those above the lowest classes in all three sections
could at least read, write, and keep accounts, and some few had dared to
reach out into the sphere of higher learning. That many realized their
intellectual poverty and deplored it is evident; how many more who kept
no diaries and left no letters hungered for culture we shall never know;
but the very longing of these colonial women is probably one of the main
causes of that remarkable movement for the higher education of American
women so noticeable in the earlier years of the nineteenth century.
Their smothered ambition undoubtedly gave birth to an intellectual
advance of women unequalled elsewhere in the world.

FOOTNOTES:

[43] Vol. I, p. 231.

[44] Vol. I, p. 161.

[45] Vol. I, p. 165.

[46] Vol. I, p. 344.

[47] _Letters of Abigail Adams_, p. 24.

[48] _Memoirs of an American Lady_, p. 27.

[49] Humphreys: _Catherine Schuyler_, p. 8.

[50] Smyth: _Writings of Ben Franklin_, Vol. III, p. 203.

[51] Smyth: _Writings of Ben Franklin_, Vol. III, p. 4.

[52] Ford: _Writings of Thomas Jefferson_, Vol. III. p. 345

[53] _Selections from Fithian's Writings_, Aug. 12, 1774.

[54] _American Nation Series, England in America_, p. 116.

[55] Vol. I, p. 299.

[56] Vol. I, p. 301.

[57] Vol. I, p. 311.

[58] _Institutional History of Virginia_, Vol. I, p. 454.

[59] Ravenel: _Eliza Pinckney_, p. 50.

[60] Ravenel: _Eliza Pinckney_, p. 51.

[61] Ravenel: _Eliza Pinckney_, p. 49.

[62] Turell: _Memoirs of Life and Death of Mrs. Jane Turell._

[63] _Letters of Abigail Adams_, p. 11.

[64] _Letters of Abigail Adams_, p. 9.

[65] Grant: _Memoirs of an American Lady_, p. 136.

[66] Grant: _Memoirs of an American Lady_, p. 267.

[67] _Letters of Abigail Adams_, p. 401.

[68] Smyth: _Writings of Franklin_, Vol. I, p. 344.

[69] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 344.

[70] Smyth: Vol. III, p. 431.

[71] Smyth: Vol. V, p. 345.

[72] Quoted in Earle's _Child Life in Colonial Days_, p. 113.

[73] Humphreys; _Catherine Schuyler_, p. 75.

[74] Brooks: _Dames and Daughters of Colonial Days_, p. 199.

CHAPTER III

COLONIAL WOMAN AND THE HOME

_I. The Charm of the Colonial Home_

After all, it is in the home that the soul of the colonial woman is
fully revealed. We may say in all truthfulness that there never was a
time when the home wielded a greater influence than during the colonial
period of American history. For the home was then indeed the ce