Social history; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
One feels about them a dreary atmosphere of homelessness. As the writer
of the Potiphar papers, while watching a gay young mother's performance
in the "German," was constrained to think of a complaining babe in her
nursery, so, in hearing those ladies boast of their enjoyments, one
cannot help remembering with commiseration the wifeless husband and
daughterless father at home, who works like a steam-fan to keep these
butterflies in motion.
More sad still are my reflections, when I hear that numbers of American
girls, with large or even moderate fortunes, go abroad and allow it to
be known that they seek a husband with a title. These are to be had, of
various grades, if the pecuniary consideration be only sufficient. And
so many of our laborious men of business work hard in order to earn for
themselves the luxury of a titled son-in-law, who has not the ability to
earn his own support, and would scorn to do it if he had.
American women with money are at a premium in fashionable Europe. Even
without this supreme merit, they are favorites. A London journal calls
attention to the fact that some of the leading ladies in the fashionable
London of to-day are Americans. The versatility of mind and ease of
manner which a free and social life develops, appear in strong contrast
with the results of the more formal education, which are often seen in
the opposite extremes of timidity and assurance.
As our young men are often entrapped, while abroad, into marriages which
prove to be very unwise and unsuitable, I wish very much that we might
bring and keep our young people in a better understanding with each
other, so that even the most ambitious among them should be content to
marry with their peers, and abide in the home of their fathers.
I have been surprised, at some periods of my late visit to Europe, to
perceive the growing interest of thinking people in all that is most
characteristic of American progress. Again and again, in private and in
public, I have found myself invited to discourse concerning the happy
country in which popular education has been so long established, that
its results are no longer putative, but ascertained and verified. The
country in which the fairest woman, provided she be a modest one, can
walk abroad by day or night, unmolested and unsuspected, the country in
which women have acquired the courage to think for themselves, and to
stand by each other.
These invitations, though not given in derision, yet seemed akin to the
Hebrew refrain, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!" And when I related
the facts familiar to all of us, to those who listened with
half-incredulous wonder, it was, indeed, like singing the Lord's song of
freedom in a strange land.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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