So, at the close of the early period of colonization, when the land was beginning to thrill with the first stirrings of nationality, the Puritan woman, not yet a type though strongly individual, stood looking into the future as one that sees but does not fear the coming time of need and responsibility. No longer English, not yet American, she stood a transition product, but one that was to find result in a permanency that would lay the strongest impress upon the nation that was to arise in after years.
Meanwhile, there was advancing in another portion of our country--a portion so remote from New England as practically to be a different land in all but ties of birth--a feminine civilization of a type widely different from that of Massachusetts and Connecticut. The Northern culture was strongly and preeminently democratic in its origins; that of the South, before the close of the period now under consideration, had come to be as preeminently aristocratic. Beginning in the same way as that of Massachusetts,--even with lower origin, since for a time it threatened to be a mere penal settlement,--Virginia soon began to attract to herself a class of adventurers widely differing from those who sought religious liberty on the bleak shores of Plymouth Bay.
Differing from the general rule in such matters, in Virginia it was the better class which survived, the convict class being gradually submerged by the persistence of the higher grade of immigrants. It must not, however, be forgotten in recalling the origin of the Virginian feminine culture that even among the convicts there were many who were mere prisoners of state and were of birth and standing the equal of any free men whom they left behind them in England. Nor are origins of so much concern as results; it is only where the former are evidently and persistently causal that they need dwelling on in this work. Therefore, we will pass from Virginia in the act of formation to Virginia as settled by a people who were as individual in their way, though a most diverse one, as their brethren of New England; but before completing the journey from Massachusetts to Virginia let us pause for a moment at an intermediate colony, to commemorate the deed of another woman pioneer in America, Mistress Margaret Brent, of Maryland, the first American woman to demand equal rights with men in the councils of state, the prototype of every female reformer of later times.