colonial servants who had to be skilled in various manufacturing processes, as well as in those occupations that we consider housework to-day, undoubtedly worked much harder and probably worked longer hours, too, than the cook or maid or waitress or general houseworker of the present time; but their social position was a far better one. Instead of working alone, in the isolation of a cheerless kitchen, they worked in the family group, side by side with their employer; they usually ate at the family table, and were treated as members of the household. If their work was hard and long, they at least did not have to toil alone in the presence of wanton idleness, for the matron and the daughters of the family set an example of industry and thrift.
OTHER OCCUPATIONS
One of the earliest remunerative employments for women, beside domestic service, was the keeping of taverns or inns. Licenses to keep inns were frequently granted to women in the colonies, but—this is noteworthy—only to wives or widows, never to spinsters. Unmarried women were the most unfortunate when it came to the necessity of earning a living. Everywhere special barriers were erected against them, and still they were expected to be virtuous and useful. Thus the Salem colony, having at first given small allotments of land to unmarried women, soon discontinued this custom, on the ground that it was a bad precedent "to keep house alone." The Puritan fathers seem to have taken for granted that some women were unmarried out of sheer wickedness and ill-will toward the community.
The keeping of small shops was also resorted to by women at an early date. The New Haven Colonial Records tell of a woman shop-keeper during the first half of the seventeenth century.
Many women took up the lady-like, but highly unremunerative occupation of teaching a "Dame's School." This was at a time when girls were not admitted to the public schools.
It is an interesting fact, and one not generally known, that printing was one of the early remunerative occupa-
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