Second. In the Sub-Department of Wool, in addition to being carders, spinners, and weavers, women were dyers, handling all the color resources of the times, boiling poke-berries in alum to get a crimson, using sassafras for a yellow or an orange, and producing a black by boiling the fabric with field-sorrel and then boiling it again with logwood and copperas.
We pass over, as trivial, the making of flax and wool stuffs into articles of actual use. We say nothing about the transformation of cloth into clothes, table-covers, napkins; nothing about the weaving of yarn on little lap looms into the narrow fabrics for hair-laces, glove-ties, belts, garters, and hat-bands; nothing about the incessant knitting of yarn into mittens and stockings; nothing about a host of other details. They were for idle moments.
Sweet domestic days, when girls stayed at home and helped their mothers and let father support the family!
It seems as if even Rip Van Winkle, in his most shiftless mood, ought to have been able to support a large number of daughters under such conditions.
Does it astonish you that they matured young? There, all about them, from babyhood, were the basic processes by which the world was sheltered, clothed, and fed. Those processes were numerous but simple. Boys and girls observed them, absorbed them, through eyes, through finger-tips, all through those early years when eyes and finger-tips are the nourishing points of the intellect.
John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, was married at seventeen. His parents were not only willing, but aiding and abetting. They considered him a man.
Mercy Otis, in Revolutionary days, in Massachusetts, the wife of the patriot, James Warren, and Abigail Smith, the wife of the future president, John Adams, both married before twenty. A study of their lives will show that at that age they were mature.
To-day, in Boston, a woman of twenty is considered so immature that many of the hospitals will not admit her even to her preliminary training for the trade of nurse till she has added at least three years more to her mental development.
Who has thus prolonged infancy; who has thus postponed maturity?
No individual.
Science has done part of it.