But when I see what some American women can do in public life, outside of the beautiful sphere in which they were intended to reign supreme, I feel ready to appreciate and echo the remark that Frederick the Great was wont to make when he met a woman alone in the streets of Berlin:
'What are you doing here? Go home and look after your house and your children!'
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE LIBERTY OF ANGLO-SAXON WOMEN
The mistakes made by foreigners — Misconstructions — Educational systems — Girls do not lose their charm by independence.
Continental men visiting England and the United States do not, as a rule, understand the comparative familiarity with which they are treated by women to whom they have been properly introduced. They are often in danger of misinterpreting their kindness of manner, and regarding as affectionate advances or invitations to flirt what are meant as only polite attentions.
This awkward error is one into which not only Frenchmen, but all men of Continental Europe, are very apt to fall, unless they happen to be men of fine perceptions, in other words, perfect gentlemen. Young girls in France are kept so much to themselves, and young men are so completely separated from them, that when one of the latter finds himself, through some accident or fault of supervision, alone in presence of one of the former, he feels called upon as a man to make himself particularly pleasant, if not actually to make a declaration of love.
Of course, there is not in France anyone, not even the most conservative provincial mother, who does not admire, above all in America, that sweet liberty which is enjoyed by the women, married or unmarried. There is not one of those French mothers who would not like to give that same liberty to her own daughters. But how can she? Who shall be the first to do it?
It takes many generations to accept such a revolution in a system of education. People will have it that this Anglo-Saxon system would never do in France. Others even affirm that French people are incapable of shaking off perpetual thought of the relations between the sexes; that in France men are always thinking about women and women about men—in fact, that it is in the blood. The proof that these people are wrong is that young men and girls, sons and daughters of French fathers and mothers, but educated from a tender age either in England or America, do behave absolutely like English or American youths. It is not in the blood: the different systems of education alone account for those different modes of thought.