the good sisters had thus paved the way a delegation of men went to his Excellency, and obtained a change in his plan.  Thus, the women did the work, and the men usurped the praise.  Again, Lady Phips, wife of the governor, had the bravery to assume the responsibility of signing a warrant liberating a prisoner accused of witchcraft, and, though the jailer lost his position for obeying, the prisoner’s life was thus saved by the initiative of a woman.

That colonial women frequently attempted to make a livelihood by methods other than keeping a dame school, is shown in numerous diaries and records.  Sewall records the failure of one of these attempts:  “April 4, 1690....  This day Mrs. Avery’s Shop ... shut by reason of Goods in them attached."[300] Women kept ordinaries and taverns, especially in New England, and after 1760 a large number of the retail dry goods stores of Baltimore were owned and managed by women.  We have noticed elsewhere Franklin’s complimentary statement about the Philadelphia woman who conducted her husband’s printing business after his death; and again in a letter to his wife, May 27, 1757, just before a trip to Europe, he writes:  “Mr. Golden could not spare his Daughter, as she helps him in the Postoffice, he having no Clerk."[301] Mrs. Franklin, herself, was a woman of considerable business ability, and successfully ran her husband’s printing and trading affairs during his prolonged absences.  He sometimes mentions in his letters her transactions amounting at various times to as much as L500.

The pay given to teachers of dame schools was so miserably low that it is a marvel that the widows and elderly spinsters who maintained these institutions could keep body and soul together on such fees.  We know that Boston women sometimes taught for less than a shilling per day, while even those ladies who took children from the South and the West Indies into their homes and both boarded and trained them dared not charge much above the actual living expenses.  Had not public sentiment been against it, doubtless many of these teachers would have engaged in the more lucrative work of keeping shops or inns.

In the South it seems to have been no uncommon thing for women to manage large plantations and direct the labor of scores of negroes and white workers.  We have seen how Eliza Pinckney found a real interest in such work, and cared most successfully for her father’s thousands of acres.  A woman of remarkable personality, executive ability, and mental capacity, she not only produced and traded according to the usual methods of planters, but experimented in intensive farming, grafting, and improvement of stock and seed with such success that her plantations were models for the neighboring planters to admire and imitate.

When she was left in charge of the estate while her father went about his army duties, she was but sixteen years old, and yet her letters to him show not only her interest, but a remarkable grasp of both the theoretical and the practical phases of agriculture.