social entertainment.

Of many it might then have been

said. "She openeth her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kindness. She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness. Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her."

James Franklin wrote at the end of the Revolutionary period that except for certain amusements the Virginia ladies

Chiefly spend their time in sewing and taking care of their families; for they seldom read or endeavor to improve their minds. However they are in general good housewives; and tho they have not perhaps, so much tenderness and sensibility as the English ladies, yet they make as good wives and as good mothers as any in the world.

Brickell wrote further of North Carolina:

The girls are not only bred to the needle and spinning, but to the dairy and domestic affairs, which many of them manage with a great deal of prudence and conduct, tho they are very young. . The women are the most industrious in these parts, and many of them by their good housewifery make a great deal of cloath of their own cotton, wool and flax, and some of them weave their own cloath with which they decently apparel their whole family tho large. Others are so ingenious that they make up all the wearing apparel both for husband, sons and daughters. Others are very ready to help and assist their husbands in any servile work, as planting when the season of the year requires expedition: pride seldom banishing housewifery.

Tradition of South Carolina tells us that among the Huguenots "men and their wives worked together in felling trees, building houses, making fences, and grubbing up their grounds and afterwards con

tinued their labors at the whip-saw." One man asserts that his grandfather and grandmother started their handsome fortune by working together at the whip

saw. A writer on South Carolina in 1763 said: The women of the province "are excelled by none in the practice of all the social virtues, necessary for the happiness of the other sex as daughters, wives, or mothers."

There was more grace and charm perhaps in the settled life of the South than in that of New England but it is pretty clear that divergence of life between North and South was less marked in colonial days than since. But even before the Revolution "chivalry" was, as we have seen, under way. Lady Tryon and Esther Wake wrought so successfully with their feminine charms that the North Carolina assembly granted a large appropriation to build a governor's palace. Woman's influence was felt not only in private but in public-in council, in assemblies, in the House of Burgesses.

It must be remembered that when writers eulogize the women of the South and the attitude of the men toward them the picture in mind is likely to be of the women of the "aristocracy." Common people were not very likely to get into books very adequately in the Old South. Side by side with the women of the nobility lived the miserable sisters of toil - the poor, the servants, the slaves-and their lot was by no means roseate. Some conception of the life of the servile class will be gained in a later chapter. In Virginia in order to discourage planters from working women in the fields, female servants so working were made subject to tithe, while all other white women were exempt.146 A woman in The Sot-weed Factor; or, a Voyage to Maryland, contrasts England and America thus:

Not then a slave for twice two year
My cloaths were fashionably new
Nor were my shifts of linnen blue.

146 Burk. History of Virginia, vol. ii, appendix xviii.

But things are changed; now at the hoe,
I daily work and barefoot go,

In weeding corn or feeding swine,

I spend my melancholy time.

In the valley of Virginia in harvest German women worked in the fields. Females reaped, hoed, plowed. A writer on the valley said: "Some of our now wealthiest citizens frequently boast of their grandmothers, aye mothers too, performing this kind of heavy labor."

The men

North Carolina became a dumping ground for "white trash." If we may believe one sharp writer (seemingly Byrd, whose reliability has been impugned) just like the Indians, impose all the work upon the poor women. They make their wives rise out of their beds early in the morning, at the same time that they lye and snore, til the sun has run one third of his course. They loiter away their lives.

of the year scarcely have bread to eat.

and at the winding up

North Carolina possessed much of the roughness and crudeness of frontier life. The reverend Mr. Urmstone, a missionary, writes numerous querulous letters detailing the hardships of the country and the roughness of the people. A letter, dated February 15, 1719, relates that his wife died in October. She had

Declared before several of her neighbors that her heart was broken through our ill usage and comfortless way of living; she prest me sore for divers years either to quit this wretched country or give her leave to go home with her children: I wish I had done either it might have pleased God to have continued her to me many years longer.

XVII. CHILDHOOD IN THE COLONIAL

SOUTH

Children were of use in the colonial South as in New England. The opportunity for child-labor left unbridled the spontaneous impulse to propagation and fecundity was a social boon in the new country.

The London Company, which settled Virginia, was anxious to utilize child-labor in developing the resources of the colony. In 1619 arrived one hundred children "save such as dyed on the waie" and another hundred, twelve years old or over, was asked for. In 1627 many ships came bringing fourteen or fifteen hundred children kidnapped in Europe. A few years later a request went to London for another supply of "friendless boyes and girles."

How the system of servitude affected family relations may be gathered from the following illustrative material.

A boy six years old was kidnapped in England by a sea-captain and sold to America where he married his master's daughter and became his heir. He never found his parents. Later he bought the sea-captain (now a convict). The latter, probably fearing vengeance, killed himself the first day.

James McAvoy and thirteen other youths were kidnapped from Ireland and brought to Virginia. Several of the boys were recovered by their parents. McAvoy was sold to Mr. R. Carlile and by him resold to a man