occurrence. First the letter had to be penned with a goose-quill, and then it cost about 25 cents to reach its destination. As letters were usually not prepaid, the recipient of the message had to defray the expense, and so people were not anxious to have their friends write to them often.
To complete the picture of our country during colonial days, we must turn from the cities to the farms. Farming was the main pursuit of the great majority of the male population. The budding young nation was essentially an agricultural one. The farms were often situated far apart and their isolation deprived their residents of even those slight comforts and conveniences that city dwellers enjoyed. It, therefore, was necessary for each farm to be entirely self-supporting, for each family to produce whatever they consumed. During the early period of settlement, women had often helped to build the rough log-cabins that became the first homesteads of their families. They had helped to manufacture the crude furnishings. They had even helped—most male occupation of all—to guard their homes, by armed force, against the attacks of the Indians. But when settled conditions prevailed, there was a clearly defined division of labor along sex lines. We must therefore look to the American farm of colonial days to obtain a true and vivid picture of man's work and woman's work before the rise of modern industry.
COLONIAL WOMEN AND THEIR WORK
Broadly speaking, it may be said that man's work was chiefly the production of raw material, while woman's work was chiefly the transforming of raw material into commodities. All food products, also much of the material used for the manufacture «f clothing, were grown on the home farm. The man supplied these natural products. The woman transformed them into articles of food and wearing apparel. Consider, for example, the manufacture of linen cloth: Men planted and raised the crops of flax and did the breaking and heckling. Women then took the raw material and proceeded to card, spin, weave, bleach and dye, and finally to cut and sew the cloth into articles of clothing and household linens. In the same
way, men raised and sheared the sheep. Women trans-
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