USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 3 > Part 29
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INEQUALITIES IN SOCIAL LIFE
As late as 1784 at Easton, an inland town not thirty miles from Boston, Olive Pool and her husband William Read, the young parson, had to settle themselves and live on one hundred pounds (later eighty) the year. In 1784 John Adams in France was serving as United States treaty commissioner, and Abigail was writing home to Massachu- setts from the beautiful chateau at Auteuil, which the com- missioner had been obliged to lease as official residence:
"Thus, with seven servants and having a charwoman upon occasion, we may possibly make out to keep house; with less we should be hooted at and ridiculed and could not entertain any company."
John and Abigail Adams were never what the world dubs society folk, yet belonged to what today would be termed the intellectuals. There were servants in the house at Braintree; but Mrs. Adams. might rise at five in the morning and skim the cream or "in imitation of his Britannic Majesty, kindle her own fire." During the war, in her effort
Courtesy of Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities MRS. JOHN ADAMS (Abigail Smith)
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EDUCATION OF WOMEN
to economize when not only the responsibility of the house- hold but of running the farm rested solely upon her, she doubtless worked harder than any manual laborer upon her place. She spun and wove with her maids, and together they clothed the household.
Another significant fact in the study of these women is that while Massachusetts society remained stratified during the period, the personnel within the strata was continuously shifting. Nowhere is the social side more clearly illustrated than in Massachusetts. Jameson says that more than half of the upper classes in New England were Tory, and during the period either voluntarily left or were harried out of the land. The Revolution doubtless brought privation and sacrifice in some form to the majority of the patriot women, though there was some compensation in economic and polit- ical power and their concomitant social prestige. Daring privateers made fortunes at sea and founded families domi- nant in the Commonwealth; and middle class people moved up into confiscated Tory estates.
Tradition says that the lively Anna Winslow at nineteen died of tuberculosis. Anna Winslow's father remained loyal to the King and fled from Massachusetts. In 1780 Sophy Parkman married Elijah Brigham, whose sole fortune was his Dartmouth education. Sophy's father asked him where he intended to live. He replied, "Here, if you should like it." The parson replied that he would do what was in his power for him. The parson saw before him a man of brain and character who in time became Judge Brigham and member of Congress. Sophy's early death is an exam- ple of the fate which two of her young married sisters shared with her before the advance of medical science.
EDUCATION OF WOMEN
The education of girls was exasperatingly neglected in Massachusetts in this period. Abigail Adams wrote in 1778 that it had been fashionable "to ridicule feminine learning," and in her old age she said that in her youth "female edu- cation in the best families went no further than writing and arithmetic; and in some few and rare instances music and
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dancing." No girls were admitted to the Boston public schools till 1789.
Private and separate schools for girls were not uncom- mon. In Boston at least two prominent schoolmasters, in charge of public schools for boys, also conducted private writing schools which girls as well as boys from the best Boston families attended. Between 1761 and 1765 Nathaniel Holmes paid John Tileston for the tuition of Sarah Eell; and Mrs. Bright for that of Elizabeth Ingersoll. A decade later Anna Winslow and her friends were attending Master Holbrook's writing school in Boston. Perhaps Caleb Bing- ham's private school opened in 1784 was the first separate school for girls. In Salem one day in 1770, Daniel Hop- kins opened for instruction in reading, writing and arithmetic a private school which seven-year-old Peggy Holbrook entered.
Meanwhile some of the smaller towns were more friendly to girls than were the larger places. The Weston records show that back in 1768, the town "voted to have five women's schools kept three months in the next season and to Begin aboute the middle of May next." Boys were so busy on the farms that girls perforce had a chance. Un- fortunately summer schools were not permanent, for the town book of 1770 read: "To know the minds of the town whether they will have five women schools in the summer and it passed in the negative." In Holden in May 1772, a vote to appropriate money for "a woman's school" failed to carry. But five years earlier Hingham feminists carried a vote "to build a girls' schoolhouse," and as far back as 1745, "thirty pounds old Tenor money" was voted at Bristol "to encourage ye keeping of womens schools." Though the Dedham books do not record when schools were opened to both sexes, Carlos Slafter thinks that probably long before 1762 girls shared some of the school privileges of Ded- ham boys.
