THE AMERICAN WOMAN. 385 



mains common to the Americans and the English in their rela- 

 tions to women; and the large place given to woman in the 

 United States, and the greater independence she enjoys, flow as 

 much from the change of medium as from the advanced intel- 

 lectual position which she was able to take at the beginning and 

 has long held. 



But as the United States grows and becomes more refined, 

 the difference between the sexes in this respect is diminishing. 

 Yet while man has to a large extent recovered possession of the 

 vantage-ground in mental cultivation occupied by woman, and 

 while his stronger faculties, more robust organization, and more 

 sustained will give him the superiority everywhere else, there is 

 a social domain from which he could not and would not dispossess 

 her — a domain hers by tradition and by concessions which he has 

 made and she has accepted and extended. At this point becomes 

 manifest the contrast between the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin 

 races, the antithesis between the conception of the East and that 

 of the West, the two poles of which are Asia and the United 

 States, while its mean term is found in central and southern Eu- 

 rope. To these two poles correspond, in effect, a maximum and a 

 minimum of human personality. This personality is nowhere so 

 intense as in the United States, and nowhere less so than in the 

 extreme East. England transmitted to the United States, with 

 that basis of personality peculiar to the English race and more 

 accentuated there than anywhere else in Europe, that respect for 

 individuality which made itself manifest at an early period in 

 British laws and institutions. 



Cantoned in her family and social domain, the American 

 woman has till this time made only rare and timid incursions into 

 the field of politics. But in the field in which she usually moves, 

 we are struck, on a close examination of the various phases and 

 details of life in the United States, with the important place she 

 occupies. This is true to a higher degree in modest conditions, in 

 the agricultural districts, in the farms and settlements and in 

 populations of working people, than in the large cities. Not that 

 these, too, do not contain curious types for study, essentially 

 original, and tending in a high degree to reconcile the exigencies 

 of the external features of modern life with lofty aspirations and 

 an active philanthropy. 



Given, as the points of departure for woman's position in the 

 United States, equality with man, intellectual and social predomi- 

 nance, with the charms of her sex refined and developed by 

 natural selection, by unions between young women free to choose 

 and a race of colonists energetic, vigorous, deeply imbued with 

 religious convictions, and respecting the conjugal bond, woman 

 must necessarily appear, at any given moment, as the definite ex- 



VOL. XLIII. — 26 



