We have now come to the period in our story when there will be no longer distinction between the woman of the North and her sister in the South in the things which have thus far kept them apart in type. They will always preserve certain racial, climatic, and inherited traits peculiar to their respective sections; but they will be none the less in mass the women of America. Even when we shall be forced to record the great dissension which separated our country into two nations and accentuated all the sectional traits of its womankind as of its men there will be but different expressions of womanhood to record, not different types,--different conditions of existence, having effect of direction, not differing spirits and impulses. It was in the days before the darkening of the shadow of the Revolution that the American woman, untrammelled by conditions of residence or descent, began to appear as a type. She was very admirable, but she was no longer unique.
Though the present chapter in its title purports to tell of the days of the war for independence, in reality this is but an arbitrary heading, for we shall approach those days from the distance of a quarter of a century. Not that there were at the beginning of this period any distinct limits of demarcation from the days immediately preceding it: the contrary was the case. But it is needful for the chronicler that he have some point of departure in each of his progressive steps toward the goal of to-day. The opening period of this chapter, therefore, is about the year 1750. There are reasons for this, apart from the arbitrary whim of the historian. Though not exactly in the year dividing the century, yet about that time there began to be manifested a spirit of American nationality such as had never before been shown. For the first time the country began to appear to itself in the aspect of something more than an aggregation of colonies, and to examine itself whether it were not in truth a nation. From the Canadas to the Carolinas there began to be a feeling of cohesion, a tardy and half-awake recognition of unity of interests and race. There had come about a much-fractured and thinly stretched chain of communication and continuity from north to south, and this was having the effect of binding together the scattered settlements in a feeling of union, which was in a way effectual in the shaping of the history of women in America.