86 Singing Valleys 



too vigorous hoeing. Wheat had to be cut, cradled, threshed 

 and milled. But corn-harvest meant only passing up and down 

 between the rows, pulling the ripened ears into baskets. The 

 ears could be stored as they were and shelled at the house- 

 wife's convenience; a good task for little maids sitting round 

 the fire of evenings. And the woman who had no horse or 

 oxen to cart her corn to the miller could get out the wooden 

 mortar, or the samp mill which was one of Salem's first manu- 

 factures, and grind her meal in her own kitchen, as her grand- 

 mother had done in Plymouth. 



So corn made possible the great male exodus to the sea. 



It was a servantless society. True, in the later days of 

 Boston's and Portsmouth's magnificence, the merchants kept 

 slaves and sometimes Chinese or Hindu servants. But in the 

 seventeenth century, New England women did their own 

 housework without shame, and with a self-sufficiency that 

 must on occasions have driven husbands to up anchor. In a 

 society which honored work, the wife who combined the 

 offices of mother, nurse, physician, gardener, baker, brewer, 

 miller, cook, laundress, tailor and dairymaid wielded a power 

 far beyond that of any Southern "toast." Gallants might fight 

 duels or pen sonnets for love of the Evelyn Byrds and Mis- 

 tress Carters. But bronzed seamen humbly took orders from 

 the "Cap'n's wife" who represented her husband when he was 

 on a voyage. Supercargoes turned in their invoices to her, and 

 waited while she ran over their arithmetic. There were widows, 

 like Madam Martha Smith of St. George's Manor, Long 

 Island, who sent out their own whalers and did business in 

 sperm oil with chandlers all over the world. When these 

 energetic women died, the minister usually read aloud the 

 description of a virtuous woman prophesied by King Lemuel's 

 mother to her son, and the mourners nodded to each other, 

 "How true!" 



These New England Penelopes whose Ulysseses had sailed 

 away into the sunrise believed in "gumption." 



"There's precious little," one of them used to say to her 