Even when girls were taught with boys, separate educa- tional ideals prevailed. Women were the weaker sex and that was considered to mean mentally as well as physically. Latin was beyond their sphere; and some folk "considered arithmetic an almost useless subject for women to under-
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stand." It was the age when letter writing was one of the arts, and in it Massachusetts women of the upper classes, at least, were encouraged to excel. No one with the instinct for literature may read Anna Winslow's diary without mar- veling at her literary gift and her joy in literary expres- sion. Yet the keeping of a diary was regarded as one of her educational tasks, strictly supervised by her temporary guardian. Caleb Bingham's Young Lady's Accidence, which he prepared for his school, quickly became the outstanding text, and a favorite task was a formal letter to a parent, ad- dressed as "Hon'd Madam." Such effusions were apt to be but pious ejaculations, as were the samplers, another popular form used to teach a girl how to know the alphabet and how to express herself with ease and no injury to the brain.
In a farming town like Sudbury the only textbooks used were the Bible, Dillingsworth's spelling book, the Primer, and the Psalter. The master set copies, and for his mathe- matical pupils wrote down rules and sums which they worked out on pieces of birch bark.
SPECIAL SCHOOLS
The minuet, like letter writing, was an art that had to be studied. As far back as 1739, the selectmen of Salem per- mitted Charles Bradstreet to teach dancing in connection with French "so long as he keeps good order." Other towns followed suit and in Anna Winslow's youth, Master Wil- liam Turner, the fashionable dancing master of Boston, did not lack for pupils. Still dancing as a part of one's educa- tion was restricted to the upper classes.
In John Adams' diary appears what was probably a typical discussion among young married intellectuals on the value of dancing. Abigail's elder sister, Mary Cranch, announced that since she had attended commencement this year (at Harvard, of course), she quite altered her mind about danc- ing schools. Her husband assented, and remarked that all who learned to dance were so absorbed by it that they could not study. Finally the two agreed that if they decided to have their son prepared for college they would not send him to dancing school. Nor would they let their daughters go. John Adams declared that he had never known a good
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dancer good for anything else; that Otis, Sewell and Paine danced, but none of them shone that way. Yet some in- fluence withheld him from forbidding his sons and daughters to go to dancing school. His children, Nabby and John Quincy, learned to dance.
In a plain home like the Parkmans' the singing school was possibly a girl's chief diversion. It may be that eight- een year old Sophy Parkman handed her lover her dearest treasure when, as she notes in her diary, she gave him her singing book, "To Pric some tunes in it while I was gone to school." Leicester in 1767 or 1768 had a public singing school; but in 1778, Sophy in Westborough had to scrape up eighteen shillings ten pence to pay Mr. Badcock for her attendance at his school.
What Sophy knew of sewing she doubtless learned at home or in the town school, which may have offered, like the Ded- ham school in 1780, sampler making, patchwork, and em- broidery. More affluent "Young ladies under twelve" and over, went to private sewing schools profusely advertised, where sewing often developed into an art that produced tapestries like "the wedding party in Boston in 1756." Even the intellectual Smiths dabbled in these arts. "Arrived with Abigail at my dear Brother Cranch's about eight," records John Adams in his early married life. "Drank tea, and are all very happy. Saw and heard the ladies talk about ribbon, catgut and Paris net, riding hoods, cloth, silk and laces."
Though girls learned to knit in the Ipswich school, Dr. Elizabeth Dexter found only one teacher in Massachusetts who specified spinning in her curriculum. The poorer girls, obliged later to clothe their households, undoubtedly picked up spinning and weaving from their mothers. Sophy Park- man was an expert. But wealthier girls were not always so accomplished, for at least one group of young ladies of "high rank," under the auspices of the Sons and Daugh- ters of Liberty, were given a regular course of instruction in how to spin flax.
