Puritans we're in their own churches, and democracy in congregational church government led logically to democracy and political government. The town meeting, in which adult males met together and each man voted, was a showcase and a classroom for democracy. New England villagers from the outset gathered regularly in their meetinghouses to elect their officials, appoint school masters, and discuss such mundane matters as road repairs. The town meeting, observed Thomas Jefferson, was “the best school of political liberty the world ever saw.”

in the eventual US in the 1970s women would struggle just to be given a job in the mines