when hardly more than a child, discovered the secret of bleaching and
braiding the meadow grass of Dedham, her native town. Others were
taught, and a regular business of supplying the want for summer hats and
bonnets was organized, and has grown to its present large proportions.

At this period women widowed by the fortune of war or forced by the
absence of all the male members of the family on the field, were often
found in business. The mother of Thomas Perkins of Salem, one of the
great American merchants, left widowed in 1778, took her husband's place
in the counting-house, managed business, despatched ships, sold
merchandise, wrote letters, all with such commanding energy that the
solid Hollanders wrote to her as to a man.[12] The record of one day's
work of Mary Moody Emerson, born in 1777, reads:--

"Rose before light every morn; read Butler's Analogy; commented on
the Scriptures; read in a little book Cicero's Letters--a few
touches of Shakespeare--washed, carded, cleaned house and
baked."[13]

There is another woman no less busy, a member of the distinguished Nott
family, who did work in her house and helped her boys in the fields. In
midwinter, with neither money nor wool in the house, one of the boys
required a new suit. The mother sheared the half-grown fleece from a
sheep, and in a week had spun, wove, and made it into clothing, the
sheep being protected from cold by a wrappage made of braided straw.

Details like this would be out of place here did they not serve to
accent the fact of the concentration of industries under the home roof,
and the necessity that existed for this. But a change was near at hand,
and it dates from the first bale of cotton grown in the country.