learning the rudiments of Latin, Greek, geography, and logic. Some gentlemen who boarded at my father's offered to instruct me in these branches of learning gratis, and I pursued these studies with indescribable pleasure and avidity. I still, however, sensibly felt the want of a more systematic education, and those advantages which females enjoy in the present day.... My reading was very desultory, and novels engaged too much of my attention."

After all, it would seem that fancy sewing was considered far more requisite than science and literature in the training of American girls of the eighteenth century. As soon as the little maid was able to hold a needle she was taught to knit, and at the age of four or five commonly made excellent mittens and stockings. A girl of fourteen made in 1760 a pair of silk stockings with open work design and with initials knitted on the instep, and every stage of the work from the raising and winding of the silk to the designing and spinning was done by one so young.

Girls began to make samplers almost before they could read their letters, and wonderful were the birds and animals and scenes depicted in embroidery by mere children. An advertis.e.m.e.nt of the day is significant of the admiration held for such a form of decorative work: "Martha Gazley, late from Great Britain, now in the city of New York Makes and Teacheth the following curious Works, viz.: Artificial Fruit and Flowers and other Wax-works, Nuns-work, Philigre and Pencil Work upon Muslin, all sorts of Needle-Work, and Raising of Paste, as also to paint upon Gla.s.s, and Transparant for Sconces, with other Works. If any young Gentlewomen, or others are inclined to learn any or all of the above-mentioned curious Works, they may be carefully instructed in the same by said Martha Gazley."

Thus the evidence leads us to believe that a colonial woman's education consisted in the main of training in how to conduct and care for a home.

It was her princ.i.p.al business in life and for it she certainly was well prepared. In the seventeenth century girls attended either a short term public school or a dame's school, or, as among the better families in the South, were taught by private tutors. In the eighteenth century they frequently attended boarding schools or female seminaries, and here learned--at least in the middle colonies and the South--not only reading and writing and arithmetic, but dancing, music, drawing, French, and "manners." In Virginia and New York, as we have seen, illiteracy among seventeenth century women was astonishingly common; but in the eighteenth century those above the lowest cla.s.ses in all three sections could at least read, write, and keep accounts, and some few had dared to reach out into the sphere of higher learning. That many realized their intellectual poverty and deplored it is evident; how many more who kept no diaries and left no letters hungered for culture we shall never know; but the very longing of these colonial women is probably one of the main causes of that remarkable movement for the higher education of American women so noticeable in the earlier years of the nineteenth century.

Their smothered ambition undoubtedly gave birth to an intellectual advance of women unequalled elsewhere in the world.

FOOTNOTES:

[43] Vol. I, p. 231.

[44] Vol. I, p. 161.

[45] Vol. I, p. 165.

[46] Vol. I, p. 344.

[47] _Letters of Abigail Adams_, p. 24.

[48] _Memoirs of an American Lady_, p. 27.

[49] Humphreys: _Catherine Schuyler_, p. 8.

[50] Smyth: _Writings of Ben Franklin_, Vol. III, p. 203.

[51] Smyth: _Writings of Ben Franklin_, Vol. III, p. 4.

[52] Ford: _Writings of Thomas Jefferson_, Vol. III. p. 345

[53] _Selections from Fithian's Writings_, Aug. 12, 1774.

[54] _American Nation Series, England in America_, p. 116.

[55] Vol. I, p. 299.

[56] Vol. I, p. 301.

[57] Vol. I, p. 311.

[58] _Inst.i.tutional History of Virginia_, Vol. I, p. 454.

[59] Ravenel: _Eliza Pinckney_, p. 50.

[60] Ravenel: _Eliza Pinckney_, p. 51.

[61] Ravenel: _Eliza Pinckney_, p. 49.

[62] Turell: _Memoirs of Life and Death of Mrs. Jane Turell._

[63] _Letters of Abigail Adams_, p. 11.

[64] _Letters of Abigail Adams_, p. 9.

