The Puritans, in their war against vice, endeavoured to lay waste the fields of culture and learning. Everything which ministered to the pleasure of the senses they treated as a snare to be avoided. The remedy which they applied to the ills of society was in itself a disease. George Fox, declaiming against the schoolmistresses who teach young women “to play of instruments and music of all kinds,” shows the attitude of the Puritan party in the matter of ordinary education. A catch, a song, or a dance, Fox looked upon as destructive of modesty, things leading to wantonness, and only fitted “for them that live in the lusts of the world.” It was little wonder that, with learning at a discount and accomplishments denounced as sinful, women became frivolous and narrow. The light-hearted, in rebellion against the austerities of their Puritan neighbours, plunged into excesses, and the more serious subsided into a round of domestic drudgery. To men of the old order the times seemed sadly out of joint. “All relations were confounded by the _several sects in religion_ which discountenanced all forms of reverence and respect as reliques and marks of superstition. Children asked not blessing of their parents; nor did they concern themselves in the education of their children, but were well content that they should take any course to maintain themselves that they might be free from that expense. The young women conversed without any circumspection or modesty, and frequently met at taverns and common eating houses; and they who were stricter and more severe in their comportment became the wives of the seditious preachers or of officers of the army. The daughters of noble and illustrious families bestowed themselves upon the _divines of the time_ or other low and unequal matches. Parents had no manner of authority over their children, nor children any obedience or submission to their parents; but every one did that which was good in his own eyes.”[44] The loss of property occasioned by the Civil War caused great domestic upheavals. Many a family was brought to the brink of ruin. It was then that the women bestirred themselves. The daughters of men whose estates had been confiscated, the wives who had brought their husbands dowers, finding themselves denuded, made strenuous efforts to recover their possessions, in the absence through death or enforced exile of their male protectors. The Duchess of Newcastle, who was herself a sufferer,[45] looked with grave disapprobation upon the more energetic of her sex at this juncture. She complains that-- “women become pleaders, attornies, petitioners and the like, running about with their several causes, complaining of their several grievances, exclaiming against their several enemies, bragging of their several favours they receive from the powerful; thus trafficing with idle words, bringing in false reports and vain discourse.”