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 the wool into cloth. Men grew wheat and rye and ground it in windmills or water-mills. Women baked it into bread. Men raised vegetables and fruit. Women did the cooking, pickling and preserving. All along the line of household manufacture the same division of labor along sex lines may be observed. Of course, men were engaged in the making of commodities to some extent also. Thus, in the early pioneer days, before there was a village blacksmith, cobbler and carpenter, every farmer had to be his own blacksmith, cobbler and carpenter, and in many homes the furniture and most of the household utensils were manufactured by the men and boys of the family, particularly during the winter months, when there was no work to be done on the farm. On the other hand, women were also engaged to some extent in the production of raw material. Every good housewife had her little kitchen garden, where she raised the vegetables for her family table. The raising of poultry and the care of cattle was frequently left to the women. In the South, women, particularly slave women, gathered the cotton and performed the slow, laborious task of plucking the seed from the fiber. But—with very few exceptions—women were engaged in the production of raw material only when such material was used by themselves in their own households. Women had little or no share in the making of things that were not used in the home.

The colonial woman was essentially—indeed, we may almost say exclusively—a housekeeper. All our traditions about the home being woman's sphere are a mental remnant of those days when the home actually was woman's sphere, when every woman was so intensely and usefully occupied within the home that she had neither time, interest nor energy left for anything outside of her four walls. Housekeeping, in the time of our great-grandmothers, meant something very different from modern housekeeping. It meant productive labor. It meant the learning and practicing of more than one trade. It meant an important share of the world's work. The difference between former and present-day housekeeping becomes