And Franklin writes thus to his wife from London in 1758:  “You are very prudent not to engage in party Disputes.  Women never should meddle with them except in Endeavors to reconcile their Husbands, Brothers, and Friends, who happen to be of contrary Sides.  If your Sex can keep cool, you may be a means of cooling ours the sooner, and restoring more speedily that social Harmony among Fellow Citizens that is so desirable after long and bitter Dissension."[121] Again, he writes thus to his sister:  “Remember that modesty, as it makes the most homely virgin amiable and charming, so the want of it infallably renders the perfect beauty disagreeable and odious.  But when that brightest of female virtues shines among other perfections of body and mind in the same mind, it makes the woman more lovely than angels."[122]

What seems rather strange to the twentieth century American, the women of colonial days apparently agreed with such views.  So few avenues of activity outside the home had ever been open to them that they may have considered it unnatural to desire other forms of work; but, be that as it may, there are exceedingly few instances in those days, of neglect of home for the sake of a career in public work.  Abigail Adams frequently expressed it as her belief that a woman’s first business was to help her husband, and that a wife should desire no greater pleasure.  “To be the strength, the inmost joy, of a man who within the conditions of his life seems to you a hero at every turn—­there is no happiness more penetrating for a wife than this."[123]

Women like Eliza Pinckney, Mercy Warren, Jane Turell, Margaret Winthrop, Catherine Schuyler, and Elizabeth Hamilton most certainly believed this, and their lives and the careers of their husbands testify to the success of such womanly endeavors.  Mercy Warren was a writer of considerable talent, author of some rather widely read verse, and of a History of the Revolution; but such literary efforts did not hinder her from doing her best for husband and children; while Eliza Pinckney, with all her wide reading, study of philosophy, agricultural investigations, experiments in the production of indigo and silk, was first of all a genuine homemaker.  In fact, some times the manner in which these true-hearted women stood by their husbands, whether in prosperity or adversity, has a touch of the tragic in it.  Beautiful Peggy Shippen, for instance, wife of Benedict Arnold—­what a life of distress was hers!  Little more than a year of married life had passed when the disgrace fell upon her.  Hamilton in a letter to his future wife tells how Mrs. Arnold received the news of her husband’s guilt:  “She for a considerable time entirely lost her self control.  The General went up to see her.  She upbraided him with being in a plot to murder her child.  One moment she raved, another she melted into tears.  Sometimes she pressed her infant to her bosom and lamented its fate, occasioned by the imprudence of its father, in a manner that would have pierced insensibility itself.”  “Could I forgive Arnold for sacrificing his honor, reputation, duty, I could not forgive him for acting a part that must have forfeited the esteem of so fine a woman.  At present she almost forgets his crime in his misfortunes; and her horror at the guilt of the traitor is lost in her love of the man."[124]