lar form of
hospitality was shown to male visitors, the prettiest maids of the house
being detailed to "attend" such visitors.

The lot of a German workingwoman in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries was very hard. Her hours of work were from sunrise to sunset.
If she lived in the country, she did all the ordinary housework for a
large family; she planted and harvested, she attended to the cattle, she
sheared the sheep, gathered the flax, spun and wove the linen and wool,
bleached or dyed the finished cloth, and with her needle fashioned it
into garments for her husband, her children, and herself. In the
country, grand ladies often had workrooms where as many as three hundred
girls were employed. A city workingwoman was shut out by the guilds from
any remunerative labor. She could seldom earn more than her board, no
matter how hard she might work. Women's wages, except for sin, were
pitifully meagre. That the majority of German workingwomen did remain
chaste in spite of the ever present temptations toward vice speaks
volumes in praise of the German feminine character.

In both city and country, spinning was looked upon as woman's natural
occupation. "She was pious and spun" is a common epitaph upon sixteenth
century tombstones in Germany. "Let men fight and women spin," preached
Berthold von Regensberg. Almost as soon as a girl baby could walk she
was taught to spin. Little Gertrude Sastrow, at the age of five, asked
one day what the princes at the Diet did. Her brother replied: "They
determine what shall be done in the empire." "Then," her brother
relates, "the little maiden at her distaff gave a deep sigh and said
dolefully, 'Oh, good God, if they would only decree that little girls
should not spin!"

Luther bitterly resented the accusation that his teachings were
responsible for the Peasant's War. He declared, truly enough, that the
peasants, long ground between the upper and nether millstones of an
oppressive nobility and a greedy merchant monopoly, had again and again
revolted long before he was born. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that
Protestantism, as representing individualism, had much to do with the
social upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Both the
Renaissance and the Reformation, or rather, the underlying force which
produced both, made tremendously for Democracy.

The peasant woman's lot was doubly hard. The horrible outrages committed
upon her during war make one's blood run co