all together form a sort of composite picture of our great-grandmothers of colonial days. The woman who, within her own home, made whatever her family required for immediate consumption, was the typical woman prior to our modern, industrial era. The spinning-wheel, at which she so faithfully toiled, may be rightfully regarded as the symbol of that period when practically all commodities were the product of domestic manufacture.
COLONIAL AMERICA
In order to understand the woman of colonial times, her life and work and her relation to the society of her day, we must briefly examine that society itself. America, prior to the Revolutionary War, was very different from the America of our day. It was an agricultural country, sparsely populated, with immense tracts of uncultivated and uninhabited land, with isolated farms scattered over wide areas, and with few cities, and those few far apart. What is now Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee was then the far western frontier, the undisputed realm of the Indian, and there were not as many white inhabitants in the whole country as there are to-day in one of our big cities. It is difficult for a modern city dweller to picture one of the early American cities. There were only six—Boston, Salem, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Charleston—that could be called cities at all, and of these Philadelphia, at that time the largest, had about 20,000 inhabitants. In regard to comfort, cleanliness and sanitation, those cities of the eighteenth century could not be compared with the humblest mountain village of to-day. The streets were all unpaved. The citizens had to go about their business through dust like the sands of the desert or through mud, ankle-deep. There were no sewers and there was no garbage removal. Each household piled its refuse in the back-yard, and there was no limitation to the size of the garbage heap, except that which was set by the natural scavengers of the communities. These natural scavengers were the domestic hogs in the North and the carrion crows in the South. The modern mind can readily imagine how much disease was bred through this utter disregard of the laws of hygiene. Epidemics, particularly of small-
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