ed Quakers, Catholics, and even
the Church of England; so Margaret found that she could read most easily
Quaker or "Popish" tracts as well as the Book of Common Prayer, but not
a word in the Bible or any Puritan work. What symptoms of the workings
of the devil could seem surer to a man of Mather's prejudices and
sympathies? Then again Margaret could not be prevailed upon to enter
Mather's study, and would scream and kick like a young donkey until she
was dragged by force into the room, when she would become calm and
assert that the devil had just fled from her in the form of a mouse,
unable to endure the presence of the sacred works which lined the walls.
Probably she had learned these things from the old dames of her native
village, with their remnants of Teutonic folklore; but the strange part
of the affair was that Cotton Mather, who tells us all these details,
had no doubt whatever of the genuineness of the possession. If the
accusers of Goody Glover were typical of the credulity and superstition
of their age, Margaret Goodwin, with her shrewd ability to make use of
the most salient tendencies and prejudices of her benefactor in order to
deceive him, was a type of a certain other aspect of Puritanism which
has not yet entirely died away--and never will as long as New England
possesses individuality of human product. So that even the minx who
fooled Cotton Mather to the top of his bent seems to be worthy of rescue
from obscurity in this retrospect of the path by which American women
have reached their present position and characteristics.

It may be objected to the women whose names appear in this chapter that
they were not typical New England women, but were only typical of phases
of New England life in the early days of the colonies. Whether or not
this allegation be just, we can assuredly learn from their stories and
characters much of the atmosphere in which lived the New England woman
of the greater part of the seventeenth century. She was at once a
product and a producer, a cause and an effect, of her environment. There
was constant action and reaction; she molded her time and her time
molded her. She lived, as we have seen, if we have rightly understood
that which we have read, in an atmosphere of religious turmoil and
energy, of purity of purpose and integrity of faith, and of the darkest
and most narrowing superstition. All these things acted mentally and
spiritually upon the woman of New England. They entere