Frau Migerka's first letter is devoted to the women of America, whom she acknowledges to be pretty even beyond their reputation and her expectation, wider awake and better educated than the men, and beautifully dressed, although her sober taste is shocked by the display of jewelry and trinkets in public conveyances and places of amusement. She censures the rage for adornment of the women of the working-classes, and the unfitness of a woman who is maid-of-all-work, whether in her own house or that of an employer, appearing in the street arrayed with pretensions to style and elegance which belong to people of very different means and scale of living. Frau Migerka had heard of the extravagance, love of luxury and idleness of our women in all classes, but inclines to disbelieve the last charge, and to give them credit for working much harder than they themselves admit. She suspects them of being ashamed of household occupations, and shows us first the American woman, who, after drudging the whole week, sallies forth on Sunday peacockwise, "looking like a real lady" (as used to be said before "ladies" took to advertising their desire for a cook's or chambermaid's situation), and then the good German housewife, who, after "cooking and cleaning all day long, stirring with spoons and clattering with plates, patching the children's clothes and darning the goodman's hose, has no ambition beyond relating her achievements to her next-door neighbors over a friendly gossip-cup of coffee." It is a lifelike picture of the two types: no right-minded person will deny the folly and vanity of the American city woman, who does not lack mentors and censors in her own country; but whether the German housewife, after her day of multifarious scrubbing, scouring and sewing, might not find something better to talk about in the evening, Frau Migerka could learn from some of our Yankee farmers' wives. She considers American wives very inferior to German ones; and there, again, she is right, as far as industry and self-forgetfulness are concerned; but she also considers American husbands as in a condition of subservience and degradation, of which flagrant instances are their not daring to smoke in their wives' rooms, and going to market carrying the basket. How wrong and inverted is such a position! No, no: if there must be slaves, Nature has settled of which sex they shall be by appointing that the weak shall serve the strong. Therefore she accounts for the respect which the unworthy fair sex receives in America, like several other things which she cannot otherwise explain, as being a matter of tradition, the habit of a reverence which our foremothers rightly received from men for whom they had sacrificed everything but principle.