New Orleans Republican. [volume] (New Orleans, La) 1867-1878, 1872-10-20
WaAr GIRLs ARR ABROAD
THE AMERICAN GIRL.

|
| there are more glorious girls, more lovely
| girls, than are to be found in this realm OF
| the American eagle, but when You want to
| find any Of these genuine and muGh.Uo-De
| sought-after specimens Of femininity you
musGnot go into the ranks of so-called society
upon your quest. The girl Of the period to
be found in such circles is not the girl you
! will desire to take home and make wife
! Of. Too frequently she is told at her birth
| that she must be "smart'-she knows that
means pert" and becomes so, At ten
she is woman, wiser and worse than
| her grandmother at twenty. She has
her beaux and furbelows, frizzes, flow
ers, frenzies, fun, folly, frolic, feints
and faints, falsity, fanfaronade,, tanta-
! sizes, and in fact, all the is but tat. AS
| soon as she is able to walk the streets, the
leather is Whitfield sharp at the toes, spike
is stuck at the toes, spike Is stuck at the
other end for heel, a camel hump is Sc
! cured at the base Of her spinal column, her
| heart, lungs and liver aFetied up in corsets,
| flesh barbados Of bone and steel, and she
| is sent out to the world, She goes to school,
eats slate pencils, and absorbs arsenic, pols-
oning her stomach and stunning her senses.
| The cOrsets squeeze the breath out of her
| lungs and the heels send the blood to her
| head. She firts with the boys and young
men before nature has informed her
that there are sexes. During school
hours she may be in her seat, or she
NAV be out Of 1.-THE teacher does not
always know. Out Of school hours she
| goes where she pleases, sees whom she
| pleases, does what she or somebody else
| pleases, says what she pleases, visits DR..
| Huston, perhaps. or the den of his negro
servant. Frequently, the Lord only knows
how frequently, so-oailed fashionable
mothers seem perfectly willing that their
daughters should gOto the bOttomless pit,
by the license they give them to go where
they like. If the mothers of the scores of
girls now before the courts of the country
as plaintiffs or defendants in criminal cases
had only known where their daughters
were when they we're with their betrayers,
the criminal cases would probably have
never appeared on the dOCkets. The
smartness of this species of girl is her
Satan If she has a pretty face, she is
in danger of becoming somebody's play
thing. If she have not q pretty face, she
proceeds to daub her cheeks, burn her hair,
tint her lips, paint her nails, shade her
eyebrows, and gasp that she may draw her
COrsets tighter. Then she begins to learn
the trade Of the adventures. She becomes
fraud, internally and externally. She
looks with lofty contempt at the honest
working girl who earns her bread in honor
and in virtue; but she begins to draw
money for herself from the banks in which
she has no deposits. In time this goes to
Europe. and becomes the m0rgantiC wife OF
Victor Emanuel, as did -, or of Ba-
varian baron, as does -. That's where
the ''smartness' of modern society tends to
lead most of its YOtari6s.
THE IRISH GIRL.
Talking about girls, it will perhaps be in
order to allow an Irish enthusiast to have a
little to say about the maids of Killarney
and adjacent localities. He perhaps gushes
but then consider the Celt and the theme
and you won't be surprised.
The Irish girls character is made up of
two qualities, vivacity and tenderness. The
Irish girl is the natural lover. She is the
tawn Of the field and the house; domestic,
devOut, candid, courageous, superstitiOus,
sentimental, flial and apt to be phil0sophic.
If belonging to the gentry she receives
somewhat the same education as the En-
gIish girl, with the same tbinneSs in the cur
riculum; but she will dash poetry into all
the prOsaics and in bellies lettres learn
volume while the English girl studies a
page. The national schools are working
revolution among the women of the holier
isle, and in sad political twilight are glim-
mering hundred DeStael and Sperauzas
whose sons and daughters will blaze in the
next generation. Mark the future of the
Irish girl She has fun far beyond that of
the French; an imagination cleaning with
figures, but memory mOistens them into
melancholy: an ambition wide as the sea,
willing to bear as many burdens as com
PEELED to hold nearly as many dead, but
narrowed by the iron of traditional fear
and the nearness Of English guns. The
chastity Of Diana is borne among her noun
tains, and it is a maxim among the Irish
women, Gin part she is to blame that has
been tried" The Irish girl is she who
never had a change in the world. Poor,
wretched, abused as a child by the savage
ness of disappointed parents, sold when
ready to be wife, more ignominiOus than
Mary Powell to John Milton, miserable as
a mother, often supporting husband and
children, but faithful as Mary Powell was
not, wearing out as the drudge of drunk
ard, but never standing before a divorce
court to secure dangerous if a legal free
dom; in sorrow, gay; in poverty, full of
laughter; with tears and rainbow smile
through her-own. She may envy, but she
is more likely to emulate; she may be jeal-
GUS, but cliefest of her self-respact. The
specimen we ind in America is not always
good OF the genus. She will falsify in
friends behalf, but she will oct SANDER or
betray foe.
She is the daughter of the church, not al
ways OF the gods; and although not always
dIvinely tall, is often divinelya fair. Her
harsher feelings are passionate in intensity
and emotional to duration. Her devotion to
her family never pales; the brightest gold
and sweetest words in Irish cabins to-day
are sent by the white fingers of the Irish
girls in American workrooms. She is more
devoted to her father than to her child, and
it may have been she that was in the mind
OF Pope when he wrote:
Me let the tender office long engage
To ROCK the cradle of reposing age,
With lenient arms extend mothers breath,
Make love or smile and smooth the bed of death;
Explore the thought, explain the aching eye,
And keep while one parent from the sky
Unlike the English girl, marriage with
her is an accidental rather than an aim; she
would as soon be Sister of Charity as the
mother of the Gracchi. But if the altar
lamp does not prove the magnet of her
youth, she is liable to fall madly in love, to
marry, and to abide unto the bitter end.
She loves for the better or worse, chiefly for
worse. In physique she is unsurpassed,
even in Arabia. Her feet ara apt to be large,
because like Maud Muller, she rakes the
meadows sweet with hay, but unlike Maud,
digs turf in the boys and plants potatoes on
the sunny hill; but her hands are always
small, and her fingers taper, and the nails
are nearly pink.
She is SO vigorous. and her coursing
blood so thoroughly inearnadine that, as
medical records show, she can bear an en-
co1tehenaent on twenty-tour hours notice,
and be about her household again in forty
eight And she neither kills her child be-
tore its birth nor feeds it by proxy after.
She is the happiest and saddest, the strong
est and tenderest woman on earth.
THE FRENCH GIRL.
All, here appears quite different type of
the feminine. She is the electric woman.
She constantly desires to evaporate, to Ely,