Die Ehelosigkeit eines Theils des weiblichen Geschlechts ist in dem monogamischen Gesellschaftszustande eine nicht zu beseitigende statistische Nothwendigkeit. GUSTAVE SCHÖNBERG THE NEW ENGLAND WOMAN Throughout our fair country there has long been familiar, in actual life and in tradition, a corporate woman known as the New England woman. When this woman landed upon American shores, some two hundred and fifty years ago, she was doubtless a hearty, even-minded, rosy-cheeked, full-fleshed English lass. Once here, however, in her physical and mental make-up, under pioneer conditions and influenced by our electric climate, a differentiation began, an unconscious individualizing of herself: this was far, far back in the time of the Pilgrim Mothers. In this adaptation she developed certain characteristics which are weakly human, intensely feminine, and again passing the fables of saints in heroism and self-devotion. Just what these qualities were, and why they grew, is worth considering before--in the bustle of the twentieth century and its elements entirely foreign to her primitive and elevated spirit--she has passed from view and is quite forgotten. In the cities of to-day she is an exotic. In the small towns she is hardly indigenous. Of her many homes, from the close-knit forests of Maine to the hot sands of Monterey, that community of villages which was formerly New England is her habitat. She has always been most at home in the narrow village of her forebears, where the church and school were in simpler days, and still at times are--even to our generation measuring only with Pactolian sands in its hour-glasses--the powers oftenest quoted and most revered. From these sources the larger part of herself, the part that does not live by bread alone, has been nourished. It was in the quiet seclusion of the white homes of these villages that in past generations she gained her ideals of life. Such a home imposed what to women of the world at large might be inanity. But, with a self-limitation almost Greek, she saw within those clapboard walls things dearest to a woman’s soul,--a pure and sober family life, a husband’s protective spirit, the birth and growth of children, neighborly service--keenly dear to her--for all whose lives should come within touch of her active hands, and an old age guarded by the devotion of those to whom she had given her activities. To this should be added another gift of the gods which this woman ever bore in mind with calmness--a secluded ground, shaded by hemlocks or willows, where should stand the headstone marking her dust, over which violets should blossom to freshening winds, and robin call to mate in the resurrection time of spring, and in the dim corners of which ghostly Indian pipes should rise from velvet mould to meet the summer’s fervency.