ore the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth there was at least one public
school for both sexes in Virginia. But for the most part the girls of
early New England appear to have gone to the "dame's school," taught
by some spinster or poverty-stricken widow. We may again turn to
Sewall's _Diary_ for bits of evidence concerning the schooling in the
seventeenth century: "Tuesday, Oct. 16, 1688. Little Hanah going to
School in the morn, being enter'd a little within the Schoolhouse
Lane, is rid over by David Lopez, fell on her back, but I hope little
hurt, save that her Teeth bled a Little; was much frighted; but went
to School."[43] "Friday, Jan. 7th, 1686-7. This day Dame Walker is
taken so ill that she sends home my Daughters, not being able to teach
them."[44] "Wednesday, Jan. 19th, 1686-7. Mr. Stoughton and Dudley and
Capt. Eliot and Self, go to Muddy-River to Andrew Gardner's, where
'tis agreed that L12 only in or as Money, be levyed on the people by a
Rate towards maintaining a School to teach to write and read
English."[45] "Apr. 27, 1691.... This afternoon had Joseph to School
to Capt. Townsend's Mother's, his Cousin Jane accompanying him,
carried his Hornbook."[46]

And what did girls of Puritan days learn in the "dame schools"? Sewall
again may enlighten us in a notation in his _Diary_ for 1696: "Mary goes
to Mrs. Thair's to learn to Read and Knit." More than one hundred years
afterwards (1817), Abigail Adams, writing of her childhood, declared:
"My early education did not partake of the abundant opportunities which
the present days offer, and which even our common country schools now
afford. I never was sent to any school. I was always sick. Female
education, in the best families went no farther than writing and
arithmetic; in some few and rare instances, music and dancing."[47]

The Dutch women of New York, famous for their skill in housekeeping,
probably did not attend school, but received at home what little they
knew of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Mrs. Grant, speaking of
opportunities for female education in New Amsterdam in 1709, makes it
clear that the training of a girl's brain troubled no Hollander's head.
"It was at this time very difficult to procure the means of instruction
in those inland districts; female education, of consequence, was
conducted on a very limited scale; girls learned needlework (in which
they were indeed both skilful and ingenious) from their mothers and
aunts; they were taught too at