Woman's Life in Colonial Days by Carl Holliday

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And Mrs. Franklin, like her husband and Mrs. Adams, had no doubt of the
necessity of a thorough knowledge of household duties for every woman
who expected to marry. In 1757 she wrote to her sister-in-law in regard
to the proposed marriage of her nephew: "I think Miss Betsey a very
agreeable, sweet-tempered, good girl who has had a housewifely
education, and will make to a good husband a very good wife."

With these fundamentals in female education settled, some of the
colonists, at least, were very willing that the girls should learn some
of the intellectual "frills" and fads that might add to feminine grace
or possibly be of use in future emergencies. Franklin, for instance,
seemed anxious that Sally should learn her French and music. Writing to
his wife in 1758, he stated: "I hope Sally applies herself closely to
her French and musick, and that I shall find she has made great
Proficiency. Sally's last letter to her Brother is the best wrote that
of late I have seen of hers. I only wish she was a little more careful
of her spelling. I hope she continues to love going to Church, and would
have her read over and over again the _Whole Duty of Man_ and the Lady's
Library."[70] And again in 1772 we find him writing this advice to Sally
after her marriage to Mr. Bache: "I have advis'd him to settle down to
Business in Philadelphia where he will always be with you.... and I
think that in keeping a store, if it be where you dwell, you can be
serviceable as your mother was to me. For you are not deficient in
Capacity and I hope are not too proud.... You might easily learn
Accounts and you can copy Letters, or write them very well upon
Occasion. By Industry and Frugality you may get forward in the World,
being both of you yet young."[71]

_V. Educational Frills_

Toward the latter part of the eighteenth century that once-popular
institution, the boarding school for girls, became firmly established,
and many were the young "females" who suffered as did Oliver Wendell
Holmes' dear old aunt:

"They braced my aunt against a board,
To make her straight and tall;
They laced her up, they starved her down,
To make her light, and small;
They pinched her feet, they singed her hair,
They screwed it up with pins;--
Oh, never mortal suffered more
In penance for her sins."

One of the best known of these seminaries was that conducted by Susanna
Rowson, author of the once-famous novel _Charlotte Temple_. A letter
from a colonial miss of fourteen years, Eliza Southgate, who attended
this school, may be enlightening:

"Hon. Father:

"I am again placed at school under the tuition of an amiable
lady, so mild, so good, no one can help loving her; she treats
all her scholars with such tenderness as would win the affection
of the most savage brute. I learn Embroiderey and Geography at
present, and wish your permission to learn Musick.... I have
described one of the blessings of creation in Mrs. Rowson, and
now I will describe Mrs. Lyman as the reverse: she is the worst
woman I ever knew of or that I ever saw, nobody knows what I
suffered from the treatment of that woman."[72]

The Moravian seminaries of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and of North
Carolina were highly popular training places for girls; for in these
orderly institutions the students were sure to gain not only instruction
in graceful social accomplishments and a thorough knowledge of
housekeeping, but the rare habit of doing all things with regularity,
neatness, decorum, and quietness. The writer of the above letter has
also described one of these Pennsylvania schools with its prim teachers
and commendable mingling of the practical and the artistic. "The first
was merely a _sewing school_, little children and a pretty single
spinster about 30, her white skirt, white short tight waistcoat, nice
handkerchief pinned outside, a muslin apron and a close cap, of the most
singular form you can imagine. I can't describe it. The hair is all put
out of sight, turned back, and no border to the cap, very unbecoming and
very singular, tied under the chin with a pink ribbon--blue for the
married, white for the widows. Here was a Piano forte and another sister
teaching a little girl music. We went thro' all the different school
rooms, some misses of sixteen, their teachers were very agreeable and
easy, and in every room was a Piano."

It was a notable fact that dancing was taught in nearly all of these
institutes. In spite of Puritanical training, in spite of the
thunder-bolts of colonial preachers, the tide of public opinion could
not be stayed, and the girls _would_ learn the waltz and the prim
minuet. Times had indeed changed since the day when Cotton Mather so
sternly spoke his opinion on such an ungodly performance: "Who were the
Inventors of Petulant Dancings? Learned men have well observed that the
Devil was the First Inventor of the impleaded Dances, and the Gentiles
who worshipped him the first Practitioners of this Art."

