Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1884-06-12
Smart and Cute American Girls.

English society is naively slow to
take the measure of social novelties;
and, though London has been flooded
by our nasal cousins, the American girl
herself is still imperfectly understood.
If she is distinguished by one quality
more than another among womankind,
it is by that attribute which is common
to all her countrymen, and generated
by their restless life. She is cute
quite cute enough to take every advant-
age OF the mOmentary confusion she
has produced. Now is her critical
time, the eager competition of her ever
increasing sisters will destroy her IA
vOrable position; she is resolved to
take her fortune at the flood, and so.
ciety hears whispers of 4 determined
invasion in the course of the season at
whose eve we have arrived. Outside
London she is scarcely to be found.
The few princes of whom the inhospit-
able Roman palaces still boosted have
long been carried off, Poor unhappy
Paris, Us our Socialist friends put it,
has been exploited, and Paris of repub-
lican advocates and simmering san
sculOttism has seen the odious city on
the Thames usurp the position of
premier city in the world for pleasure
seeking society. Again, the fashion
able world of London is in q stateeof
chronic boredom, and is always ready
to welcome a new sensation. Together
with her novelty the American girl ex-
ercises something of the charm which
half-educated visitor always eXercis-
es on q conventional society. Pocahon-
tas might have had the town at her
feet; her successor is less simple and
more schooled than Pocahontas, but.
compared with the smart people of
Europe, she is uneducated. She has
not, that is to say, lived in an atmOs-
phere the creation of centuries charged
to an extent impossible to realize with
social opinions, conventionalities and
traditions. They are born and bred in
the European child. Her transgres-
siOrs and her criticism give her half
her piquancy, but what is amusing in
her would be embarrassing in her En-
glish sister. Her natural quickness of
perception has, moreover, been sharp
ened by more travelling than falls to
the lot of the ordinary English girl.
Table d'hote and second-rate foreign
society, if they have not added to her
refinement, have taught her a preco-
cious self-possession. The English
girl, though temporarily eclipsed by
her rival. need not despair. Her quail
ties will tell in the long run. The APP
parent distinction and tact of the
American girl is as snowy and as smart
and as little part of her as her Partisan
dresses. Real refinement is the at
tribute of :. leisured class. This does
not exist in the States except in the
narrow Puritan circle at Boston. The
feverish pushing and striving and bar
barous ostentation of the men must re-
act upon their sisters. And, indeed,
American women are the most snowy,
restless and unquiet in the world. Re
pose and dignity are alien to them;
smartness is their ideal Nor are they
physically equal to the oyershadowed
English girl. Far from evolving SUI
perior, American civilization seems
destined to evolve an inferior type OF
woman. The American girl IS as diI-
ferent from her English sister as the
women of the insipid American parlor
fiction are different from the women
with hearts and brains OF the robuster
literature of Fielding and Scott.-LoD
don WOr{d