d the heart of the Country
Girl in the new era.

Going but half a generation farther back into the past one may find the
woman who had not only all that has been described to do but the milking
and the butter making beside. She worked up the wool and spun, wove, and
made full cloth for men's wear, for flannel sheets and for all the
flannel dresses, and she knit all the socks and stockings for the big
family. She would rise at four, summer and winter. She would build her
own fires, milk four to eight cows, and have breakfast at six. There
would be a sugar orchard that made many hundred pounds of sugar, and she
would make the syrup and care for it. The floors of her rooms would be
covered with carpets of her weaving. The table linen and toweling would
be both spun and woven by her hands. All the time she had for
intellectual employments would be while some labor was going on. It is a
tradition from the past in this country that if a woman can work with
her hands or her feet and at one and the same time employ the eyes in
some studious pursuit, she has a fair right to whatever intellectual
attainment she may be able to gain thereby. Roxana Beecher in Guilford,
Connecticut, a hundred years ago, had a volume of philosophy fastened to
her wheel and read the book while she treadled and spun; and no woman
was really accomplished in the old days unless she could knit and read
at the same time.

Sometimes--but rarely--the women of past time in this country took some
part in the outside farm labor. The author knows of a woman who husked
six hundred bushels of corn in one summer. The following season she
piled up one hundred cords of wood and did all the housework beside. It
would not be possible to speak of some pathetic cases of enforced toil
lest some good men should be led thereby to fall from grace and wish
they were noncombatants. The truth is that it has never been the custom
in this country that the women should enter into the heavier farm work;
from the beginning women were held so sacred that nothing must be risked
that could injure their permanent strength. The men rolled in the logs
of wood for the big fireplaces and did all the heavier work of the
place, answering without a moment's demur the request of the women for
help. Such a spirit in the men of America has crystallized in many laws
more favorable to women than to men, and in many others designed to give
special protection to women and to ward off the possibility