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 those above the lowest classes in all three sections could at least read, write, and keep accounts, and some few had dared to reach out into the sphere of higher learning. That many realized their intellectual poverty and deplored it is evident; how many more who kept no diaries and left no letters hungered for culture we shall never know; but the very longing of these colonial women is probably one of the main causes of that remarkable movement for the higher education of American women so noticeable in the earlier years of the nineteenth century. Their smothered ambition undoubtedly gave birth to an intellectual advance of women unequalled elsewhere in the world. FOOTNOTES: [43] Vol. I, p. 231. [44] Vol. I, p. 161. [45] Vol. I, p. 165. [46] Vol. I, p. 344. [47] _Letters of Abigail Adams_, p. 24.