Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/37

 women took a lively interest in industrial, political, and religious activities. Of this fact indisputable evidence appears in the records of the period—old books on agriculture and the handicrafts, orders and papers of the justices of the peace who tried offenders against the law and who fixed the wages of laborers, documents and entries of craft guilds, archives of the great departments of government, and private memoirs of the day.

Even the women of the landed families were not idly rich. Rather were they responsible managers of large households in which numerous industries, now established in factories, were conducted under their watchful eyes. Nor were their energies confined to domestic pursuits. A granddaughter of Oliver Cromwell was director of a salt works. It is said of her that "she would sometimes, after a day of drudgery, go to the assembly at Yarmouth and appear one of the most brilliant there." Muriel Lyttelton, wife of a condemned Papist, begged her husband's forfeited estate from King James and "with the utmost prudence and economy" retrieved the fortune, educated the children, and discharged the duties of the head of the family. The memoirs of Mrs. Hutchinson, wife of the famous Puritan Colonel, show her maintaining a keen interest in the political controversies of her age and once at least in the lobby of the House of Commons during the absence of her husband, working against the passage of an objectionable measure. Women of her class often acted as executors of estates; they mingled in the throngs at court petitioning for grants of wardships, monopolies, patents, and other royal favors.

In an age when fortunes were relatively small, women of the trading class had not yet joined the leisure order devoted to gaiety and trifles. On the contrary, they were often partners in their husbands' enterprises or, as widows and daughters of merchants, were in business on their own account. In the records of the time they appear with striking frequency as pawnbrokers, money-lenders, stationers,