A party of us, perhaps fifteen in all, had travelled a distance of some two thousand miles to assist at the opening of a new line of railway in the remote Northwest. We duly arrived at the little mountain town at which the junction was to be made between the line running up from the south and that running down from the north, over which we had come. The ceremony of driving the last spike was conducted with due solemnity, after which a "banquet" was given to us by the Mayor and citizens of the small community. After the banquet—which was really a luncheon—we again boarded our train to complete the run to the southern end of the line, a number of the citizens of the town with their wives accompanying us on the jaunt. It chanced to be my privilege to escort to the car, and for the remainder of the journey to sit beside, the wife of the editor of the local paper. She was pretty, charming, and admirably dressed. We talked of many things,—of America and England, of the red Indians, and of books,—when in a pause in the conversation she remarked:
"I think this is such a nice way of travelling, don't you?"
It puzzled me. What did she mean? Was she referring to the fact that we were on a special train composed of private cars, or what? The truth did not at first occur to me—that she was referring to railway travelling as a whole, it being the first time that she had ever been on or seen a train. Explanations followed. She had been brought by her parents, soon after the close of the Civil War, when two or three years old, across the plains in a prairie schooner (the high-topped waggon in which the pioneers used to make their westward pilgrimage), taking some four months for the trip from the old home in, I think, Kentucky. At all events she was a Southerner. Since then during her whole life she had known no surroundings but those of the little mining settlement huddled in among the mountains, her longest trips from home having been for a distance of thirty or forty miles on horseback or on a buckboard. She had lived all her life in log cabins and never known what it meant to have a servant. She read French and Italian, but could not take any interest in German. She sketched and painted, and was incomparably better informed on matters of art than I, though she knew the Masters only, of course, through the medium of prints and engravings. What she most dearly longed to do in all the world was to see a theatre—Irving for choice—and to hear some one of the Italian operas, with the libretti of which, as well as the music, so far as her piano would interpret for her, she was already familiar.
Now at last the railway had come and she was, from that day forward, within some six days' travelling of New York; and her husband had faithfully promised that they should go East together for at least three or four weeks that winter. And as she sat and talked in her soft Southern voice, there in the heart of the wilds which had been all the world to her, she might, so far as a mere man's eyes could judge, have been dropped down in any country house in England to be a conspicuously charming member of any charming house-party.
Familiarity with similar instances, though I think with none more striking, has robbed the miracle, so far as its mere outward manifestation is concerned, of something of its wonder; but the inward marvel of it remains as inexplicable as ever. By what power or instinct do they do it? With nothing of inheritance, so far as can be judged, to justify any aspirations towards the good or beautiful, among the poorest and hardest of surroundings, with none but the most meagre of educational facilities, by what inherent quality is it that the American woman, not now and again only, but in her tens of thousands, rises to such an instinctive comprehension of what is good and worth while in life, that she becomes, not through any external influence, but by mere process of her own development, the equal of those who have spent their lives amid all that is most beautifying and elevating of what the world has to afford? When she takes her place, graciously and composedly, as the mistress of some historic home or amid the surroundings of a Court, we say that it is her "adaptability." But adaptability can do no more than raise one to the level of one's surroundings—not above them. Is it ambition? But whence derived? And by what so tutored and guided that it reaches only for what is good? How is it tempered that she remains all pure womanly at the last?
It may be that the extent to which, especially in the Western States, American women of wealth and position are called upon to bear their share in public work—in the management of art societies, the building of art buildings and public libraries, the endowment and conduct of hospitals, and in educational work of all kinds—gives them such an opportunity of showing the qualities which are in them, as is denied to their English sisters of similar position but who live in older established communities. And there are, of course, women in England who lead lives as beautiful and as beneficent as are lived anywhere upon earth. The miracle is that the American woman—and, again I say, not now and again but in her tens of thousands—becomes what she is out of the environment in which her youth has so often been lived.
It will be necessary later to refer to the larger part played by American women, as compared with English, in the intellectual life of the country,—a matter which itself has, as will be noticed, no little bearing on the question of the merits and demerits of the co-education of the sexes. The best intellectual work, the best literary work, the best artistic work, is still probably done by the men in the United States; but an immensely larger part of that work is done by women than in England, and in ordinary society (outside of the professional literary and artistic circles) it is the women who are generally best informed, as will be seen, on literature and art. To which is to be added the fact that they take a much livelier and more intelligent interest than do the majority of Englishwomen in public affairs, and assume a more considerable share of the work of a public or quasi-public character in educational and similar matters. It might be supposed that this greater prominence of women in the national life of the country was in itself a proof that men deferred more to them and placed them on a higher level; but when analysed it will be found far from being any such proof. Rather is woman's position an evidence of, and a result of, man's neglect. By which it is not intended to imply any discourteous or inconsiderate neglect; but merely that American men have been, and still are, of necessity more busy than Englishmen, more absorbed in their own work, whereby women have been left to live their own lives and thrown on their own resources much more than in England. The mere pre-occupation of the men, moreover, necessarily leaves much work undone which, for the good of society, must be done; and women have seized the opportunity of doing it. They have been especially ready to do so, inasmuch as the spirit of work and of pushfulness is in the atmosphere about them, and they have been educated at the same schools as the men. The contempt of men for idleness, in a stage of society when there was more than enough work for all men to do, necessarily extended to the women. It is not good, in the United States, for any one, woman hardly more than man, to be idle.
Women being compelled to organise their own lives for themselves, they carried into that organisation the spirit of energy and enthusiasm which filled the air of the young and growing communities. Finding work to their hands to do, they have done it—taking, and in the process fitting themselves to take, a much more prominent part in the communal life than is borne by their sisters in England or than those sisters are to-day, in the mass, qualified to assume. Precisely so (as often in English history) do women, in some beleaguered city or desperately pressed outpost, turn soldiers. No share in, or credit for, the result is to be assigned to any peculiar forethought, deference, or chivalrousness on the part of the men, their fellows in the fight. It is to the women that credit belongs.
And while we are thus comparing the position of women in America with their position in England, it is to be noted that so excellent an authority among Frenchmen as M. Paul Cambon, in speaking of the position of women in England, uses precisely the same terms as an Englishman must use when speaking of the conditions in America. Americans have gone a step farther—are a shade more "Feminist"—than the English, impelled, as has been seen, by the peculiar conditions of their growing communities in a new land. But it is only a step and accidental.
Englishmen looking at America are prone to see only that step, whereas what Frenchmen or other Continental Europeans see is that both Englishmen and Americans together have travelled far, and are still travelling fast, on a path quite other than that which is followed by the rest of the peoples. In their view, the single step is insignificant. What is obvious is that in both is working the same Anglo-Saxon trait—the tendency to insist upon the independence of the individual. Feminism—the spirit of feminine progress—is repugnant to the Roman Catholic Church; and we would not look to see it developing strongly in Roman Catholic countries. But, what is more important, it is repugnant to all peoples which set the community or the state or the government before the individual, that is to say to all peoples except the Anglo-Saxon.