ABIGAIL SMITH
Though Abigail Smith was a delicate child who was kept at home and missed most of the limited educational advan-
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tages of the girl of the day, her brilliant mind seized oppor- tunities for self-education. Born in 1744, she came of a long line to whom ideas and discussion were as the breath of their nostrils. She grew up in her father's library, which was fairly comprehensive for that day. She was one of an alert group whose isolated lives, because of poor public trans- portation and slim pocketbooks, forced them back upon intel- lectual resources. Before she married John Adams, she seemingly found her chief diversion in composing letters. Her amazing precocity, her thinking for herself, appear in a letter which, at the age of sixteen, she wrote to a young married woman who somewhat coolly replied : "We are often disappointed when we set our minds upon that which is to yield us great happiness." Abigail countered with spirit : "I know it too well already. Daily experience teaches me that truth. And now let me ask you, my friend, whether you do not think that many of our disappointments and much of our unhappiness arise from our forming false notions of things and persons. We strangely impose upon ourselves; we create a fair land of happiness. Fancy is fruitful and promises fair, but, like the dog in the fable, we catch at a shadow, and when we find the disappointment, we are vexed not with ourselves, who are really the impos- tors, but with the poor innocent thing or person of whom we have formed such strange ideas."
This mind in which imagination and the thinking power innate to it had been stimulated by a solitary childhood, the freedom of a parson's library, and contact with her intellec- tual and cultured elders, had the good fortune to be thrown in intimate association in its still formative period with that of a college-trained man seven years her senior.
Abigail Smith's own natural taste early led her into the field of literature. She was passionately fond of all of Richardson's works, "even to his Pamela." She wrote when a married woman: "I believe Richardson has done more to embellishing the present age and teaching the talent of letter writing than any other modern I can name." The first English novelist to recognize intellectual aspirations in women, he made books and pens his heroines' most cher- ished possessions. In part from Richardson, more from her
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own eager impressionable mind, ease, grace, lightness, above all, sincerity, came to distinguish her style.
MERCY WARREN
Only when she corresponded with Mercy Warren, the notable literary woman of the day, did Abigail mount eight- eenth century stilts. Mercy never learned to walk without them. Nevertheless, Mercy, in spite of her satires, her his- tory, her poems, was the intellectual inferior of Abigail. Mercy, seventeen years Abigail's senior, was a professional writer and Revolutionary agitator. Abigail, sensitive, ro- mantic, imaginative, with a keen mind and a capacity for emotion as bounteous as the sea, and artificially curtailed by her century and by her birth in a New England parson- age, found wings for her spirit in her immortal letters.
This literary rival was an unusual woman, remembered by posterity because of her character, her patriotism, her con- temporary influence. She was the intellectual comrade and stimulator of Revolutionary leaders: of her brother James Otis; of her husband General James Warren, to whom John Adams unbosomed himself. She corresponded with John Adams, and to some extent with Sam Adams, Jefferson, Dickinson, Gerry, and Knox. It is said that at eleven years of age she studied with the tutor who prepared her brilliant brother for Harvard. Like Abigail Adams, she was prob- ably self-taught and spurred on by contact with able minds around her.
In time, Mercy Warren became a notable example of the mediocre phenomenon over whom contemporaries lose their heads. They read avidly "The Adulator," printed in Bos- ton in 1773, "The Retreat," and "The Group," which ap- peared in 1775. These inferior fragments of political plays, which excoriated Hutchinson and other leading royalists, filled the over-partisan patriots with mad joy. They read her unpoetical poems and her later didactic dramas. Some even waded through her History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution in three volumes. She allowed her mind, like the bound foot of a Chinese woman, to be distorted by the artificialities of her age. To- day her works are literary fossils.
Original by Copley
Courtesy of Hon. Winslow Warren, Dedham MERCY OTIS (Mrs. James Warren)
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EDUCATED WOMEN
OTHER EDUCATED WOMEN
Many Massachusetts women with literary aspirations taught themselves through the pursuit of good literature and practice in writing. More than one testified to a knowledge of Richardson by naming her infant daughter Pamela or Clarissa. President Quincy's wife relates that a Revolution- ary lady who visited her father's house at Stockbridge real- ized her ideas of Mrs. Shirley in Sir Charles Grandison. Anna Winslow's aunt found Dr. Pemberton of the New Brick Church unpleasantly reminding her of Fielding's Par- son Trullibar. Twelve-year-old Anna received a New Year's gift of the History of Joseph Andrews-abbreviated, not expurgated-and this young person recorded in her journal that she "laugh'd enough." On the same day she notes that she "read part of Pilgrim's Progress." From her cousin she borrowed Gulliver's Travels, abbreviated, and her literary sense constantly reveals itself in Biblical allusions.
