The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-04-26
AMERICAN FAMILY LIFE.
From the N. Y. Tribune.


For year or two the articles in the Lon
don Saturday Re0ieao upon social topics have
gained for that cynical and shallow journal
increased notoriety by the virulence and wit
of their attacks upon women. Wife, maiden,
mother, and old maid have each been held up
to ridicule with a rancor and malignancy only
to be explained by personal spleen; the more
gentle and womanly the type of woman, the
more implacable and venomous was the
assault. Now, this puerile and almost catfish
splitting of ill-will, which might provoke reply
if it came from a man, becomes only amusing
when we know that it emanates from one of
the maligned sex. Whether hell can furnish
no fury like woman scorne2 is hard to tell;
but we do not need this instance to teach us
that woman here, disappointed in the happi-
ness or love which has fallen to the lot of her
more fortunate sisters, is apt to regard them
with about as much Justice and temper as did
the immortal Sairey Mrs. Prig when she pos
sessed herself of the whole of the salad.
In one of the last numbers of the RegjeD
this gentle savage pounces as usual upon the
latest disgusting scandal. and gloats over it
as evidence of the hopeless condition of her
sex. The Mordaunt trial and the cowhiding
exploit of Lydia Thompson are the especial
incidents which she selects, and from which
she arues, with true womanish logic, that all
English women are strong minded ballet
dancers, or, if not ballet-dances, worse. She
fairly whoops with exultation, like a Ca
manche over a fresh victim, at the pitiable
spectacle of the miserable blonde tramps and
the crazy Mordaunt woman, first shrieking
out the usual feminine triumph of 81 told
you so, and then trying her brain to invent
new and more filthy epithets for her sex, for
''the fast young peeresses and tripudiant
matrons,' as well as the "give-and-take
loose-zoned age in which they live
She denounces all English women as ami
mails, and as animals either wallowing in
nastiness or peering wishfully over the brink
OF it, and then, by reasoning which we
confess ourselves unable to follow, throws
the blame of this condition of affairs upon
the long retirement of the Queen after her
husbands death. 'While this continues, +"
she predicts, "English society will present q
| happy combination of all the sin of Versailles
and the insolence and brutality of a Saratoga
| boarding house" 1t appears to us outside
barbarians that if English women were only
held out of this slough of corruption by the
chance of an annual drawing-room or ball at
Buckingham Palace, their tenure of virtue
must be very slight indeed. But, however
amusing her sketches may be, they carry
with them no evidence of truth. We would
be as 10th to receive them as accu-
rate pictures of English homes as
the prurient uncleanness of Ouida's
novels. We protest against the mistake made
by this woman and those of her stamp on this
side of the Atlantic, when they take the thin
and impure crust of fashionable life as the
exponent of either English or American
society. Because Sir Charles Mordaunt's
wife was mad from disease or vice, we GER
tainly do not argue that the pure homes OF
England are all suddenly filed with Mesa.
linas; because our own fashionable girls
exhibit themselves in immodest dances OF
revel in the indecencies of the opera 6Oute
we do not suspect the air to tainted about
well-bred women, or feel disposed to doubt
the integrity and purity of our own wives ant
daughters.
immortality among women is found in two
strata only of our social life: in the Lowest
class who fill the houses of prostitution in the
cities (eight-tenths of whom, by statistics in
New York and Philadelphia, are foreigners)
and in that spurious aristocracy whose onl.
claim to notice consists in wealth and thu
vulgar display of it. Both of these bodies o
women, by virtue of certain unity of ain
and flash demeanor, keep themselves glaringly
before the public eye. They find their read
organs, too, in some of orr New York jour
nails, which willingly advertise not only tn
fine dresses of the latter, but the assignation
of their unnamable sisters. Hence tn
name of American society has been graduall
absorbed by Anonyma and Mrs. Shoddy
and is degraded almost beyond help by tn
Stiffness of the one and the vice of tn
other. Now, what have these Two womel
to do with the great element OF America