Colonial school girls may have been meek and lowly in the seventeenth
century--the words of Winthrop and the Mathers rather indicate that
they were--but not so in the eighteenth. Some of them showed an
independence of spirit not at all agreeing with popular ideas of the
demure maid of olden days. Sarah Hall, for instance, whose parents lived
in Barbadoes, was sent to her grandmother, Madam Coleman of Boston, to
attend school. She arrived with her maid in 1719 and soon scandalized
her stately grandmother by abruptly leaving the house and engaging board
and lodging at a neighboring residence. At her brother's command she
returned; but even a brother's authority failed to control the spirited
young lady; for a few months after the episode Madam Coleman wrote:
"Sally won't go to school nor to church and wants a nue muff and a great
many other things she don't need. I tell her fine things are cheaper in
Barbadoes. She says she will go to Barbadoes in the Spring. She is well
and brisk, says her Brother has nothing to do with her as long as her
father is alive." The same lady informs us that Sally's instruction in
writing cost one pound, seven shillings, and four pence, the entrance
fee for dancing lessons, one pound, and the bill for dancing lessons for
four months, two pounds. No doubt it was worth the price; for later
Sally became rather a dashing society belle.

One thing always emphasized in the training of the colonial girl was
manners or etiquette--the art of being a charming hostess. As Mrs. Earle
says, "It is impossible to overestimate the value these laws of
etiquette, these conventions of custom had at a time, when neighborhood
life was the whole outside world." How many, many a "don't" the colonial
miss had dinned into her ears! Hear but a few of them: "Never sit down
at the table till asked, and after the blessing. Ask for nothing; tarry
till it be offered thee. Speak not. Bite not thy bread but break it.
Take salt only with a clean knife. Dip not the meat in the same. Hold
not thy knife upright but sloping, and lay it down at the right hand of
plate with blade on plate. Look not earnestly at any other that is
eating. When moderately satisfied leave the table. Sing not, hum not,
wriggle not.... Smell not of thy Meat; make not a noise with thy Tongue,
Mouth, Lips, or Breath in Thy Eating and Drinking.... When any speak to
thee, stand up. Say not I have heard it before. Never endeavour to help
him out if he tell it not right. Snigger not; never question the Truth
of it."

Girls were early taught these forms, and in addition received not only
advice but mechanical aid to insure their standing erect and sitting
upright. The average child of to-day would rebel most vigorously against
such contrivances, and justly; for in a few American schools, as in
English institutions, young ladies were literally tortured through
sitting in stocks, being strapped to backboards, and wearing stiffened
coats and stays re-inforced with strips of wood and metal. Such methods
undoubtedly made the colonial dame erect and perhaps stately in
appearance, but they contributed a certain artificial, thin-chested
structure that the healthy girl of to-day would abhor.

As we have seen, however, some women of the day contrived to pick up
unusual bits of knowledge, or made surprising expeditions into the realm
of literature and philosophy. Samuel Peters, writing in his _General
History of Connecticut_ in 1781, declared of their accomplishments:
"The women of Connecticut are strictly virtuous and to be compared to
the prude rather than the European polite lady. They are not permitted
to read plays; cannot converse about whist, quadrille or operas; but
will freely talk upon the subjects of history, geography, and
mathematics. They are great casuists and polemical divines; and I have
known not a few of them so well schooled in Greek and Latin as often to
put to the blush learned gentlemen." And yet Hannah Adams, writing in
her _Memoir_ in 1832, had this to say of educational opportunities in
Connecticut during the latter half of the eighteenth century: "My health
did not even admit of attending school with the children in the
neighborhood where I resided. The country schools, at that time, were
kept but a few months in the year, and all that was then taught in them
was reading, writing, and arithmetic. In the summer, the children were
instructed by females in reading, sewing, and other kinds of work. The
books chiefly made use of were the Bible and Psalter. Those who have had
the advantages of receiving the rudiments of their education at the
schools of the present day, can scarcely form an adequate idea of the
contrast between them, and those of an earlier age; and of the great
improvements which have been made even in the common country schools.
The disadvantages of my early education I have experienced during life;
and, among various others, the acquiring of a very faulty pronunciation;
a habit contracted so early, that I cannot wholly rectify it in later
years."

