nches of learning gratis, and I pursued these studies with
indescribable pleasure and avidity. I still, however, sensibly felt the
want of a more systematic education, and those advantages which females
enjoy in the present day.... My reading was very desultory, and novels
engaged too much of my attention."

After all, it would seem that fancy sewing was considered far more
requisite than science and literature in the training of American girls
of the eighteenth century. As soon as the little maid was able to hold a
needle she was taught to knit, and at the age of four or five commonly
made excellent mittens and stockings. A girl of fourteen made in 1760 a
pair of silk stockings with open work design and with initials knitted
on the instep, and every stage of the work from the raising and winding
of the silk to the designing and spinning was done by one so young.
Girls began to make samplers almost before they could read their
letters, and wonderful were the birds and animals and scenes depicted in
embroidery by mere children. An advertisement of the day is significant
of the admiration held for such a form of decorative work: "Martha
Gazley, late from Great Britain, now in the city of New York Makes and
Teacheth the following curious Works, viz.: Artificial Fruit and Flowers
and other Wax-works, Nuns-work, Philigre and Pencil Work upon Muslin,
all sorts of Needle-Work, and Raising of Paste, as also to paint upon
Glass, and Transparant for Sconces, with other Works. If any young
Gentlewomen, or others are inclined to learn any or all of the
above-mentioned curious Works, they may be carefully instructed in the
same by said Martha Gazley."

Thus the evidence leads us to believe that a colonial woman's education
consisted in the main of training in how to conduct and care for a home.
It was her principal business in life and for it she certainly was well
prepared. In the seventeenth century girls attended either a short term
public school or a dame's school, or, as among the better families in
the South, were taught by private tutors. In the eighteenth century they
frequently attended boarding schools or female seminaries, and here
learned--at least in the middle colonies and the South--not only reading
and writing and arithmetic, but dancing, music, drawing, French, and
"manners." In Virginia and New York, as we have seen, illiteracy among
seventeenth century women was astonishingly common; but in the
eighteenth century