The Education of American Girls

by Anna C. Brackett

Our schools give all classes an opportunity for education, and by associating the poorer classes with the wealthier, implant in the former, tastes for the life of the latter, and a keen ambition to attain it, and this imposes upon the latter the necessity of struggling to maintain their position. All our men are over-active; our girls are educated along with the boys, and they not only acquire equal mental power, but common intellectual tastes. Men and women are able to be, and are, the companions of each other.

Our girls have a longing for an active life not felt by the girls in any other country. Wives share the hopes, fears, and anxieties of their husbands. They are eager to gain wealth and friends as a means to improve their social position. They economize in the family expenditure; they employ few or no servants, and do plain sewing, dressmaking, and millinery. Education and a varied experience gives our women a “faculty” for doing anything, and there is no national sentiment in the matter of either health or respectability to keep then from doing everything. As fast as the daughters grow up, they are drawn into this ceaseless activity. Besides the lessons there is house-work in the morning, and sewing till into the late evening.

We are a rich nation, but we are not a nation of rich individuals. Domestic service is expensive, and of poor quality, for no one is willing to occupy the position of a menial who can find anything else to do.

The intelligence of our women, combined with the necessity in our society of producing a good personal impression, together with the habit of applying their intelligence to the construction and arrangement of articles of dress, have developed among us a very high order of taste in these matters, and the skilled labor that can satisfy it, is necessarily very costly.

Our women spend all they can afford in buying these materials, and save, in using their own intelligence and hands in making them up.

Very few, in considering the work of our women, take into account the real brain-power expended in this triple combination of economy, taste, and execution. Emerson somewhere in his English Traits says, referring to the English aristocracy:—“It is surprising how much brain can go into fine manners.”

It would be very pertinent to say of American women, “It is surprising how much brain-work can go into fine dressing,” and our girls join their mothers in this worry and work at a very early age. Passing from work to society, the strain upon our women is no less. Social gatherings occur irregularly, have irregular hours, and an irregular regimen of food, and every one feels a keen stimulus to be both agreeable and brilliant. English faces at a party look as they do at church, and as they do at Madame Tussaud's. Contrast with them the smiles, luminous eyes, and pretty cant or toss of the head of the carefully-dressed American woman, and think of the work to be done the next day.

In place of a health-seeking instinct in America, we have a feeling which says, “I do not mind how hard a strain I have, provided I can hold out till I get through it.” We are too much employed to think much of the discomfort of moderate fatigue and ill-health. Neither have we sufficient feeling respecting the permanence of the family to lead us to plan for a succession of descendants. An American says, “I had rather have forty-five or fifty years of active, satisfactory life, than sixty or seventy years of a comfortable, dawdling existence;” and, if we look at the case only as it affects himself, we cannot especially condemn the reasoning, but when we consider the constitution that this overstrained life bequeathes to the children, it assumes a different aspect.

Being accustomed to see an attenuated, sickly physique in our leading and best-bred families, the eye is mis-educated; we establish a false ideal for women, and become comparatively indifferent to a fine physique in men. Men do not marry with a view of founding or continuing a family name, and their sentiment of gallantry inclines them to be fond of protecting a weak woman.

Irregular habits are to some degree a necessity with us, and the greatest misfortune is, that we get used to the irregularity, and take little pains to avoid it. We have some rules in regard to diet and digestion, but they are for the most part practised only by those who have acquired ills, and are not very frequently applied in the rearing of children.