on to vindicate the slave if the whim of a master "unreasonably" denied marriage? The owner of a valuable female slave had to consider the risks of motherhood as compared with the accession of a slave child which would be little worth. And as for males Sewall refers to the well-known temptation masters have to connive at their fornication lest they should have to find wives for them or pay their fines. And it is certain that, in spite of Puritan regard for parenthood and the care of children, they separated mothers from their offspring.

One Massachusetts town hands down in tradition the memory of "raising slaves for market." 44 But the breeding of slaves was not, in general, regarded favorably in that colony. It seems to have been unprofitable. Negro children were, indeed, sold by the pound but the market was sadly sluggish, for negro babies were advertised in Boston to be given away like puppies and sometimes money was offered to any one that would take them. Thus economic interest hoodwinked the Calvinist conscience as it always hoodwinks or swamps the conscience of the master class in matters of class dominance.

Some show must, of course, be made of approximating the relations of the disinherited to those of the privileged class. Thus in 1745 a negro slave obtained a divorce for his wife's adultery (with a white man) and in 1758 the Superior Court decided that a child of a female slave "never married according to any of the forms prescribed by the laws of the land" by another slave who "had kept her company with her master's 44 Moore. Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts, 69.

57.

45 Earle. Customs and Fashions in Old New England, 89; Moore, op. cit.,

consent" was not a bastard. The reader will recall the mockery of slave marriage previously mentioned.

Slavery never took deep root in New England. The climate was against it. The fewness of the negroes tended to make race questions less urgent than in the South. Some of the farmers ate with their slaves. Madam Knight complained that in Connecticut slaves were allowed to sit and eat with the masters. "Into the dish goes the black hoof as freely as the white hand." Hawthorne says concerning the slaves of New England:

They were not excluded from the domestic affections; in families of middling rank, they had their places at the board; and when the circle closed around the evening hearth its blaze glowed on their dark shining faces, intermixed familiarly with their master's children.

But the system was evil at best, and did violence to the fundamentals of morality. There might be cause to wonder that the subordinating of the marital interests and family ties of the servile class to monetary considerations did not demoralize the family institutions of the masters, were it not that bourgeois marriage is itself an economic institution subordinating love to money, and further that in a society marked by class cleavage each social level preserves its own ethic, more or less distinct and insulated from that of the other classes. And we need only note the present-day phenomenon of "the divided conscience" in order to appreciate the incongruities that economic interest can perpetrate. The colonial conscience was able to witness even the shocking system of white servitude with its ruinous effects. Massachusetts tried to sell children of Quakers to Barbadoes but could find no shipmaster base enough to take them."

46 Moore, op. cit., 33.

V. THE POSITION OF WOMEN IN THE NEW ENGLAND COLONIAL FAMILY

The rigors and dangers of pioneer life constituted colonial New England a man's world. Life conditions allowed a type of patriarchism that found affinity in the Old Testament régime. Views as to proper relations between husband and wife, parent and child, or between man and maid before marriage, came directly from the scriptures, as for example Calvin's views quoted in an introductory chapter. Byington thinks that "The Courtship of Miles Standish" gives us a very correct picture of the social and family life of the Pilgrims. The proxy wooing suggests the patriarchal story of Isaac.

Inasmuch as the husband was the patriarch, woman found in matrimony but limited freedom. Sewall reports a wedding address by Mr. Noyes in which he said that: "Love was the sugar to sweeten every condition in the married relation." It is to be feared that there was no superabundance of sugar in the Puritan domestic economy. An excess of male despotism is more probable. One man that abused his wife asserted in good ancestral phrase that she was his servant and slave.

Woman was indeed "a sweet sex" but her sphere was narrow. Altho it was a woman that gave the first plot of ground for a free school in Massachusetts, education even in common schools was withheld from girls until it was found necessary to allow them to attend during the summer (while the boys were busy fishing) in or

48

der to hold school moneys." One Connecticut town voted not to "waste" any of its money in educating girls. One small maiden sat for hours daily on the schoolhouse steps in order to catch as much as possible of the lessons going on inside. By the middle of the eighteenth century girls were sometimes sent to the city to finishing school. In 1788 Northampton voted not to spend any money on the education of girls. It was well into the nineteenth century before the New Englanders thought education for girls desirable. Mrs. John Adams said: "It was fashionable to ridicule female learning. Female education in the best families went no further than writing and arithmetic; in some few and rare instances, music and dancing." Woman's only chance for much intellectual improvement was to be found in occasional contact with the learned, and in the families of the educated class. The only useful instruction in practical affairs was received from the mother. When Governor Winthrop's wife lost her mind her Puritan women friends attributed the calamity to her desertion of her domestic duties and meddling in man's sphere. Governor Winthrop believed that the young wife of the governor of Connecticut had gone insane "by occasion of giving herself wholly to reading and writing." Had she "not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, etc., she had kept her wits, and might have improved them usefully and honorably in the place God had set her."

There were, indeed, during the colonial period some women conspicuous for their brilliancy and mental attainments; but their field was cramped. The principal

47 Gage. Woman, Church, and State, 407.

48 Scribner's Magazine, vol. 1, 762.

charge against Mrs. Hutchinson was that she had, contrary to Paul, presumed to instruct men. Anne Bradstreet, daughter of Governor Dudley and wife of a governor, the mother of eight children, and a faithful performer of household and social duties, felt the pressure when she essayed to write poetry. She says:

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue

Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A poets pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on female wits:
If what I do prove well, it won't advance,
They'l say it's stoln, or else it was by chance.

Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are
Men have precedency and still excell,

It is but vain unjustly to wage warre:

Men can do best, and women know it well
Preheminence in all and each is yours;

Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours.

In such an atmosphere it is not strange if, as Fisher says of the colonies in general, "Married women usually became prudes and retired from all amusements and pleasures."

Mrs. Adams writing in 1778 says: "I regret the trifling, narrow, contracted education of the females of my own country." She quotes some writer thus:

If women are to be esteemed our enemies, methinks it is an ignoble cowardice, thus to disarm them, and not allow them the same weapons we use ourselves; but if they deserve the titles of our friends, 'tis an inhuman tyranny to debar them of the privileges of ingenuous education, which would also render their friendship so much the more delightful to themselves and Their senses are generally as quick as ours; their reason as nervous, their judgment as mature and solid. Nor need we fear to lose our empire over them by thus improving their native abilities; since, where there is most learning,

us.