384 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ning, becomes gradually superior to him, by the leisure which he 

 creates for her and the use she makes of it, in intellectual culti- 

 vation, in the variety and extent of her knowledge, and by the 

 lead which she is able to take and keep. She is the resultant of 

 a concurrence of circumstances which have not yet been found 

 united in a like degree anywhere else, and which have all con- 

 tributed to make her a superior type of the race. In her are 

 combined and fused the characteristic traits which, more special- 

 ized in the man, appear accentuated, magnified, exaggerated, as 

 well by the free play of natural instincts as by the necessity of 

 furnishing himself with arms in the struggle for existence and of 

 demanding from them the maximum of force and of practical 

 utility. In the woman these characteristics persist, but they are 

 tempered and held in ; she smooths their angles and polishes 

 their facets, and of a dull pebble makes a precious stone. The 

 constituent parts remain the same, but a judicious cutting sets 

 the luster and beauty of the stone in clear relief. 



Those who find more to blame than to approve in the Ameri- 

 can young woman, who are shocked at the freedom of her ways, 

 at her independence, at her scorn of social conventions, at her 

 luxurious tastes and her fondness for admiration, have often made 

 those traits the text of their accusations against the democratic 

 institutions of the United States. According to their reasoning, 

 the result could not be otherwise, given the same premises as a 

 point of departure, namely, the customary association of young 

 women and young men, equality of the sexes raised to an axiom 

 abdication of parental dictatorship, independence of children, and 

 freedom of matrimonial choice. The eccentricities noticed by 

 them are, in their view, the inevitable consequences of a democ- 

 racy hostile by instinct to the principle of authority, endeavoring 

 to reduce it everywhere to its minimum of action and control, ex- 

 tolling equality with an apostolic zeal and practicing it with the 

 fervor of a neophyte. And now these pretended apostles of equal- 

 ity, these self-styled levelers of privilege, have ended with re-estab- 

 lishing inequality with the advantage on the woman's side, with 

 making her the eminently privileged person, and, reversing the 

 Asiatic conception, of elevating her into a despot and converting 

 the man into a subject. It seems to us, however, that the influ- 

 ence of political institutions on social habits has been very much 

 exaggerated. Unstable and mobile, the former change at the 

 caprice or the passions or the necessities of the moment. Not so 

 with that aggregation of usages and customs which rests upon 

 uninterrupted traditions, upon a long transmission. They un- 

 dergo modification, but slowly ; they are the results of the experi- 

 ence of centuries, and never proceed by jumps in their evolution. 

 More of the fundamentally primitive than is usually believed re- 



