Among the older women created by the local color generation there were certain fashionable successes and social climbers in the large cities who have more complex fortunes than the young girls; but for the most part they are merely typical or conventional—­as selfish as gold and as hard as agate.  On somewhat humbler levels that generation—­as Mary Austin has pointed out of American fiction at large—­came nearer to reality by its representation of a type peculiar to the United States:  the “woman” who is also a “lady”; that is, who combines in herself the functions both of the busy housewife and of the charming ornament of her society.  The gradual reduction in America of the servant class has served to develop women who keep books and music beside them at their domestic tasks as pioneer farmers kept muskets near them in the fields.  They devote to homely duties the time devoted by European ladies to love, intrigue, public affairs; they preserve, thanks to countless labor-saving devices, for more or less intellectual pursuits the strength which among European women is consumed by habitual drudgery.  The combination of functions has probably done much to increase sexlessness and to decrease helplessness, and so to produce almost a new species of womanhood which is bound eventually to be of great moment in the national life.  Local color, however, taking the species for granted, seems hardly to have been aware of its significant existence.

Only New England emphasized a distinct type:  the old maid.  She has been studied in that section as in no other quarter of the world.  Expansion and emigration after the Civil War drew very heavily upon the declining Puritan stock; and naturally the young men left their native farms and villages more numerously than the young women, who remained behind and in many cases never married.  Local fiction fell very largely into the hands of women—­Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Alice Brown—­who broke completely with the age-old tradition of ridiculing spinsters no longer young.  In the little cycles which these story-tellers elaborated the old maid is likely to be the center of her episode, studied in her own career and not merely in that of households upon which she is some sort of parasite.  The heroine of Mrs. Freeman’s A New England Nun is an illuminating instance:  she has been betrothed to an absent, fortune-hunting lover for fourteen years, and now that he is back she finds herself full of consternation at his masculine habits and rejoices when he turns to another woman and leaves his first love to the felicity of her contented cell.