European women

“ American womanhood still stood for all the best of its kind. Removed from the chief temptations offered by Old World conditions, it knew no taint, felt no canker at its heart. Its head was often in the wrong, but its heart never. The importation of European customs and manners, as well as of European fashions, had worked its will upon the outward bearing of the American woman; but European morals, then at a low ebb in all the Latin countries and not too high in England herself, had not yet succeeded in gaining foothold among our women. ”

“ In order to understand the position of women in the United States it is necessary to make a brief survey of the laws under which European women are governed, and the social theory on which their apparent advantages are based.
In the first place, the statement that in European countries a woman may succeed to the throne must be qualified. In three countries only, England, Spain, and Portugal, are women counted in the line of succession on terms approaching equality with men. In these three countries when a monarch dies leaving no sons his eldest daughter becomes the sovereign. ”

“ The gradual reduction in America of the servant class has served to develop women who keep books and music beside them at their domestic tasks as pioneer farmers kept muskets near them in the fields. They devote to homely duties the time devoted by European ladies to love, intrigue, public affairs; they preserve, thanks to countless labor-saving devices, for more or less intellectual pursuits the strength which among European women is consumed by habitual drudgery. ”

“ Their domination and influence ruins modern society.... The essentially European lady is a being who ought to have no existence at all; there ought, on the other hand, to be housewives and girls who hope to become such, and who are, in consequence, [Pg 42] brought up to domesticity by subordination. Just because there are ladies in Europe, women of a lower grade, who form, therefore, the great majority of the sex, are much more unhappy than they are in the East. ”

“ It is true that in some particulars American women do seem to be at a disadvantage with European women. With what looks like a higher regard for women's intelligence, England has bestowed upon them every measure of suffrage except the Parliamentary franchise. ”

“ Though America was spared the adoption of the notable extravagances of European fashions, yet everywhere, in every aspect, were to be seen European conditions of society. Even the type of American woman, preserved till now in certain peculiarities of mental attitude, began to fail. ”

“ And never again—you hear me, man—never again does our shop go back to men. The ten or twelve dollar skirt has made a hit with me! Have a cigarette?"
The net gain of women in this war, all over the world is, of course, a gain in fellowship.
But after all fellowship will be futile if it does not bear fruit. And the first fruit of the fellowship between men and women in Europe surely will be a wider and deeper influence of women upon the destinies of the European world. And who can doubt who knows woman, that her influence will be thrown first and heaviest toward a just and lasting peace. ”

“ It remains to be seen whether the extraordinary amount of work the European women are doing in [Pg 253] the service of their country, and the marked improvement in their health and physique, marks a stride forward in the physical development of the sex, being the result of latent possibilities never drawn upon before, or is merely the result of will power and exaltation, and bound to exhibit its definite limit as soon as the necessity is withdrawn. ”

“ THE EUROPEAN PLAN. Every mishap among American women brings out renewed suggestions of what maybe called the “European plan” in the training of young girls,—the plan, that is, of extreme seclusion and helplessness. It is usually forgotten, in these suggestions, that not much protection is really given anywhere to this particular class as a whole. Everywhere in Europe, the restrictions are of caste, not of sex. Even in Turkey, travellers tell us, women of the humbler vocations are not much secluded. ”

“ East European peasants are brutal in the assertion of marital rights, so when the poor immigrant woman, noticing the lot of the American wife, comes to the point of rebelling against the overlarge family, she runs the risk of rough treatment. Some nationalities are almost Oriental in the way they seclude their women. It is significant that the Ruthenian, Polish, Portuguese, South Italian, and Greek female employees who have lived here from five to ten years are further [237] behind their men-folk in speaking English than the women from northern and western Europe. ”

“ To what nation, I say, is due the chivalrous respect to women which is the surest sign of civilization, and which was unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans, except to the Germans, who even in their most uncivilized state paid such veneration to their women as to consult them as oracles on all occasions and to admit them to their councils? ”

“ It is incredible to the European how very much the unselfish and high-minded women of America are able to accomplish, and how so many of them can combine a vast deal of practical work with living in the midst of bustling social affairs, and themselves entertaining perhaps in a brilliant way. ”

“ In the Orient and the Far East woman is almost without exception a plaything or a beast of burden; and to a degree that would incense us Europeans. In the uncivilized countries, and in the countries of non-European civilization, the majority of the women are insufficiently nourished; in all cases more poorly than the men. Early marriages enervate the women. ”

“ Naturally, one of the chief reasons why American women have so great a liking for European society is to be found in the fact of the far more important position that married ladies occupy in that society than they do with us. ”

“ These women never again can return to the lives they have left, to the sheltering positions from which the awful needs of this war have driven them. The cultivated European woman, who I think on the whole was the highest product of our civilization, has gone. She has fallen to the American level. ”

“ But the prudery of the British women excited the admiration of foreigners, thoroughly satiated with the arts, the flaunting manners, and the gilded charms of the young women of the European capitals.
One foreigner is found recording his astonishment at the diversity in the manner of walking of the ladies, and sees in it an index of their characters; for, says he, when they are desirous only of being seen, they walk together, for the most part without speaking. He suggests that the stiffness and formality of their demeanor when not thus on dress parade are laid aside for greater naturalness. ”

