'AMERICA’S FAVOURED WOMEN.

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 72, 18 December 1928, Page 16 (Supplement)

'AMERICA’S FAVOURED WOMEN.

An Englishmen’s View.

“It is not true to say,” writes Count Keyserling, “that there are no class distinctions in America. There are two great classes, men and women; and the class of tho women is the superior.” lie writes, of course, as a European observer; but few Americans, men or women, would challenge his view. The belief in the essential superiority of the female persist, indeed, practically throughout the United States, and no one can begin to understand the fabric of that great and complex country until he clearly recognises its existence.

Woman has attained her position in America both through her numerical inferiority to man, which has continued through the nation’s history, and from the blending of modern ideas with the innate conservatism which, in spite of much belief to the contrary, is one of the most important ingredients in the national make-up.

In no civilised country more than in 'America is the “old-fashioned,” the “Victorian,” view of women as beings to be set on a pedestal and adored, to be kept apart from the daily rough-and-tumble of existence, more largely maintained. In no other country are all those emotions that are grouped under the nebulous head of “chivalry” more widely kept alive. But with this conservatism, this keeping to the traditional paths, of the American people marches its progressiveness, its desire not to be backward in anything that tends to the amelioration of the human race, and nowhere has this racial impulse been more clearly displayed than in regard to the position of women. In consequence, State after State has passed legislation that puts women on an equality with men in matters of divorce, of the holding of property, of politics. There are a few exceptions to the general rule. In South Carolina, for example, divorce is not contemplated by tho statute books at all; but then scarcely any generalisations that one applies to America as a whole can be taken as relevant to South Carolina or some other of the States of the Old iSonih.

Elsewhere, woman’s rights in the courts are secure both in the sentimental (the old) and in the legal (the new) aspect; and in some States such as California intelligent and prominent individuals from among the women themselves have been heard to question whether the process has not gone too far; whether divorce laws that allow the woman to take half her ex-hus-band's property, whoever brings the

action, do not tend to make divorce .something of a profession ; and whether the scales are not iu this and other instances tilted unfairly against the male.

But when all is said and done, it is the psychology of the thing that really matters. I saw a woman who had killed her husband with a bread knife on trial for her life in Baltimore. In England she would either have been hanged or sentenced to life imprisonment. In Baltimore, her counsel had only to produce a few isolated, and singularly unconvincing, instances of “ill-treatment” on tho part of the murdered man for her to escape with a two years’ sentence for manslaughter. In some States she would have got off altogether.’

A cutting before me as I write relates how a Savannah (Georgia) Judge dismissed a charge of murder against a woman because the defendant had “been badly mistreated by her husband during their married life, and I think she was justified in killing , her husband.”

No sincere English friend of America, such as I can claim to be, could withhold his approval from a general system in which all legal, economic and intellectual discriminations against women as such are removed; and the spectacle of tens of thousands of American girls making their way successfully against male competition in business and professions all over the States is a heartening one. Yet there are times when one is tempted to doubt, to question.

The fundamental basis of American married life in the great bulk of the nation is that the woman has all the privileges she wants and no responsibilities beyond those which she decides to take upon herself. The husband’s duty may be summed up in a phrase: he has to make the money; and the more unobtrusively he does it, and the less disturbance he makes in the daily life of his wife in the process, the better.

The segregation of the sexes, after the days of youth, is remarkable. The husband goes early to his office and spends long hours there—not necessarily in back-breaking toil. The wife has her own circle of friends, her clubs, usually her own car. One would imagine that the scarcity of servants would keep her unduly tied to her domestic duties. In actuality it reduces them to a point where they almost cease to exist. —l’. lIEWITT-MYRING.

Tommy has an awful pain, So has sister Ruth; They’ve both been at mince pies again, That's the candid truth!