Never did women work harder than during this domestic period of labor. The slave women of the South, in addition to going through all the processes of manufacturing woolen and cotton cloth, which they afterward cut and made into garments, attended to both in and out-of-door labor. They tilled the rice fields, planted tobacco, sowed the cotton seed, and helped with the harvesting. The women in the North, though not “put into the ground,” as the early adventurers termed field-work, engaged energetically in other industries. History tells of women who helped build their own homes, wielding the ax and carrying the water to mix mortar with which to build chimneys. On the farms, it was women who raised the garden truck of vegetables and herbs, attended to poultry breeding, milked the cows, made butter and cheese, did the sewing, and performed all the household chores now classed in industrial statistics as “domestic service.” Outside the strictly necessary occupations of manufacture, household service, clothing, and garden-work, from quite early times women in America turned their attention to speculative labor and to trade. When James the First, thinking to utilize mulberry trees that were indigenous to our soil, forwarded silkworm cocoons to America, when dazzling dreams of wealth to come from the successful culture of the silkworm were indulged in by people on both sides of the Atlantic, and when bounties of money and tobacco were offered for spun and woven silk, according to its weight and width, most of these prizes were obtained by women. The success obtained by women in feeding the worms, and reeling, spinning, and weaving the silk, caused this industry, during the varying fortunes that preceded the establishment of silk-weaving as a factory industry, to be carried on mainly by them. History has preserved the names of three women famous before the Revolution as silk-growers and weavers: Mrs. Pinckney, Grace Fisher, and Susanna Wright. While silkworm culture was a failure in spite of all the fostering care bestowed upon it, and none of the pioneers realized any of the golden visions of rivaling the productions of Spain and the Indies, the efforts made by them paved the way for future cultivation.