America Climbs the Cornstalk 87 



granddaughter, "you can't set right with gumption, and a 

 few drops of oil." 



And usually with more gumption than healing oil, they 

 proceeded to right innumerable conditions which they con- 

 sidered wrong. Ladies' societies dedicated to the improvement 

 of everything from the higher education of the members to 

 the morals of the Patagonians flourished in every New England 

 village and town. Most of the "movements" in America began 

 in some New England parlor, and were nourished through 

 infancy on chicken and clam-pie suppers, sales of bread, pie 

 and johnnycake. New England cornfields, tended by these mis- 

 sionary zealots, sent of their harvest to clothe the innocently 

 naked Hawaiians in nankeen drawers and calico Mother Hub- 

 bards, and to build tin chapels on the banks of the Ganges to 

 convert the Hindus to the tenets of Congregationalism. 



It was surprising how the tide of New England corn, thriftily 

 administered by women, rolled around and fed the world. 



Much of this might be read merely as a quaint chapter of 

 New England's social history were it not for the spread of 

 the New England gospel into the Western Reserve and the 

 states of the corn belt during the years of American expansion 

 following the Revolution. 



The migrants carried with them across the Alleghenies the 

 ideal of strong-armed, strong-minded women. That ideal had 

 originated in a civilization in which women had labored with 

 hoes to make the corn to grow. The food of the western 

 frontier was also corn. The women of the frontier were ex- 

 pected to grow, as well as mix and bake, the family bread, while 

 the frontiersmen hewed logs, hunted, trapped, fished. It was 

 a repetition of the life lived in early colonial Massachusetts and 

 Connecticut. So the early New England woman never died; 

 she merely moved west. And she carried with her to her new 

 home, after the way of all women since the days of Rachel, 

 her familiar household gods the "movements" and the bet- 

 terment societies, the reverence for education and the right of 

 individual conscience, and the ideal upheld by King Lemuel's 



