5. American Duchesses - Page 2

saying this I take my life in my hands. I shall be
prepared to defend myself from the infuriated Westerner with the usual
argument, which I shall carry about loaded in all its chambers in my
right-hand pocket. I am also aware that less infuriated Easterners,
choosing their own more familiar weapon, will inundate my leisure with
sardonic inquiries whether I don't consider Oliver Wendell Holmes or
Charles Eliot Norton (thus named in full) the equal in culture of the
average American woman. Well, I frankly admit these cases and thousands
like them; indeed I have had the good fortune to number among my
personal acquaintances many American gentlemen whose chivalrous breeding
would have been conspicuous (if you will believe it) even at Marlborough
House. I will also allow that in New York, in Boston, and less
abundantly in other big towns of America, men of leisure, men of
culture, and men of thought are to be found, as wide-minded and as
gentle-natured as this race of ours makes them. But that doesn't alter
the general fact that, taking them in the lump, American men stand a
step or two lower in the scale of humanity than American women. One need
hardly ask why. It is because the men are almost all immersed and
absorbed in business, while the women are fine ladies who stop at home,
and read, and see, and interest themselves widely in numberless
directions.

The consequence is that nowhere, as a rule, does the gulf between the
sexes yawn so wide as in America. One can often observe it in the
brothers and sisters of the same family. And it runs in the opposite
direction from the gulf in Europe. With us, as a rule, the men are
better educated, and more likely to have read and seen and thought
widely, than the women. In America, the men are generally so steeped in
affairs as to be materialised and encysted; they take for the most part
a hard-headed, solid-silver view of everything, and are but little
influenced by abstract conceptions. Their horizon is bounded by the rim
of the dollar. Nay, owing to the eager desire to get a good start by
beginning life early, their education itself is generally cut short at a
younger age than their sisters'; so that, even at the outset, the girls
have often a decided superiority in knowledge and culture. Amanda reads
Paul Bourget and John Oliver Hobbes; she has some slight tincture of
Latin, Greek, and German; while Cyrus knows nothing but English and
arithmetic, the quotations for prime pork and the state of the market
for Futures. Add to this that the women are more sensitive, more
delicate, more naturally refined, as well as unspoilt by the trading
spirit, and you get the real reasons for the marked and, in some ways,
unusual superiority of the American woman.

That, I