It is necessary to suppose the reader familiar with the government and affairs generally in that peculiar palatinate, the colony of Lord Baltimore in Maryland. On the 9th of June, 1647, Leonard Calvert, the Governor of Maryland and vice-gerent of Lord Baltimore, died at St. Mary's, then the capital of the colony. He was attended during his fatal illness by his kinswomen, Mistresses Margaret and Mary Brent, and the former was made administrator to his estate. From this resulted an unprecedented incident, when in January, 1648, the new governor having called a session of the Assembly, Mistress Margaret Brent appeared in the council chamber and demanded "to have a vote in the House for herself and another as his Lordship's [Lord Baltimore] attorney." Upon the refusal of the Assembly, shocked at such a revolutionary demand, to consider the matter, Mistress Brent "protested in form against all the proceedings of that Assembly, unless she might be present and vote as aforesaid." Her protest did her very little good, unless it be well to have one's name handed down as a baffled reformer, but she thus won for herself at least a right to have her name placed on the pages of any volume dealing with the progress of the women of America. As far as there is any record, Margaret Brent was absolutely the first woman who ever even dreamed of being accorded equal rights of citizenship in a commonwealth of modern times, though antiquity could show other examples. She was at all events the first American woman to demand the privilege of the ballot and of a share in the government of her country; and her demand was based on the same foundation as that of her sisters in later times, that of the rights conferred by the care of property and a stake in the welfare of the commonwealth. The women reformers of our day should promote Margaret Brent to the position of their patron saint and protomartyr.
Let us resume the journey to Virginia and study as best we may the aspects of feminine culture as found in the great Southern colony. Unfortunately, even in general matters there is great dearth of authoritative record of Virginia colonial days, and in the matter of the doings of individual women, or even of the sex generally, we find but little of interest. We can only gather up the fragments and judge from them of the feast of which they tell. Though Maryland may be considered a southern colony, and was indeed so regarded, we must not take Margaret Brent as representative of the feminine status or spirit in the South. The women of Virginia in the early colonial days were less independent, less assertive, than their sisters of New England, where women, as we have seen, occasionally took the lead in matters of public import. It was not so in Virginia. There women were held in less account, though not in less respect, than in the northern colonies. This was caused by a multiplicity of reasons, chief among which is the fact that in Virginia there was far greater difference of rank and station than in the North. The consequence of this was that, while in New England the woman was a needful and recognized adjunct of the home, that unit on which was based the civilization of the North, in Virginia she was more of ornament than necessity. Hence, while in the councils of New England woman had made herself felt and recognized as a power and thus had come to be held in mental esteem as a sex, though not always overtly, as we have seen, she was in Virginia still the lady, the almsgiver, the comforter and inspirer, but not the fellow-laborer, the equal in danger and toil and therefore in counsel. For it cannot be denied, save by him who has studied history with blind eyes, that in the matter of descent the colonists of Virginia were far superior to those who made to blossom the bleak shores of Massachusetts Bay. On both records there are too many blots of birth to make it safe for the ancestral tuft-hunter to delve very deep into the past in his search on American soil; but the balance of rank is with the Virginian. Therefore it is that, while we instinctively regard the early New England woman, taken collectively, as a worker, a true colonist, we turn to the representative Virginia woman of the same day with the expectation of seeing a dame dressed in a short skirt of divers colors, with huge ruff and high-heeled shoes, with mincing gait and some pretty little affectations of speech and bearing, and we are not disappointed in the expectation.