THE AMERICAN WOMAN

Otago Witness, Issue 3882, 7 August 1928, Page 76

THE AMERICAN WOMAN

She is soft and small-boned. She has pretty feet, slim ankles, a thin voice with a lilt in it. It rises and falls, as she tips her head this way and that and waves her hands. She is ne v er still, but always graceful. She understands movements but not repose. She dances beautifully. She talks incessantly. When her dancing days are over she takes to a rocking chair, or to bridge, or to reforming the world. She fears silence and solitude. Child of skyscrapers, kinemas, prairies, motor cars, steam whistles, and saxophones, she has a craving for noise, activity, and crowds. Her idea of a good time is a whirl. If things round her are moving fast enough, if her husband is getting rich quick enough, if they are asked to enough parties, can go to enough theatres, can get about .rapidly in a car, if there is always something different to look forward to, she is happy, or at anyrate not too discontented, for she is really the least happy of women. Her main craving is variety She must have change. Everything round her must change or be changed often if she is to feel alive. Change is in the air she breathes. In her country it means growth. In herself it means the opposite, but she has not yet learned to stand still and develop as a plant does, naturally, in the turmoil of her world. On the contrary, she automatically reacts to the ceaseless pressure, changes houses, friends, husbands, clothes, religion, and ideas for new ones, and reflects in herself the element .of hysteria in American progress. Things must be new to be interesting to her. Antiques must be new antiques, new that is to her, just arrived from the other side of the Atlantic, otherwise she won’t look at them. And they are new. And t'.ere are always new ones to be seen, coveted, bought, new Chinese potteries, Ming or Tang, new Chippendale chairs, signed, new Rembrandts, new Romneys. It is the same with cathedrals. The charm of the Cathedral of Chartres lies in its newness for her. She will go a long way to see it, but once she has seen it it becomes an old story. She doesn’t want to see it again.

I stop short, doubtful, a little con-science-stricken. My composite photograph is not a good likeness. There is no such 5 ng, perhaps, as a photograph of the American woman. Perhaps there is not yet even such a thing as the American woman. In any case I am not, I feel, drawing a lifelike portrait. I will begin again, this time with a definite type in mind, the serious selfsupporting professional or business woman of the United States. She is the best of them all. There are, I believe, 6.000,000 women in business America, and I don’t know how many equipped for professions are turned out of universities every year. These are the happy women of America. They are in tune with their country and their age. Their country believes in work and workers, and their age is one of production and experiment, and since there is enough work for everyone they find no antagonism on the part of the men, nor do they suffer any soc'al stigma, if they belong to the upper classes, from being workers. Doctors, lawyers, sanitary experts, shopkeepers, or business women engaged in any ordinary trade keep their individuality, find little or no difficulty in enjoying life, go to balls or smart dinners at night, to their offices in the morning, remain well dressed, witty, frivolous at the right time, and human. The democratic, spirit of America supports them, helps them, respects them. It is a reality. The mind of America does not understand idleness, but it understands work, and it approves of these women who are helping to develop the vast resources of the country, who are a vital and harmonious part of the great bounding energy, enthusiasm, and optimism of the nation. Work is in the air. Work is fun. A business career is a lark. Fortunes are to be made, to-day, to-morrow. Everything is on the move. The stream of life is a roaring torrent, and these women are carried along with it, laughing, 'happy, gallant. They are like the logriders standing in mid-stream on the floating logs that go rushing down the rivers from the forest lands in the spring.

And so it is not fair to judge the American nation by its leisured class, because America despises leisure and the class that indulges it. And truly it is an insignificant class. Our hostess at a luncheon in Chicago said to my husband, “ Let me introduce the leisured class of Chicago,” and led him to two elderly gentlemen with white hair. She forgot the women of the party. America’s leisured class is almost entirely composed of women, and that is why America in the bottom of its young, ruthless, ignorant, and romantic heart despises all women a little, and what are called " society women ” greatly.

The society woman of America is a definite and peculiar type. She is not a Great Lady yet, or at anyrate very rarely. Some great ladies there are in the country, but they do not stand out as Englishwomen of the same type do in the public eye. It is the society women who occupy the public eye in America, and. what the American public asks of them is that they should be

decorative, and they are decorative. They are more decorative than any women in the world.

They have a great sense for clothes. This question of clothes is very important to them, also that of houses. The American society woman’s background is almost entirely made up of beautiful houses full of beautiful clothes. You cannot separate her from her clothes and her 'house. If you do she has no social position left. She is recognised by the street she lives in and the clothes she wears. If either becomes shabby she drops out of society. Suppose you strip her of her house, her clothes, her motor, and all her expensive paraphernalia, what is left that is peculiar to her among women, and proves her to be akin to those others, the workers? Surely there is something that is her real self? Not her ideas; no. Those she purchases in tabloid form. They are standardised ideas, circulating, like the Ford car, by the million. Not her moral principles These are equally conventional. Not her passions. They are thin and fleeting. Yet there is something. Inside this uazzling kaleidoscopic creature there is a vivid spark, a great sizzling vitality. It is this that makes her brilliance and her monotony. Frail though she may appear, she has the energy of a dynamo. Soft as she may look she can, at anyrate in her youth, ride, swim, play games as well as a man and dance a man off his legs. It is this that is surprising. She does not look what she is. She looks a sprite, a fairy, a doll, a porcelain goddess. She is an engine. She appears languid, indifferent, dainty. She is eager, insatiable, tireless, and devoured with ambition.

Trace her life for a moment from youth to old age and see what happens to her, and remember that she lives at high speed and with great intensity. She begins life equipped with an immense optimism, a puritanical .outfit of ideas as to right and wrong, and a great sense of her own value. She is filled with romance, beautiful unrealisable ideals, and all manner of happy beliefs. She believes in a loving God and a kind Providence; she believes in happiness and in love; in the essential goodness of human beings, and in the great rosy future. Being very ignorant and intensely emotional she acts quickly on her beliefs, marries for love at first sight, dashes into every adventure, espouses ks' causes, takes up with intensity every new fad, and when she is disillusioned breaks down. She doesn’t wear well, for she is undisciplined. At the age o. 40 she probably becomes peevish and has nerves, and towards 50, her life frustrated, she turns, as I have said, to religion or bridge, becomes either a colourless individual or a fanatic. It i as if the great hungry life of her country sucked her drj’, drained the blood from her veins, and cast her aside, a disappointed, insignificant, old woman. She is really less interesting than the Ame. ican man, though international gossip would have it the other way round.—Mary Borden, in the Spectator.