The inventive faculty, so distinctive a trait in the character of the American man, was also a gift of the American woman. How many women were inventors will never be known, as they timidly shielded their identity behind men. This is said to have been the case with the cotton-gin. Credited through all the years to Eli Whitney, modern writers claim that it was the fruit of the inventive powers of Mrs. Nathaniel Green,[172] widow of Gen. Green of revolutionary fame. The story runs that Mrs. Green, a native of Rhode Island and familiar with the working of the anchor forge belonging to her husband’s father, set her wits to work while visiting her Georgia plantations, to lessen the labor of cleansing the cotton. When this difficulty was solved, she permitted Mr. Whitney to claim the patent, through fear of the ridicule of her friends and loss of social position recognition of her work might have entailed. By whomever invented, no other instrument has been so fruitful of consequences. In 1793, when the cotton-gin was made, cotton, instead of being King, was a humble garden plant, grown for home consumption in the regions from Georgia to New Jersey. When its snowy blossoms ripened, women gathered them, plucked the seeds from the fiber, and got it ready for spinning. So difficult was this process, that to remove the seed from one pound was considered a good day’s work. By the operation of the cotton-gin, in the time it had taken to cleanse one pound, three hundred-weight could be got ready for market. By this, cotton was transformed at once into a valuable commercial product that required for its successful cultivation an enormous increase of land and labor. It instilled such new life into the almost dying institution of slavery that the cotton-gin may well be said to have been the foster-mother of slavery in America. As the immediate effect of the cotton-gin in the South was to give an enormous value to the slave, its invention was followed in the North by the cotton factory. The cotton factory was the northern complement of the cotton-gin. To women it had the momentous results of transferring them from the home to the factory; of taking them out of the family farm-house to the manufacturing towns and villages, and, by making them for the first time the wage-earning competitors of men, altering their whole status in the labor market of America.