"It was a moving sight to see the buxom lasses, how they hung about the doughty Antony Van Corlear--for he was a jolly rosy-faced, lusty bachelor, fond of his joke, and withal a desparate rogue among women. Fain would they have kept him to comfort them while the army was away; for besides what I have said of him, it is no more than justice to add, that he was a kind-hearted soul, noted for his benevolent attentions in comforting disconsolate wives during the absence of their husbands--and this made him to be very much regarded by the honest burghers of the city."
Moreover, there was now entering into Virginia conditions a sort of feudality, less in theory than in fact. There was much to recall the life of the old feudal baron. There was the same dependence upon the household for the necessaries and many of the luxuries of life; in the families of the great planters, such as Colonel Byrd of Westover, --whose daughter, Evelyn Byrd, was the pearl of Virginia ladies in her day, but died of a broken heart before she had grown past her first maturity,--there was manufacture of the raw materials into the finished product, under the eye of the mistress of the house. Slavery had by this time become an established feature of Virginia society, and it was at its best in results. The slaves answered in conditions to the feudal servitors; they were retainers in a way, and they were also the workmen of the home. They made shoes and rough clothing, and they performed all the household tasks which were not strictly within the province of the chatelaine. The field hands raised tobacco; and it was with this commodity that the planter bought the silks and laces which clothed his wife and daughters when they appeared en grande tenue. But, though thus the lady of the manor had her duties in the training of her household servants, in the supervision of the household tasks, and in the provision of certain cates and other dainties which were to be made by no hands but hers, her general duty, that which occupied more of her time and thought than any other, was to be effective and satisfactory as a hostess.
It was thus in the southern colonies, with their greater wealth in servants and money and their consequently greater refinement, that there first appeared the type of American woman as she was a little later to be known throughout the land; but the coming of refinement and its accompaniment, modishness, was not long confined to the Virginias. Before the ending of the later colonial period and the beginnings of the days of the Revolution, there were to be found refinement and modishness in Massachusetts as in Virginia; but it was long before an equal amount of luxury was there displayed. In the North the same distinction of station was maintained between the "governor's lady" and the plebeian housewife that existed in the South between the lady of the plantation and her humbler sister of the hut; but there were fewer spouses of governors and their social equals in the North than there were wives of planters in the South, and so the developing type of American lady began in Virginia and spread thence rather than adopted from without. But everywhere, in all sections of the country save indeed the undeveloped outskirts, where the wilderness was being forced back and concerning which we shall busy ourselves later, when the type of the pioneer was more distinctive--there was up-springing a different type from that of the settlers or the early colonists. The American woman was ceasing to be the co-worker with her husband in matters of the hands and was gradually taking her rightful place as the director rather than the laborer. She was still the housewife; but her sphere was becoming enlarged and her ideas different. The wilderness had been pushed back from her door; she was as much a dweller in towns, even if they were not of very great dimensions or importance, as were her sisters across the great water. Her husband no longer wrestled with a hostile earth for a bare sustenance, but owned his houses and his lands and held himself among the prosperous ones of the world, so that his wife and his daughters were free from need of personal labor. Not that they were idle, these ladies who had blossomed from the earlier stem; we shall see that many of them were notable housewives, real helpmeets to their husbands; but they worked in a different manner from that of their grandmothers. And they differed from those excellent dames in many things, but above all in their respect for that impalpable but dominant thing called Fashion; and so they began to lose their individuality and take on the bearing and ways of the cosmopolitan type of women.
As a consequence of the introduction of luxury as a recognized condition of the American household of wealth and refinement, there came about a gradual change in the type of the sections which resulted in a levelling of the type of the whole land and its adaptation to European standards. That subtle influence of fashion permeated the land from north to south--there was then no east or west--and brought all the severed types under one strait rule. No longer could the dame of the Puritans be distinguished by outer guise or even by her customs and manners from her of the Cavaliers, while the intermediate woman, she of the settlement erstwhile known as Manhattan, on her part came forward with the rest to the goal of identity. There were more women of fashion in Virginia and Maryland than in Massachusetts or Connecticut; but the type was the same, and a man might travel from Williamsburg to Boston, stopping on his way at Annapolis, Philadelphia, and New York, and find no considerable difference between the woman who sped him at the outset and the woman who greeted him at the end of his journey,--at least as far as the eye and ear could note. From Madame Berkeley to Madame Phips was no step at all. The gracious dame of the period, stately in silks and satins and brocade, was as easy to find at one end of the country as at the other; the "toasts" were just as lovely, if not quite so plentiful, in Boston as in Williamsburg. But all this gain, as is the inevitable law, was at the expense of compensating loss. Refinement and elegance had come to be the inheritance of the American woman, but at the cost and loss of individuality. There had come into existence a type which was neither Puritan nor Cavalier nor Dutch, but American; though a universal type, it was not a distinctive one, as had been the others. The word "American" had come to have a meaning of universality as applied to the women of this country, and was yet to have a more inclusive signification; but the passing of marked sectional differences had also brought with it the doing away as well with that subtle thing which we term individuality. As distinguished from her sisters of that country which was still termed "mother," though so soon to be encountered in bitter hatred, the American woman had lost definition and personality.
We have now come to the period in our story when there will be no longer distinction between the woman of the North and her sister in the South in the things which have thus far kept them apart in type. They will always preserve certain racial, climatic, and inherited traits peculiar to their respective sections; but they will be none the less in mass the women of America. Even when we shall be forced to record the great dissension which separated our country into two nations and accentuated all the sectional traits of its womankind as of its men there will be but different expressions of womanhood to record, not different types,--different conditions of existence, having effect of direction, not differing spirits and impulses. It was in the days before the darkening of the shadow of the Revolution that the American woman, untrammelled by conditions of residence or descent, began to appear as a type. She was very admirable, but she was no longer unique.
CHAPTER VII
REVOLUTIONARY DAYS
Though the present chapter in its title purports to tell of the days of the war for independence, in reality this is but an arbitrary heading, for we shall approach those days from the distance of a quarter of a century. Not that there were at the beginning of this period any distinct limits of demarcation from the days immediately preceding it: the contrary was the case. But it is needful for the chronicler that he have some point of departure in each of his progressive steps toward the goal of to-day. The opening period of this chapter, therefore, is about the year 1750. There are reasons for this, apart from the arbitrary whim of the historian. Though not exactly in the year dividing the century, yet about that time there began to be manifested a spirit of American nationality such as had never before been shown. For the first time the country began to appear to itself in the aspect of something more than an aggregation of colonies, and to examine itself whether it were not in truth a nation. From the Canadas to the Carolinas there began to be a feeling of cohesion, a tardy and half-awake recognition of unity of interests and race. There had come about a much-fractured and thinly stretched chain of communication and continuity from north to south, and this was having the effect of binding together the scattered settlements in a feeling of union, which was in a way effectual in the shaping of the history of women in America.
There were still--there ever must be--differences of manners and customs and even of thought imposed by the geographical dwellings of the women of the various sections; but there was withal a certain continuity and persistence of type, and this was gathering strength to survive the coming days of storm. During years of stress, in the face of treason to itself at the hands of its own daughters as well as of foreign foes, it did so survive and became the American woman of the early days of the republic; but there was much of vicissitude to be borne first--vicissitude not always recognized by the chroniclers of those days, for it was rather of manner than of contest. It was the old question of the survival of the fittest, with European complexity and American simplicity contending for the prize; and the battle, though won for the best, was not without compromise.