In former periods women were producers as well as distributors, each household being like a little township, dependent on itself. But in the eighteenth century, although domestic industries had not been revolutionized as they have since been, there were factories and shops, and all sorts of hawkers, who vended goods of various kinds in the streets. In London and in the large towns there was no need for each family to produce its own necessaries, though in country districts the domestic arrangements were more stationary. Baking, brewing, and salting were still carried on in the larger houses occupied by the gentry, but in small households most of the things required for daily use were bought. The domestic _rôle_ of the eighteenth-century woman among the middle classes was not so absorbing as to leave her no time for mental recreation. But books, like politics, were, for the most part, left to the men. There was so little circulation of literature that in London much of the reading was done standing at a bookseller’s stall, a method obviously impossible to women. With such scanty education as was considered appropriate to the weaker sex, with no books but of the most dreary kind, written for young people, it was little wonder that the generality of girls grew up without any habit of reading, or of regarding literature as an essential element of their daily lives. We cannot think of the average woman in the last century as finding much of her pleasure in any intellectual occupation. She had been neglected, her mind allowed to rust. The awakening that had taken place two hundred years before had been succeeded by a reaction, and there was a general apathy with regard to women’s education. A writer in the second quarter of the century, who is vaunting the superiority of men over women, says England is “the place in the world where the fair sex is the most regarded, and, perhaps, deserves most to be so.... Nor is it easy to comprehend how it is possible to raise them higher with any show of reason, considering their natural incapacity for everything above the sphere they actually move in.” Foreigners were always struck by the freedom enjoyed by married women. One observes that “among the common people the husbands seldom make their wives work. As to the women of quality, they don’t trouble themselves about it.” The middle-class wife has been pictured for us by Fielding in the description of Squire Western’s wife:--