Woman's work in America

by Unknown

To fill the pages of two centuries, blank, in America, as to female education beyond the merest rudiments of learning, let Abigail, wife of President John Adams, who was descended from the most illustrious colonial families, the Shepards, Nortons, and Quincys, sketch for us the intellectual opportunities for girls of her own rank in her time. Born in 1744, she wrote, in 1817, when past threescore and ten:

“The only chance for much intellectual improvement in the female sex was to be found in the families of the educated class, and in occasional intercourse with the learned of the day. Whatever of useful instruction was received in the practical conduct of life came from maternal lips: and what of farther mental development, depended more upon the eagerness with which the casual teachings of daily conversation were treasured up, than upon any labor expended purposely to promote it. Female education in the best families went no farther than writing and arithmetic, and, in some few and rare instances, music and dancing.”

Although at this time the number of post-offices in the country probably did not exceed half a hundred, Mrs. Adams notes a great letter-writing propensity in her circle. “These letters deserve notice,” says her biographer, “only as they furnish a general idea of the tastes and pursuits of the day, and show the evident influence upon the writers which study of “The Spectator” and of the poets had exerted.” This appears in the train of thought and structure of language, as in trifles of taste for quotation, and for fictitious signatures. “Calliope” and “Myra,” “Aspasia” and “Aurelia,” have effectually disguised their true names from the eyes of younger generations. Miss Smith’s signature appears to have been “Diana,” a name which she dropped after her marriage, without losing the fancy that prompted its selection.

Her letters written during the Revolution show clearly enough the tendency of her own thoughts and feelings in the substitute she then adopted of “Portia.”

The young ladies of Massachusetts, in the last century, were certainly readers even though only self-taught, and their taste was not for the feeble and nerveless sentiment or the frantic passion of our day, but was derived from the deepest wells of English literature. The superb flowering of native mental gifts in many women of the last part of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth centuries, under so slight stimulus of educational advantage, would almost force upon us the theory of Descartes, that “in order to improve the mind we ought less to learn than to contemplate”; and lead us to accept the dictum of Huxley, that “all the time we are using our plain common sense we are at once scientists and artists.”

Rev. William Woodbridge, a descendant of Rev. Jonathan Edwards, and for fifty years an honored educator, wrote, in the latter part of his life, to a correspondent: “You inquire how so many of the females of New England, during the latter part of the last century, acquired that firmness, and energy, and excellence of character for which they have been so justly distinguished, while the advantages of school education were so limited. The only answer is that it is not the amount of knowledge, but the nature of the knowledge, and, still more, the manner in which it is used to form character. Natural logic, the self-taught art of thinking, was the guard and guide of the female mind. The first of Watts’s five methods of internal improvement, ‘The attentive notice of every instructive fact and occurrence,’ was exemplified in practice. Newspapers were taken in a few families; books were scarce but freely lent; the Scriptures were much read; and, as for time, ‘where there is a will there is a way.’”

Since the women of that day left almost no record of their thought in print, the biography of Mrs. Adams, already quoted, may be called upon to illustrate the intellectual and moral characteristics attributed to them. Among the New England women of the early part of this century who are still remembered by the present generation, there was a noteworthy number who, in vigor of intellect and strength of character, might truly be called her peers.

While Mr. Adams was in Europe (from 1780) as Commissioner from the United States, Mrs. Adams was managing the family property, at a time of depreciation of paper money. Speaking of this period Mr. Charles Francis Adams says: “Her letters are remarkable because they display the readiness with which she could devote herself to the most opposite duties, and the cheerful manner in which she could accommodate herself to the difficulties of the times. She is a farmer, cultivating the land and discussing the weather and crops; a merchant, reporting prices current and the rates of exchange, and directing the making up of invoices; a politician, speculating upon the probabilities of peace or war, and a mother, writing the most exalted sentiments to her son. All of these pursuits she adopts together; some from choice, the rest from the necessity of the case; and in all she appears equally well.”

The complete sympathy of interest between Mrs. Adams and her distinguished husband in “seeking for political truth in its fundamental principles,” as Mr. Adams is said to have done, appears in her letters, and it may be questioned whether, barring the consideration of sex, the term “statesmanlike” might not apply to the views of both.

Just a month before the resolution declaring the independence of the colonies was offered in the Continental Congress by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia and seconded by John Adams of Massachusetts Mrs. Adams wrote to her husband, under date of May 7, 1776.