It was thus in the southern colonies, with their greater wealth in servants and money and their consequently greater refinement, that there first appeared the type of American woman as she was a little later to be known throughout the land; but the coming of refinement and its accompaniment, modishness, was not long confined to the Virginias. Before the ending of the later colonial period and the beginnings of the days of the Revolution, there were to be found refinement and modishness in Massachusetts as in Virginia; but it was long before an equal amount of luxury was there displayed. In the North the same distinction of station was maintained between the "governor's lady" and the plebeian housewife that existed in the South between the lady of the plantation and her humbler sister of the hut; but there were fewer spouses of governors and their social equals in the North than there were wives of planters in the South, and so the developing type of American lady began in Virginia and spread thence rather than adopted from without. But everywhere, in all sections of the country save indeed the undeveloped outskirts, where the wilderness was being forced back and concerning which we shall busy ourselves later, when the type of the pioneer was more distinctive--there was up-springing a different type from that of the settlers or the early colonists. The American woman was ceasing to be the co-worker with her husband in matters of the hands and was gradually taking her rightful place as the director rather than the laborer. She was still the housewife; but her sphere was becoming enlarged and her ideas different. The wilderness had been pushed back from her door; she was as much a dweller in towns, even if they were not of very great dimensions or importance, as were her sisters across the great water. Her husband no longer wrestled with a hostile earth for a bare sustenance, but owned his houses and his lands and held himself among the prosperous ones of the world, so that his wife and his daughters were free from need of personal labor. Not that they were idle, these ladies who had blossomed from the earlier stem; we shall see that many of them were notable housewives, real helpmeets to their husbands; but they worked in a different manner from that of their grandmothers. And they differed from those excellent dames in many things, but above all in their respect for that impalpable but dominant thing called Fashion; and so they began to lose their individuality and take on the bearing and ways of the cosmopolitan type of women.