With all their evidence of love and confidence in their wives, these colonial gentlemen were not, however, especially anxious to have womankind dabble in politics or other public affairs.  The husbands were willing enough to explain public activities of a grave nature to their help-meets, and sometimes even asked their opinion on proposed movements; but the men did not hesitate to think aloud the theories that the home was woman’s sphere and domestic duties her best activities.  Governor Winthrop spoke in no uncertain terms for the seventeenth century when he wrote the following brief note in his History of New England: 

(1645) “Mr. Hopkins, the governour of Hartford upon Connecticut, came to Boston and brought his wife with him (a godly young woman, and of special parts), who was fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason, which had been growing upon her divers years, by occasion of her giving herself wholly to reading and writing, and had written many books.  If she had attended to her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, etc., she had kept her wits, and might have improved them usefully and honorably in the place God had set her.”

Thomas Jefferson, writing from Paris in 1788 to Mrs. Bingham, spoke in less positive language but perhaps just as clearly the opinion of the eighteenth century:  “The gay and thoughtless Paris is now become a furnace of politics.  Men, women, children talk nothing else & you know that naturally they talk much, loud & warm....  You too have had your political fever.  But our good ladies, I trust, have been too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics.  They are contented to soothe & calm the minds of their husbands returning ruffled from political debate.  They have the good sense to value domestic happiness above all others.  There is no part of the earth where so much of this is enjoyed as in America.  You agree with me in this; but you think that the pleasures of Paris more than supply its wants; in other words, that a Parisian is happier than an American.  You will change your opinion, my dear madam, and come over to mine in the end.  Recollect the women of this capital, some on foot, some on horses, & some in carriages hunting pleasure in the streets in routes, assemblies, & forgetting that they have left it behind them in their nurseries & compare them with our own country women occupied in the tender and tranquil amusements of domestic life, and confess that it is a comparison of Americans and angels."[120]