Many in addition to Mercy Warren expressed themselves in poems. For example, Elizabeth Craft, who married a Princeton graduate, Caleb White of Brookline, wrote frequently in verse. Mary Flagg, of Boston, kept a common- place book which she filled with recipes for cakes and pud- dings, selections from old English poets, and her own origi- nal verse. Anna Foster wrote poems on sermons she heard, on the popularity of the tavern on Saturday night, on the Lisbon earthquake, the vanity of this world, the safe deliv- ery of a child, the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1776. Abigail Smith was no more alone in her taste for Dr. Young's Night Thoughts, for Dr. Isaac Watts, Rollins' History of Rome, Pope, Swift, than she was for Richardson's novels. But the poetical wonder of Massachusetts was the negro, Phillis Wheatley. Born in the jungle and for years a slave, she died in 1784, not yet thirty, in poverty but famous. Of her poems at least three editions have appeared.
Sarah Sartell Prentice, not too old to have been a Daugh- ter of Liberty, educated herself in theology and was a pro- tagonist of religious freedom. The mother of ten children, she is recorded as strong-willed and determined and able to quote any part of the Bible. She came under the influence of Whitefield, so fascinating to middle-class American
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women, and revolted from the orthodox church, with the result that her husband mournfully and helplessly wrote in the church book: "She is a dissenter from the Constitution and doctrine of the New England Churches." She finally won him to support religious freedom, even though conver- sion cost him his church.
Equally vigorous but different was John Adams' friend, Hannah Quincy. When the two were hardly more than boy and girl, and Abigail scarcely out of the nursery, John recorded in his diary :
"O- [meaning Hannah] makes observations on actions, characters and events in Pope's Homer, Milton, Pope's Poems and plays, romances, etc. that she reads, and asks questions about them in company-'What do you think of Helen? What do you think of Hector', etc. 'What character do you like best? Did you wish the plot had been discovered in Venice Preserved'. These are questions that prove a , thinking mind."
ANTI-TEA DEMONSTRATIONS (1767 - 1770)
Five women merchants of Salem united with the men in an organized protest against the obnoxious Stamp Act. But women in large numbers seem first to have been stirred by the Townshend Tax Acts. In 1767 Sam Adams and his followers were able to rouse not only men but women to defy the measures. Boston, Easton, and Ipswich speedily acted through town meeting to ban tea-drinking and stop the importation of British manufactures; the women were quick to endorse their action. Both the married and the unmarried in Boston hastened to take the pledge. By Jan- uary 31, 1770, some three hundred mistresses of families had bound themselves to "totally abstain from tea (sick- ness excepted) not only in our respective families, but we will absolutely refuse it if it should be offered to us on any occasion whatsoever." "One hundred and twenty-six young ladies of Boston" signed a like agreement. Of course there were whispers around of another sort of action. In Ips- wich, for instance, it was rumored that Captain Farley's wife persisted "in slipping in to neighbor Dame Heard's and par- taking of the forbidden thing." Among the patriots "Lib- erty Tea" made of native herbs had rushed into fashion.
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DAUGHTERS OF LIBERTY (1768 - 1770)
As early as April, 1768, leading Massachusetts women were declaring homespun of domestic make the fabric of the hour. In Boston and other towns they organized their sex of all ages into Daughters of Liberty who met in groups to spin and weave at the local parsonage. The results were flattering. On April 20, 1768, it is recorded that the young ladies of Newburyport at the end of their busy day pre- sented to Mrs. Parsons, a parson's wife, 270 skeins of good yarn and they drank tea made from ribwort. At Ipswich, in Chebacco Parish, June 21, 1769, seventy girls, ranging from thirteen years of age into the unknown, in a ten-hour day spun 440 knots of linen yarn, carded and spun 730 knots of cotton yarn, and 600 knots of tow, which made a total of 177 ten-knot skeins "all good yarn." Sometimes, as in Linebrook Parish, interest and achievement were further stimulated by making the occasion a spinning match. Perhaps a parson's wife, out of gratitude, or possibly out of benev- olence, entertained thoughts of other kinds of matches and invited young men at the end of the working day to join the spinners. What if the parson did upset her schemes? "Lud!" some eighteenth-century miss might exclaim, "the parson is going to give us another discourse!" The parson may have been another Wiberd, in whose company John Adams, aged twenty-three, found that he could learn about those eternally interesting subjects, "human nature, human life, love, courtship, marriage."
