American Thumb-prints: Mettle of Our Men and WomenStephens, Kate
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American Thumb-prints: Mettle of Our Men and Women
Stephens, Kate
National characteristics, American; University of Kansas; Women -- Social conditions
With whatsoever or whomsoever she is in sympathy this woman is apt
to be a partisan. To husband, parents, and children there could be
no more devoted adherent. Her conscience, developed by introspective
and subjective pondering, has for her own actions abnormal size and
activity. It is always alert, always busy, always prodding, and not
infrequently sickened by its congested activity. Duty to those about
her, and industry for the same beneficiaries, are watchwords of its
strength; and to fail in a mote’s weight is to gain condemnation of
two severest sorts--her own and the community’s. The opinion of the
community in which she lives is her second almighty power.
In marriage she often exemplifies that saying of Euripides which
Stobæus has preserved among the lavender-scented leaves of his
Florilegium--“A sympathetic wife is a man’s best possession.” She
has mental sympathy--a result of her tense nervous organization, her
altruism in domestic life, her strong love, and her sense of duty,
justice, and right.
In body she belongs to a people which has spent its physical force and
depleted its vitality. She is slight. There is lack of adipose tissue,
reserve force, throughout her frame. Her lungs are apt to be weak,
waist normal, and hips undersized.
She is awkward in movement. Her climate has not allowed her relaxation,
and the ease and curve of motion that more enervating air imparts.
This is seen even in public. In walking she holds her elbows set in an
angle, and sometimes she steps out in the tilt of the Cantabrigian man.
In this is perhaps an unconscious imitation, a sympathetic copying, of
an admirable norm; but it is graceless in petticoats. As she steps she
knocks her skirt with her knees, and gives you the impression that her
leg is crooked, that she does not lock her knee-joint. More often she
toes in than out.
She has a marvellously delicate, brilliant, fine-grained skin. It is
innocent of powder and purely natural. No beer in past generations has
entered its making, and no port; also, little flesh. In New England it
could not be said, as a London writer has coarsely put it, that a woman
may be looked upon as an aggregate of so many beefsteaks.
Her eyes have a liquid purity and preternatural brightness; she is the
child of γλαυχῶπις Athena, rather than of βοῶπις Hera, Pronuba, and
ministress to women of more luxuriant flesh. The brown of her hair
inclines to the ash shades.
Her features would in passport wording be called “regular.” The
expression of her face when she lives in more prosperous communities,
where salaries are and an assured future, is a stereotyped smile. In
more uncertain life and less fortunate surroundings, her countenance
shows a weariness of spirit and a homesickness for heaven that make
your soul ache.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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