[65] Grant: _Memoirs of an American Lady_, p. 136.

[66] Grant: _Memoirs of an American Lady_, p. 267.

[67] _Letters of Abigail Adams_, p. 401.

[68] Smyth: _Writings of Franklin_, Vol. I, p. 344.

[69] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 344.

[70] Smyth: Vol. III, p. 431.

[71] Smyth: Vol. V, p. 345.

[72] Quoted in Earle's _Child Life in Colonial Days_, p. 113.

[73] Humphreys; _Catherine Schuyler_, p. 75.

[74] Brooks: _Dames and Daughters of Colonial Days_, p. 199.

CHAPTER III

COLONIAL WOMAN AND THE HOME

_I. The Charm of the Colonial Home_

After all, it is in the home that the soul of the colonial woman is fully revealed. We may say in all truthfulness that there never was a time when the home wielded a greater influence than during the colonial period of American history. For the home was then indeed the center and heart of social life. There were no men's clubs, no women's societies, no theatres, no moving pictures, no suffrage meetings, none of the hundred and one exterior activities that now call forth both father and mother from the home circle. The home of pre-revolutionary days was far more than a place where the family ate and slept. Its simplicity, its confidence, its air of security and permanence, and its atmosphere of refuge or haven of rest are characteristics to be grasped in their true significance only through a thorough reading of the writings of those early days. The colonial woman had never received a diploma in domestic science or home economics; she had never heard of balanced diets; she had never been taught the arrangement of color schemes; but she knew the secret of making from four bare walls the sacred inst.i.tution with all its subtle meanings comprehended under the one word, home.

All home life, of course, was not ideal. There were idle, slovenly women, misguided female fanatics, as there are to-day. Too often in considering the men and women who made colonial history we are liable to think that all were of the stamp of Winthrop, Bradford, Sewall, Adams, and Washington. Instead, they were people like the readers of this book, neither saints nor depraved sinners. In later chapters we shall see that many broke the laws of man and G.o.d, enforced cruel penalties on their brothers and sisters, frequently disobeyed the ten commandments, and balanced their charity with malice. Then, too, there was an ungentle, rough, coa.r.s.e element in the under-strata of society--an element accentuated under the uncouth pioneer conditions. But, in the main, we may believe that the great majority of citizens of New England, the substantial traders and merchants of the middle colonies, and the planters of the South, were law-abiding, G.o.d-fearing people who believed in the sanct.i.ty of their homes and cherished them. We shall see that these homes were well worth cherishing.

_II. Domestic Love and Confidence_

In this discussion of the colonial home, as in previous discussions, we must depend for information far more upon the writings by men than upon those by women. Yet, here and there, in the diaries and letters of wives and mothers we catch glimpses of what the inst.i.tution meant to women--glimpses of that deep, abiding love and faith that have made the home a favorite theme of song and story. In the correspondence between husband and wife we have conclusive evidence that woman was held in high respect, her advice often asked, and her influence marked. The letters of Governor Winthrop to his wife Margaret might be offered as striking ill.u.s.trations of the confidence, sympathy, and love existing in colonial home life. Thus, he writes from England: "My Dear Wife: Commend my Love to them all. I kisse & embrace thee, my deare wife, & all my children, & leave thee in His armes who is able to preserve you all, & to fulfill our joye in our happye meeting in His good time. Amen. Thy faithfull husband." And again just before leaving England he writes to her: "I must begin now to prepare thee for our long parting which growes very near. I know not how to deal with thee by arguments; for if thou wert as wise and patient as ever woman was, yet it must needs be a great trial to thee, and the greater because I am so dear to thee. That which I must chiefly look at in thee for thy ground of contentment is thy G.o.dliness."

Nor were the wife's replies less warm and affectionate. Hear this bit from a letter of three centuries ago: "MY MOST SWEET HUSBAND:--How dearely welcome thy kinde letter was to me I am not able to expresse.