Responsibilities.

The confrontation with the wilderness in colonial America involved females as well as males. Women were as apt as men to use the commonsense, practical approach to knowledge so necessary for life in early America. Women practiced crafts and manufactured goods to feed and clothe the family. Early Americans wore clothing made or mended with wool or flax thread produced by a woman's work at the spinning wheel. Variety at mealtime depended on the farmwife's ability as a horticulturist in the family garden. The farmwife was simultaneously a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, cook, seamstress, and gardener. Baking bread, for example, was something of a science, requiring the perfect temperature in the fireplace and the right quantities of yeast, water, and grain. Acquiring yeast itself was a chore. The housewife used yeast from old dough or, in the words of one historian, "from the foamy...