een the lady of the plantation
and her humbler sister of the hut; but there were fewer spouses of
governors and their social equals in the North than there were wives of
planters in the South, and so the developing type of American lady began
in Virginia and spread thence rather than adopted from without. But
everywhere, in all sections of the country save indeed the undeveloped
outskirts, where the wilderness was being forced back and concerning
which we shall busy ourselves later, when the type of the pioneer was
more distinctive--there was up-springing a different type from that of
the settlers or the early colonists. The American woman was ceasing to
be the co-worker with her husband in matters of the hands and was
gradually taking her rightful place as the director rather than the
laborer. She was still the housewife; but her sphere was becoming
enlarged and her ideas different. The wilderness had been pushed back
from her door; she was as much a dweller in towns, even if they were not
of very great dimensions or importance, as were her sisters across the
great water. Her husband no longer wrestled with a hostile earth for a
bare sustenance, but owned his houses and his lands and held himself
among the prosperous ones of the world, so that his wife and his
daughters were free from need of personal labor. Not that they were
idle, these ladies who had blossomed from the earlier stem; we shall see
that many of them were notable housewives, real helpmeets to their
husbands; but they worked in a different manner from that of their
grandmothers. And they differed from those excellent dames in many
things, but above all in their respect for that impalpable but dominant
thing called Fashion; and so they began to lose their individuality and
take on the bearing and ways of the cosmopolitan type of women.

As a consequence of the introduction of luxury as a recognized condition
of the American household of wealth and refinement, there came about a
gradual change in the type of the sections which resulted in a levelling
of the type of the whole land and its adaptation to European standards.
That subtle influence of fashion permeated the land from north to
south--there was then no east or west--and brought all the severed types
under one strait rule. No longer could the dame of the Puritans be
distinguished by outer guise or even by her customs and manners from her
of the Cavaliers, while the intermediate woman, she of the sett