These busy bees stimulated production and brought neigh- bors together. They stirred enthusiasm and helped to stim- ulate the patriotism so necessary to accomplish the war work that must be done day by day in the home. An example of patriotic industry is the hamlet of Middleton, where in ninety dwellings were worked between eighty and ninety looms. From January 1769 to January 1770, a total of 20,522 yards was produced, more than forty yards for each man, woman and. child inhabitant. It is probable that women's work may have stimulated the merchants to sign the non-importation agree- ment of 1769.
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ANTI-TEA LADIES (1773 - 1774)
Three years of prosperous and comfortable conservative relations elapsed. Then another blunder of the British Ministry, Lord North's Tea Act of 1773, renewed the con- troversy. The first Continental Congress recommended that, barring a few excepted articles, the colonists should pur- chase nothing from Great Britain.
Again the Massachusetts women hastened to cooperate with the men. "I hope," wrote Mrs. Cushing, "there are none of us but would sooner wrap ourselves in sheep and goat skins than buy English goods of a people who have insulted us in such a scandalous manner." Mercy Warren accepting a conceit, which John Adams offered her, that in "the late frolic among the sea Nymphs and Goddesses there being a scarcity of Nectar and Ambrosia among the Celes- tials of the Sea, Neptune" had "determined to substitute Hyson and Congo, and for some of the inferior Divinities Bohea," wrote in her most polished and artificial style a long poem on the Tea Party entitled, "The Squabble of the Sea Nymphs: or the Sacrifice of the Tuscararoes."
Even her stilted phrasing could not stifle her patriotic ardor when she spoke for women in her verses: "To the Hon J. Winthrop, Esq., who on the American determination, in 1774, to suspend all commerce with Britain (except for the Real Necessaries of life) requested a poetical List of the Articles the ladies might Comprise under that Head." To Abigail Adams, tea was the weed of slavery; and even on the frontier her husband found that his hostess firmly re- fused to refresh him with a dish of tea, even though the tea had been "honestly smuggled" and "paid no duties." Thereafter he drank coffee daily, and wrote Abigail gloom- ily: "Tea must be universally renounced, and I must be weaned and the sooner the better."
At Salem tea-antagonism ran so high that, when it got abroad that Mr. James Bowler was hoarding tea, a group of women hurried to his house, demanded the tea, and de- stroyed it. Gossip said that some of these merry wives stuffed as much of the tea as they could get into long "pockets" which they carried, and smuggled it home for private consumption. This may be true. But enough Amer-
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ican women were determined and consistent in their hostility to what they deemed "British Tyranny", to change the Americans from a tea-drinking to a coffee-drinking people.
All available spinning wheels and weaving looms were now dragged out as in 1768. Both men and women were emotionally roused. Even after blood had been spilled at Lexington and Concord, there was no movement for separa- tion. Though Congress declared war, it sought only to organize resistance against what it considered Lord North's unconstitutional acts. Tories, however, were growing nerv- ous; and one day in May the beautiful Lady Frankland, attended by a guard of six soldiers, might have been seen passing into Boston with her servants in charge of one chest, three beds and bedding, six wethers, two pigs, one small keg of pickled tongues, some hay and three bags of corn. She opened the Frankland mansion, and a month later, ardent Tory that she was, nursed with her own hands British soldiers who fell "in the tall grass of Bunker Hill."
WOMEN IN BOSTON (1775 - 1776)
No doubt many a Tory lady enjoyed with a good con- science the occupation commanded by his Majesty's most distinguished officers. Tradition says that even the young patriot beauty, Dorothy Quincy, confessed to a thrill over an Earl who slept in a tent among his soldiers encamped on Boston Common; and she evidently enjoyed being waked at dawn by Lord Percy's ringing voice as he drilled his troops through the winter of 1774-1775. More effete Britishers occupied former great houses. General Gage had Mrs. Han- cock's house; General Burgoyne, Mr. Bowdoin's. At one time the General was occupying Mr. Sam Quincy's house, and a lady who lived opposite declared she "saw raw meat cut and hacked upon her mahogany tables, and her superb damask curtain and cushions exposed to the rain as if they were of no value."
No doubt with enormous pride the Misses Byles paraded the common with General Howe and Lord Percy and listened to the serenade which my lord ordered his regimental band to play especially in their honor. They were staunch Tories, daughters of the 'rosy-cheeked, curly-haired Dr. Matthew
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