e can render the national
intellectual spirit at least as valuable a service as he could through a
study of some legend of ancient Britain or some epic of an extinct race.
As Mr. Percy Boynton has said, "To foster in a whole generation some
clear recognition of other qualities in America than its bigness, and of
other distinctions between the past and the present than that they are
far apart is to contribute towards the consciousness of a national
individuality which is the first essential of national life.... We
must put our minds upon ourselves, we must look to our past and to our
present, and then intelligently to our future."

The author has endeavored to follow such advice by bringing forward
those qualities of colonial womanhood which have made for the
refinement, the intellectuality, the spirit, the aggressiveness, and
withal the genuine womanliness of the present-day American woman. As the
book is not intended for scholars alone, the author has felt free when
he had not original source material before him to quote now and then
from the studies of writers on other phases of colonial life--such as
the valuable books by Dr. Philip Alexander Bruce, Dr. John Bassett, Dr.
George Sydney Fisher, Charles C. Coffin, Alice Brown, Alice Morse Earle,
Anna Hollingsworth Wharton, and Geraldine Brooks.

The author believes that many misconceptions have crept into the mind of
the average reader concerning the life of colonial women--ideas, for
instance, of unending long-faced gloom, constant fear of pleasure,
repression of all normal emotions. It is hoped that this book will go
far toward clearing the mind of the reader of such misconceptions, by
showing that woman in colonial days knew love and passion, felt longing
and aspiration, used the heart and the brain, very much as does her
descendant of to-day.

For permission to quote from the works mentioned hereafter, the author
wishes to express his gratitude to Sydney G. Fisher and the J.B.
Lippincott Company (_Men, Women and Manners in Colonial Days_), Ralph L.
Bartlett, executor for Charles C. Coffin, (_Old Times in Colonial
Days_), Alice Brown and Charles Scribner's Sons (_Mercy Warren_), Philip
Alexander Bruce and the Macmillan Company (_Institutional History of
Virginia in the Seventeenth Century_), Anne H. Wharton (_Martha
Washington_), John Spencer Bassett (_Writings of Colonel Byrd_), Alice
Earle Hyde (_Alice Morse Earl's Child Life in Colonial Days_), Geraldine
Brooks