carriages hunting
pleasure in the streets in routes, assemblies, & forgetting that they
have left it behind them in their nurseries & compare them with our own
country women occupied in the tender and tranquil amusements of domestic
life, and confess that it is a comparison of Americans and angels."[120]

And Franklin writes thus to his wife from London in 1758: "You are very
prudent not to engage in party Disputes. Women never should meddle with
them except in Endeavors to reconcile their Husbands, Brothers, and
Friends, who happen to be of contrary Sides. If your Sex can keep cool,
you may be a means of cooling ours the sooner, and restoring more
speedily that social Harmony among Fellow Citizens that is so desirable
after long and bitter Dissension."[121] Again, he writes thus to his
sister: "Remember that modesty, as it makes the most homely virgin
amiable and charming, so the want of it infallably renders the perfect
beauty disagreeable and odious. But when that brightest of female
virtues shines among other perfections of body and mind in the same
mind, it makes the woman more lovely than angels."[122]

What seems rather strange to the twentieth century American, the women
of colonial days apparently agreed with such views. So few avenues of
activity outside the home had ever been open to them that they may have
considered it unnatural to desire other forms of work; but, be that as
it may, there are exceedingly few instances in those days, of neglect of
home for the sake of a career in public work. Abigail Adams frequently
expressed it as her belief that a woman's first business was to help
her husband, and that a wife should desire no greater pleasure. "To be
the strength, the inmost joy, of a man who within the conditions of his
life seems to you a hero at every turn--there is no happiness more
penetrating for a wife than this."[123]

Women like Eliza Pinckney, Mercy Warren, Jane Turell, Margaret Winthrop,
Catherine Schuyler, and Elizabeth Hamilton most certainly believed this,
and their lives and the careers of their husbands testify to the success
of such womanly endeavors. Mercy Warren was a writer of considerable
talent, author of some rather widely read verse, and of a History of the
Revolution; but such literary efforts did not hinder her from doing her
best for husband and children; while Eliza Pinckney, with all her wide
reading, study of philosophy, agricultural investigations, experiments
in the pro