ation, he wrote long in advance of the arrival of immigrants other than the "English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes" whose ability to blend into a single nation impressed him so much (40). And he wrote prior to any reasoned consideration of the presence of millions of African slaves and Native Americans in the mix. Nor did those who thought about this frontier spirit in retrospect give much thought to the fact that masses of anonymous, hard-pressed immigrants from Eastern Europe and Asia fed the insatiable maw of the Industrial Revolution. The very existence of millions of people, including women as well, whose rights were nonexistent or tightly circumscribed was simply ignored while there were free lands and new industrial and commercial prospects open to "everyone."
But when the great push ended, symbolically speaking, with the settlement of the continent from side to side the still young, but very wealthy, nation had to turn and face all the people who had been, and were being, exploited: the women who had raised and educated
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