She was sternly repressed. Subjection to her husband was a rule of the Puritan woman's life, accepted by her as rightful and even necessary. For it she found Biblical authority, and that was sufficient for her in all things. Yet, though literally and not merely nominally under the rule of her husband, the Puritan woman never thought of herself as a slave, either to a man or a system. Privately she might be a scold and a shrew,--if she had not the fear of the ducking-stool or the scold's bridle before her eyes,--but publicly she was under tutelage, and respected herself, even as she was respected, none the less on that account. It was a matter of time and place; it was a self-imposed condition rather than the survival of barbarism, as it is considered to-day by the theorists of femininity. So, at the close of the early period of colonization, when the land was beginning to thrill with the first stirrings of nationality, the Puritan woman, not yet a type though strongly individual, stood looking into the future as one that sees but does not fear the coming time of need and responsibility. No longer English, not yet American, she stood a transition product, but one that was to find result in a permanency that would lay the strongest impress upon the nation that was to arise in after years. Meanwhile, there was advancing in another portion of our country--a portion so remote from New England as practically to be a different land in all but ties of birth--a feminine civilization of a type widely different from that of Massachusetts and Connecticut. The Northern culture was strongly and preeminently democratic in its origins; that of the South, before the close of the period now under consideration, had come to be as preeminently aristocratic. Beginning in the same way as that of Massachusetts,--even with lower origin, since for a time it threatened to be a mere penal settlement,--Virginia soon began to attract to herself a class of adventurers widely differing from those who sought religious liberty on the bleak shores of Plymouth Bay.