Women of Clonial and Revolutionary Tiems

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895. Excerpt: ... Ill THE PURITAN HOUSEWIFE The life of Madam Winthrop in her English home was the usual life of active housewifery, or unvaried domesticity, of the average Englishwoman of her times. I find no entries in her letters or her husband's to show that she ever entered into what in modern phrase would be termed fashionable or society life That phase of seventeenth-century life in England is well known to us through satire, lampoons, religious tracts, and contemporary diaries, plays, and letters; and an idle, vain, useless, restless, and unhappy life it was. The curious may read pictures of it in Jonson's The Devil is an Ass; in Rowland's A Whole Crew of Kind Gossips all Met to be Merry, and his Looke to it, for lie Stabbe ye; in Dickinson's Greene in Conceit; in Goddard's Satirycall Dialogue or sharplyeinvective Conference between Alexander the Great and that truely woman-hater Diogynes; in Humours Unmasked, and scores of other plays and poems. You may find it in the court records, in the printed travels of foreigners in England, in the letters of the nobility and of royal persons. It is of interest to us as a study of the times, but it was never the life of Margaret Winthrop. Her life was peaceful, retired, and useful. It was full of manifold homespun duties and cares, the charge of a household which formed a great family, in which the servants filled no mean or uncherished position. Heber, in his Life of Jeremy Taylor, has this passage:--"In the time of our ancestors the interval between the domestics and the other members of a family was by no means so great, nor fenced with so harsh and impenetrable a barrier, as in the present days of luxury and excessive refinement. The servants of the manor-house were usually the humble friends of the master and mistress, ...