Longfellow's use of his ancestors' courtship was historically accurate, but The Courtship of Miles Standish is not history.
It is a myth based on historic events.
The poem was also contemporary, drawing on then current American thought.
While Priscilla, seated at her wheel, could not have been carding "wool like a snow-drift" (there were no sheep in Plymouth in the Aldens' time), she was representative of the 1850s idea of women as more than passive domestics.
