The real American girl admires male qualities in man. The perfumed dandy, dressed in the latest fashion—the dude, as he is called in the States—is not her admiration; she prefers a little roughness to too much polish. At a large reception, given at the New York Union League Club in the early part of the year, I asked a young lady who were ten or a dozen young men who did not miss a single dance.
"Oh," she replied, with an air of sovereign contempt, "a few young dudes, who have been invited by the club just to keep up the dancing: marionettes, you know."
CHAPTER XII.
The Emancipation of Woman.—Extinction of Man.—War against Beards.—Ladies Purifying the Streets of New York.—The Ladies "Go it" Alone, and have a "Good Time."
n a country where woman is a spoilt child, petted, and made so much of, who can do and dare almost anything, it is strange to find women who are not content with their lot, but demand the complete emancipation of their sex.
American women asking for complete emancipation! It makes one smile.
I was talking one evening with Mrs. Devereux Blake, the chief of the movement. (She is a lady middle-aged, well-preserved, of a fluent, agreeable conversation, who has declared war to the knife against the tyrant Man.)
"You must excuse me," I said to her, "if I ask questions; I am anxious to learn. I have submitted so many times to the interviewing process in your country, that I feel as if I had a right to interview the Americans a little in my turn. The American woman appears to me ungrateful not to be satisfied with her lot. She seems to rule the roast in the United States."