time. Half of the day's earnings were accounted an equivalent for diet,
and contractors for feeding gangs in agriculture, among sailors, or
wherever the system was adopted, allowed seven and one-half pence per
day a head for men and women alike. Women servants received ten
shillings a year wages, and an allowance of four shillings additional
for clothing. The working day still remained as fixed by the law late in
the fifteenth century,--from five A.M. to eight P.M., from March to
September, with half an hour for breakfast, and an hour and a half for
dinner.

These rates gradually altered, but for women hardly at all, the wages
during the eighteenth century ranging from four to six pounds a year.
The colony, however, gave opportunities unknown to the mother country,
and gardening and the cultivation of small vegetables seem to have
fallen much into the hands of women.[9] They had studied the best
methods for hotbeds, and grew early vegetables in these, the first
record of this being in 1759.

Gloves were by this time made at home, buttons covered, and many small
industries conducted, all connected with the manufacture and making up
of clothing. Patriotic spinning occupied many; and the "Boston
News-Letter" has it that often seventy linen-wheels were employed at one
gathering. The agitation caused by the Stamp Act turned the attention of
all women to the production of cloth as a domestic business. Worcester,
Mass., in 1780 formed an association for the spinning and weaving of
cotton, and a jenny was bought by subscription.[10]

Prices by this time had risen, and in 1776 the Andover records mention
that a Miss Holt was paid eighteen shillings for spinning seventy-two
skeins, and seven shillings eleven pence for weaving nineteen yards of