Along with the silk industry, another of scarcely less importance was growing up quietly in New England. This was the manufacture of straw goods, the products of which now amount to many millions annually. Straw, applied to so many purposes to-day, owes its origin as an article of manufacture to a young Massachusetts girl. In 1789 Miss Betsy Metcalf discovered the secret of bleaching and braiding the meadowgrass of her native town of Dedham, and of ingeniously making this braid into a bonnet. Although scarcely more than a child, the chronicles tell that she taught others to do what she had done, and started a business by which the want of bonnets and hats for summer-wear was supplied. From using straw for head-gear, its manufacture spread to other things, and developed an industry that, in 1880, employed nearly eleven thousand operatives. Of these over seven thousand were women. Whether it was the active out-door life led by the American women of the eighteenth century, or the wide-awake interest circumstances obliged them to take in the concerns of the family and of men; whether the stirring times in which they moved, or the deferential attitude of men stimulated them to do things that the women of other nations were not doing, it is certain that the American women of a century ago were far in advance of their times in all things except a knowledge of light literature, which the circulating libraries of Europe placed within the reach of women there, and a scarcity of books denied them here. That this was more of a gain than loss, by giving women time to think, is shown in the energy with which they went to work in helping to build up the nation. They engaged in mercantile affairs with such success that, it is said, “many Boston fortunes owed their rise to women.” The active interest taken by them in politics gave, even before the Revolution, some representative women to journalism. Out of the seventy-eight newspapers published in the colonies, sixteen were edited by women, and all but two of them championed the cause of liberty and justice. The first paper to publish the Declaration of Independence was edited and printed by a Mrs. Reid. In medicine, women confined themselves into distilling herbs into remedies which it was said “could kill or cure with any of the faculty.” In the practice of midwifery, history has preserved the name of a Mrs. Robinson, of New London, who continued to practice to an advanced age, and who “delivered twelve hundred mothers without losing a patient.”