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, destitute 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 Constitution 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 advertisement 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
Glass, 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 principal 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 classes 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] _Institutional 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 institution 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 God, 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, coarse 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, God-fearing people who believed
in the sanctity 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 institution 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
illustrations 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 godliness."

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.
The sweetnesse of it did much refresh me. What can be more pleasinge to
a wife, than to heare of the welfayre of her best beloved, and how he is
pleased with hir pore endevors.... I wish that I may be all-wayes
pleasinge to thee, and that those comforts we have in each other may be
dayly increced as far as they be pleasinge to God.... I will doe any
service whearein I may please my good Husband. I confess I cannot doe
ynough for thee...."

Is it not evident that passionate, reverent love, amounting almost to
adoration, was fairly common in those early days? Numerous other
writings of the colonial period could add their testimony. Sometimes
the proof is in the letters of men longing for home and family;
sometimes in the messages of the wife longing for the return of her
"goodman"; sometimes it is discerned in bits of verse, such as those by
Ann Bradstreet, or in an enthusiastic description of a woman, such as
that by Jonathan Edwards about his future wife. Note the fervor of this
famous eulogy by the "coldly logical" Edwards; can it be excelled in
genuine warmth by the love letters of famous men in later days?

"They say there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that
Great Being, who made and rules the world, and that there are certain
seasons in which this Great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes
to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight and that she
hardly cares for anything, except to meditate on him--that she expects
after a while to be received up where he is, to be raised up out of the
world and caught up into heaven; being assured that he loves her too
well to let her remain at a distance from him always.... Therefore, if
you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures,
she disregards it and cares not for it, and is unmindful of any pain or
affliction. She has a strange sweetness in her mind and singular purity
in her affections; is most just and conscientious in all her conduct;
and you could not persuade her to do anything wrong or sinful, if you
would give her all the world, lest she offend this Great Being. She is
of a wonderful sweetness, calmness and universal benevolence of mind....
She will sometimes go about from place to place, singing sweetly; and
seems to be always full of joy and pleasure.... She loves to be alone,
walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible
always conversing with her."

In several poems Ann Bradstreet, daughter of Gov. Thomas Dudley, and
wife of Simon Bradstreet, mother of eight children, and first of the
women poets of America, expressed rather ardently for a Puritan dame,
her love for her husband. Thus:

"I crave this boon, this errand by the way:
Commend me to the man more lov'd than life,
Show him the sorrows of his widow'd wife,

* * * * *

"My sobs, my longing hopes, my doubting fears,
And, if he love, how can he there abide?"

Again, we note the following:

"If ever two were one, then surely we;
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can."[75]

"I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold,
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor aught but love from thee give recompense.
My love is such I can no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray,
Then while we live in love let's persevere,
That when we live no more we may live ever."

The letters of Abigail Adams to her husband might be offered as further
evidence of the affectionate relationships existing between man and wife
in colonial days. Our text books on history so often leave the
impression that the fear of God utterly prevented the colonial home from
being a place of confident love; but it is possible that the social
restraints imposed by the church outside the home reacted in such a
manner as to compel men and women to express more fervently the
affections otherwise repressed. When we read such lines as the following
in Mrs. Adams' correspondence, we may conjecture that the years of
necessary separation from her husband during the Revolutionary days,
must have meant as much of longing and pain as a similar separation
would mean to a modern wife:

"My dearest Friend:

"...I hope soon to receive the dearest of friends, and the
tenderest of husbands, with that unabated affection which has for
years past, and will whilst the vital spark lasts, burn in the
bosom of your affectionate

A. Adams."

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