Girls were early taught these forms, and in addition received not only advice but mechanical aid to insure their standing erect and sitting upright.  The average child of to-day would rebel most vigorously against such contrivances, and justly; for in a few American schools, as in English institutions, young ladies were literally tortured through sitting in stocks, being strapped to backboards, and wearing stiffened coats and stays re-inforced with strips of wood and metal.  Such methods undoubtedly made the colonial dame erect and perhaps stately in appearance, but they contributed a certain artificial, thin-chested structure that the healthy girl of to-day would abhor.

As we have seen, however, some women of the day contrived to pick up unusual bits of knowledge, or made surprising expeditions into the realm of literature and philosophy.  Samuel Peters, writing in his General History of Connecticut in 1781, declared of their accomplishments:  “The women of Connecticut are strictly virtuous and to be compared to the prude rather than the European polite lady.  They are not permitted to read plays; cannot converse about whist, quadrille or operas; but will freely talk upon the subjects of history, geography, and mathematics.  They are great casuists and polemical divines; and I have known not a few of them so well schooled in Greek and Latin as often to put to the blush learned gentlemen.”  And yet Hannah Adams, writing in her Memoir in 1832, had this to say of educational opportunities in Connecticut during the latter half of the eighteenth century:  “My health did not even admit of attending school with the children in the neighborhood where I resided.  The country schools, at that time, were kept but a few months in the year, and all that was then taught in them was reading, writing, and arithmetic.  In the summer, the children were instructed by females in reading, sewing, and other kinds of work.  The books chiefly made use of were the Bible and Psalter.  Those who have had the advantages of receiving the rudiments of their education at the schools of the present day, can scarcely form an adequate idea of the contrast between them, and those of an earlier age; and of the great improvements which have been made even in the common country schools.  The disadvantages of my early education I have experienced during life; and, among various others, the acquiring of a very faulty pronunciation; a habit contracted so early, that I cannot wholly rectify it in later years.”

North and South women complained of the lack of educational advantages.  Madame Schuyler deplored the scarcity of books and of facilities for womanly education, and spoke with irony of the literary tastes of the older ladies:  “Shakespeare was a questionable author at the Flatts, where the plays were considered grossly familiar, and by no means to be compared to ‘Cato’ which Madame Schuyler greatly admired.  The ’Essay on Man’ was also in high esteem