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.
And what a difference between the French girls of my boyhood and the
French girls of the present day! Not that they are yet 'Daisy Millers,'
but at any rate they are no longer 'Eugenie Grandets.' Thirty years
ago, a French girl well advanced in her twenties could not have, even
in the early morning, gone across the street to see a friend or buy a
pair of gloves without being accompanied by an elderly lady of the
family or a lady's-maid. Thirty years ago, in my little native Brittany
town, where a child of tender years would have been absolutely safe, an
unmarried woman between forty and fifty would always be accompanied by
a servant, even in daytime.
It was the correct thing to do. Indeed, a woman not married would
always act in this manner as long as she thought that she was fit to be
looked at by men. And very few women make up their minds to the loss of
their charms. It even takes some of them a long time to become aware of
that loss.
The French girl of thirty years ago, who was only allowed to read
children's books, and never to set foot inside a theatre, now reads M.
Zola's novels, and goes to see the plays of Alexandre Dumas fils, and
as she discusses these plays she comes to the conclusion that they are
very clever and interesting, but hardly such as to take her mother to.
French women are now getting freer every day, and, with the use of
liberty, will lose the little defect they sometimes possess--affectation.
They will become more and more natural and unaffected, and they will
acquire that most charming and eminently American quality in a
woman--unconventionality. They are now moving, not in the direction of
innocent frivolity, but in that of greater independence. The time is
soon coming when French girls will cease to regard marriage as a sort
of emancipation, and will perhaps look upon it, as an American lady
novelist of my acquaintance does, as a rather hard way of making a
living.
Those French girls will not lose their charms by the enjoyment of
greater liberty and independence. The American women have thus improved
theirs.