[Sidenote:  As newspaper editors.]

Women have from very early times been exceedingly active in newspaper work.  Anna Franklin printed the first newspaper in Rhode Island, in 1732; she was made official printer to the colony.  When the founder of the Mercury, of Philadelphia, died in 1742, his widow, Mrs. Cornelia Bradford, carried it on for many years with great success, just as Mrs. Zenger continued the New York Weekly Journal—­the second newspaper started in New York—­for years after the death of her husband.  Anna K. Greene established the Maryland Gazette, the first paper in that colony, in 1767.  Penelope Russell printed The Censor in Boston, in 1771.  In fact, there was hardly a colony in which women were not actively engaged in printing.  After the Revolution they were still more active.  Mrs. Anne Royal edited The Huntress for a quarter of a century.  Margaret Fuller ran The Dial, in Boston, in 1840 and numbered Emerson and William Channing among her contributors.  From 1840 to 1849 the mill girls of Lowell edited the Lowell Offering.  These are but a few examples of what women have done in newspaper work.  How very influential they are to-day every one knows who is familiar with the articles and editorial work appearing in newspapers and magazines; and that women are very zealous reporters many people can attest with considerable vigour.[414]

[Sidenote:  Women in industry.]

The enormous part which women now play in industry and in all economic production is a concomitant of the factory system, specialised industry, and all that makes a highly elaborated and complex society.  Before the introduction of machine industry, and in the simple society of the colonial days, women were no less a highly important factor in economic production; but not as wage earners.  Their importance lay in the fact that spinning, weaving, brewing, cheese and butter making, and the like were matters attended to by each household to supply its own wants; and this was considered the peculiar sphere of the housewife.  In 1840 Harriet Martineau found only seven employments open to women in the United States, viz., teaching, needlework, keeping boarders, working in cotton mills and in book binderies, type-setting, and household service.

I shall now present a series of fifty tables, by means of which the reader may see at a glance the status of women in all the States to-day.  For convenience, I shall arrange the views alphabetically.

TABLES SHOWING THE PRESENT STATUS OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES.

The right of “dower,” as used in these tables, refers to the widow’s right, under the Common Law, to the possession, for her life-time, of one third of the real estate of which her husband was possessed in fee-simple during the marriage.

“Curtesy” is the right of the husband after his wife’s death to the life use of his wife’s real estate, sometimes dependent on the birth of children, sometimes not; and usually the absolute right to her whole personal estate.