“By woman’s revolt against her segregation. Not, in my opinion, that she is protesting against the gregarious advantages of man, but because she is beginning to discover that her sisters are worth knowing. She has begun to be impersonally interested in, as well as interesting to, the other woman. The woman’s desire is not improvement; it is, whether she knows it or not, the other woman, precisely as a man’s interest in his club is the other man. It has been said that a man often goes to his club to be alone, and that there is this advantage in a club that is a place, over a club that is a state of mind. But a woman goes to a club not to be alone. I suppose there are times when it would do a woman good to get away from her family, not into company, but into lonesome quiet. Mrs. Moody, who has said so many wise things, declares in her ‘Unquiet Sex’ that college girls are too little alone for the health of their nerves. This may be so, yet women’s clubs are contemporaneous with girls’ colleges. It begins to look as if it was at college that the American girl learned that it is not good for woman to be alone—even with her family. At any rate, that independence which is so characteristic of the American girl, which is, as I have been informed and believe, somewhat disconcerting to men, is, undoubtedly, largely the result of the American girl’s improved relations with her sister women. When she is as successfully gregarious with regard to women as men are with regard to men, her sex maturity will be complete. I know that you are wondering what sort of a woman she is going to be in that matured state. Have no anxiety. She will not be less agreeable, but more so. She will overdo the clubs, but she will recover from that; she will shed them the moment they cease to serve her purpose. I am going to a club now. I am going to talk to it about Savonarola. The club will be very well dressed, and so shall I, if I know myself, and we neither of us shall let smoke from the fateful fires of the fifteenth century blind us to the fact that we are living in the nineteenth.”
“All of which,” I said, in a severe tone, “is illustrative of the fact that woman is a sophist—though perhaps I should say an artist, for she uses life as so much material with which to construct an effect.”
“Life is an art,” remarked the Professor at the mirror.
“And you, Professor—”
But she was gone. I understood well enough that the Professor had just given an exhibition of her dexterity in taking the other side, taking it in a feminine rather than in a pugnacious spirit. The Professor’s negatives always remind me of how affirmative the American girl is. There is an English painting called “Summer,” in which the artist (Mr. Stephens) gracefully symbolizes the drowsy indolence of June. This classic allegory may not have the English girl specifically in mind, but I am quite certain that we should not be satisfied with an American symbol for the same idea which did not in some way indicate that Miss America, even in summer, is likely to be representing some enthusiasm, Pickwickian or not as you may choose to make it out. The spirit of fantasy, sitting in the midst of our variegated life, who should call up the American Summer Girl, must summon a different company. The spirit of fantasy would know that the American summer girl, though she can be a sophist, and agree that this or that is the fashion this summer, is nevertheless not to be painted as a reiteration. It frequently was remarked of the Americans at Santiago that they had great individual force as fighters. There always will be critics to remark upon the hazard of this trait in war. At all events it was and is an American trait. And in conducting her summer campaign against an elusive if not altogether a smokeless enemy, Miss America is displaying the same trait. She can accept a social sophistry, but you must leave her individuality. She will not have tennis wholly put aside if she does not choose. She will not give up her horse because a little steed of steel has entered the lists, nor give up her bicycle because it has become profanely popular. She may choose to arm herself solely with a parasol, to detach herself from even the suggestion of a hobby, which, to one who has the individual skill, is a notoriously potent way in which to establish one of those absolute despotisms so familiar and so fatal in society. There is the girl with a butterfly net, the girl who goes a-fishing, the girl who swims, the girl who wears bathing suits, the girl who gives a sparkle to the Chautauqua meetings in the summer, the girl who gets up camping parties, the girl who gets up the dances, the girl who plots theatricals, the girl with the camera, the girl who can shoot like a cowboy,—where should we end that remarkable list? How impossible to express the summer girl in any single type?
Indeed, the American girl’s methods of amusing herself are so various as to make it increasingly difficult to typify her at all, except as a goddess who, like Minerva (though she did not go in much for amusing herself), shall illustrate a wide range of activities serenely and successfully undertaken. There is a triteness in the accomplishments of any period, yet the spirit of individualism in the American girl introduces here, as elsewhere, a diversifying element. I was reading the other day that Miss Mitford had that “faculty for reciting verses which is among the most graceful of accomplishments.” Where have all the verse reciters gone? Why did this elegant accomplishment perish? Are we all less poetical? Are our girls losing that sense of sentiment to which we used to look for so many of their quieter charms? Has this change anything to do with another change, surely not to be lightly accepted, which has of late years taken poetry from the top of the page, where we once thought it belonged of natural right, and placed it at the bottom? Is it finally to be crowded off the page altogether? Has the fact that women no longer consider verse an accomplishment anything to do with this subtle but revolutionary change? And what shall poetry say? Will poetry go on as it has from the beginning of time arming us with epithets of praise?
If she be not so to me,