d into her life
and character; she was energized as well as controlled and directed by
them. There was of course no steadfastness, no persistence, of one
straitly-hewn type; but there was an ever-recurring tendency, a gradual
advance along the line of least resistance. Many were the faults of the
Puritan woman: she was cold, she was hard, she was fanatical, she was
credulous; but she was virtuous, she was truthful,--in higher sense than
mere veracity,--she was faithful,--in deeper sense than mere
constancy,--and she was strong with a strength that came to her from
resistance to the influences which sought her downfall. And she was
deep--deep with the depth of the sea and the forests and the universal
spirit of the new land that had made her its child.

She was sternly repressed. Subjection to her husband was a rule of the
Puritan woman's life, accepted by her as rightful and even necessary.
For it she found Biblical authority, and that was sufficient for her in
all things. Yet, though literally and not merely nominally under the
rule of her husband, the Puritan woman never thought of herself as a
slave, either to a man or a system. Privately she might be a scold and a
shrew,--if she had not the fear of the ducking-stool or the scold's
bridle before her eyes,--but publicly she was under tutelage, and
respected herself, even as she was respected, none the less on that
account. It was a matter of time and place; it was a self-imposed
condition rather than the survival of barbarism, as it is considered
to-day by the theorists of femininity.

So, at the close of the early period of colonization, when the land was
beginning to thrill with the first stirrings of nationality, the Puritan
woman, not yet a type though strongly individual, stood looking into the
future as one that sees but does not fear the coming time of need and
responsibility. No longer English, not yet American, she stood a
transition product, but one that was to find result in a permanency that
would lay the strongest impress upon the nation that was to arise in
after years.

Meanwhile, there was advancing in another portion of our country--a
portion so remote from New England as practically to be a different land
in all but ties of birth--a feminine civilization of a type widely
different from that of Massachusetts and Connecticut. The Northern
culture was strongly and preeminently democratic in its origins; that of
the South, before the close of the peri