Page:The Business of being a Woman by Ida Tarbell.djvu/248

 and away the best letters by a woman, which have found their way into print in this country, are those of Mrs. John Adams, written late in the eighteenth century and early in the nineteenth. They deserve the permanent place in our literature which they have. But it was a period of good letter writing by women—if weak spelling and feminine spelling was, on the whole, quite as strong as masculine!

Out of that early system of education came the woman who was to write the book which did more to stir the country against slavery than all that ever had been written, Harriet Beecher Stowe. That system produced the scientist, who still represents American women in the mind of the world, Maria Mitchell, the only American woman whose name appears among the names of the world's great scholars inscribed on the Boston