“ Chivalry and knighthood and their still surviving but greatly impaired counterparts are peculiarly Nordic traits, and feudalism, class distinctions and race pride among Europeans are traceable for the most part to the north.
The social status of woman varies largely with race but here religion plays a part. In the Roman Republic and in ancient Germany women were held in high esteem. In the Nordic countries of to-day women’s rights have received much more recognition than among the southern nations with their traditions of Latin culture. ”

“ That does not-only concern politicians, but also women. I do not speak of the fact that American women can gain an infinitely greater store of conceptions from the literature of Germany and France, from the profound discussions of the social and humane questions in Europe, than from the limited literature of materialistic America. But I should especially like to make it clear to them that it is indirectly for their greatest interest to see the ideas which have been awakened through German and French literature translated to action and life by the victory of the European revolution. ”

“ I believe that according to character as well as physique the French and the Germans, i.e., French men and German women, or German men and French women, are above all destined to establish by intermingling the new generation of a nobler race on European soil. ”

“ In a word, there is no part of Europe where an American would not see the novel sight of females laboring in the fields, or carrying burdens in the streets, without a bonnet to shield them from sun or rain.
But the European structure of society differs from that of Asiatic nations or savage tribes in the comparative equality of labor between the sexes; if poor women are obliged to work hard, poor men are so likewise; they do not, like Orientals, sit in idleness, while women perform nearly all the drudgery. ”

“ For the jealous and voluptuous Asiatic, women are but the sensual instruments of his secret pleasures.... Does the European, in spite of the apparent deference which he affects towards women, really treat them with more respect? While we refuse them a sensible education, while we feed their minds with tedium and trifles, while we allow them to busy themselves only with playthings and fashions and adornments, [Pg 197] while we seek to inspire them only with the taste for frivolous accomplishments, do we not show our real contempt, while we mask it with a show of deference and respect? ”

“ The accusation of piety calls for no rebuttal; and that of freedom was caused by the confounding, as was natural in European thought, of innocent simplicity with recklessness of deportment. The social manners of American women of the present is a subject of philosophy rather than history; but the fact of the freedom of intercourse between the sexes may be touched upon, since, however strange and reprobatory it may seem to European eyes, it is as much a national "institution" as our form of government itself, while its causes lie in the story of the past. ”

“ Ought one to suggest for the honor of French ladies that in the time of peace all other countries should import into France a certain number of their honest women, and that these countries should mainly consist of England, Germany and Russia? But the European nations would in that case attempt to balance matters by demanding that France should export a certain number of her pretty women. ”

“ To an outsider who has only known European Americans, the most noticeable thing about American women is their freedom from native soil. They are equally well equipped whether their nationality is transferred from Russia to Rome, Vienna, Roumania or Paris. ”

“ The number of matches between American girls and Europeans that turn out badly is small compared to the number of those that are perfectly satisfactory. It is astonishing to see how many of our girls, who have been brought up in the belief of the American woman's prerogative of absolute supremacy in the domestic circle, when they are thus married change and seem quite content to relinquish not a few of their ideas of perfectly untrammelled independence, and to take that more subordinate position in matrimony which European life and customs allot to women. ”

“ That, I think, in large part explains the fascination which American women undoubtedly exercise over a considerable class of European men. In the European man the American woman often recognises for the first time the male of her species. Unaccustomed at home to as general a level of culture and feeling as she finds among the educated gentlemen of Europe, she likes their society and makes her preference felt by them. Now man is a vain animal. You are a man yourself, and must recognise at once the truth of the proposition. ”

“ Here Frank and Greek women are sometimes admitted to exhibit goods and jewelry for sale, and Jewesses skilled in fortune-telling, amulets, and love-potions, are always welcome.
A visit from any lady of distinction, either from a [Pg 60] foreign nation or some distant part of the empire, is an extraordinary occasion, and conducted with much ceremony. If the visiter be a European, they manifest the greatest curiosity concerning those Christian countries where they have been told each man has but one wife. ”

“ Again, no European nation has quite so far sequestered and subordinated women as has Spain; and yet the whole tone of Spanish literature is conspicuously grave and decorous. This plainly indicates that race has much to do with the matter, and that the mere admission or exclusion of women is but one among several factors. In short, it is easy to make out a case by a rhetorical use of the facts on one side; but, if we look at all the facts, the matter presents greater difficulties. ”

“ Prior to coming to Europe I had supposed that the women of the United States had made more progress along these lines than those of any other country. But I was mistaken. The women of Europe are far ahead of the women of America in the equality of the sexes. A women in continental Europe not only has the right to go out in the field and labor, but she can work on the roads, and she can engage in any business that a man can. In Italy I saw women harnessed alongside of dogs and in Holland I find them harnessed to canal-boats, the same as men. ”

“ In western Europe, then, new races with new ideals were forming the nations that to-day are England, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Austria. It is interesting to note what some of these barbarians thought about women and what place they assigned them. ”

“ But what am I to think of the women of Europe? The artful composition of their complexion, the ornaments with which they deck themselves, the care they have of their bodies, the desire to please which occupies them continually, are so many stains on their virtue, and affronts to their husbands. ”

“ I was as profoundly interested in the great political currents of Europe, seen and unseen, as any man—or as any intelligent woman of European society. Moreover, I had the art of life down to a fine point, and I had not forgotten that even in friendship men are drawn to the subtle woman who knows how to envelop herself in a certain mystery. And European men are always eager to talk with an accomplished woman, even if she has no longer the power to stir their facile passions. ”