First. In the Subdepartment of Flax, after heckling the flax with combs of increasing degrees of fineness till the fibers lay pretty straight, after spinning it into yarn on her spinning wheel, after reeling the yarn off into skeins, after “bucking” the skeins in hot lye through many changes of water, and after using shuttle and loom to weave the stuff into cloth, the home woman of those days had to accomplish 60 some twenty subsequent processes of bucking, rinsing, possing, drying, and bleaching before the cloth was ready for use.
Second. In the Subdepartment of Wool, in addition to being carders, spinners, and weavers, women were dyers, handling all the color resources of the times, boiling pokeberries 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 narrow fabrics used for hair laces, glove ties, belts, garters, and hatbands; nothing about the incessant knitting of yarn into mittens and stockings. Those details 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 61 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, during all those early years when eyes and finger-tips are the nourishing points of the intellect. Does it astonish you that they were soon ready for the duties of adult life?
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, 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 not only thought to be grown up but were so.
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 62 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?