This idealism has naturally part also in the fact that, for example,
two-thirds of the women who have gone through college in America do
not marry, and find in club life a compensation for domestic life. But
other motives also must often play a part here, from the desire to
devote herself entirely to one of the lifeworks serviceable to
mankind, to the egoism of spiritually barren young girls with its
distaste for burdens and restraint.
A keen-sighted observer who recently spent a half year in North
America corroborated what many have already stated: that the student
and working young American girls devote themselves with true passion
to the cultivation of their beauty, their toilette, their flirtations.
All this belongs for her to the “Fine Arts” and as such is an end
sufficient in itself, while for European women these arts, as a rule,
are still means for alluring men to marriage. While study or work
often makes European women in outer sense less “womanly,” although her
soul always guards its full power to love, in America the reverse is
the case: the outer appearance is bewitchingly womanly, but the soul
no longer vibrates for love. The sexual sterility which Maudsley
already prophesied thirty years ago, when he spoke about the “sexless
ants,” has been partly realised, partly chosen voluntarily. In Europe
it still frequently happens that a young woman who has put love aside
for the sake of study or work is suddenly seized by an irresistible
passion; in America, on the contrary, this is extremely rare. Women
students look down upon the less cultured men, who ordinarily finish
their studies earlier in order to earn a livelihood. The sympathy
which they need, women find more easily in their own sex. The
unmarried have quite the same social position as the married and do
not desire children. If they finally marry, it is ordinarily because a
more brilliant position is offered them than the one which they could
create themselves, and the man is then considered and treated as a
money-getter.
My authority emphasises also that the young students or working girls
are ordinarily less original, of less personal significance, less
individually developed, than the older women, especially women’s
rights women, who often have not studied but have grown grey in
marriage and motherhood, in self-development and in social work. The
interesting significant American feminists were women between the ages
of fifty and ninety; the woman of the present generation, however,
which now enjoys the fruits of the work of the older generation, is,
in spite of excellent scholarship and great working proficiency, less
a woman and less a human being, less a personality.
These wholly fresh observations, which were communicated to me during
the printing of my book, seem to me to confirm so strongly my point of
view that I wish to repeat them here.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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