American Women Are Like the Spartans
in Their Desire to Dominate the
American Man.
Dr. Emil Reich has been lecturing to fashionable London on such
universally fascinating themes as woman and love. According to the news
despatches, so great has been the popularity of his talks that there have
not been seats enough to accommodate his titled hearers, and at one
lecture the Duchess of Portland sat on the floor. He has said of "Love and
Personality":
Personality is always a mystery with its antithetically
mingled elements in man and woman. Women have loved wrongly
and known it, were perfectly aware of it--they only know
also that they were helpless to avoid it; the desire of
their lives has been gratified, something has happened.
What was there about George Sand, save perhaps pretty good
eyes, to send such men as Alfred de Musset and Friedrich
Chopin absolutely crazy? Nothing interesting about her--even
her unattractiveness enhanced by her constant smoking. Yet
she could inspire the "Prelude," which Chopin composed on
seeing her approach in a garden in Minorca--the greatest
piece of music ever compressed into a single page.
Goethe's Gretchen, the little bourgeoise, without apparent
attractiveness, yet inspiring his mighty genius--what is
this mystery of man and woman? The beauty of nations differs
very much. The Latins are less beautiful than the
Anglo-Saxons. The angularity of the North German woman is
notorious; an uncharming person. Why? It has nothing
whatever to do with race. The growth of the Hanseatic cities
brought great wealth in North Germany; money-bags married
money-bags; the result was a people of severely plain
aspect. There are not many money-bags in America, although
there are many money-bags in the hands of a few.
American Men Marry for Love.
The American is insulted if mention of dowry is made in his
wedding arrangements. He marries because he loves the woman
and she him. Hence, the American people have become
exceedingly beautiful. Then the facilities for divorce
presented in the United States are an important factor in
the beautification process. Love is really at the bottom of
it all--not money-bags or race, but love.
The French are always talking about _l'amour, l'amour_; but
really there is no _amour_ there at all--people generally
talk most about what they haven't got or don't know. Yes,
indeed, so rare is _l'amour_ in France that it accounts for
the decline in facial beauty of the French woman--not in
movement, for in movement she excels the world, but in face.
Rome and Greece were ruined by treating marriage as a matter
of business.
Complementary to Dr. Reich's praise of the American woman's beauty is his
criticism of her love of domination. In that characteristic he reads the
doom of America. We quote his reasons from the New York _American_:
Nations differ in nothing so much as in their women. The
French, English, or American woman is easily
distinguishable. The American woman is totally different
from the English woman. So is the French woman, though the
difference in this case is not so intense; so is the German
woman; so is the woman of Italy. The American woman, while
differing from all her European sisters of to-day, bears a
marked resemblance to the woman of ancient Sparta. The
Spartans resembled the present-day Americans; the Athenians
were like the English.
I do not blame, I do not praise; I only say, and I say
emphatically, that the American woman is not womanly; she is
not a woman. The whole of the United States is under
petticoat government, and man is practically non-existent.
In America, woman commands man. Man does not count there.
The last man that came to America was Christopher Columbus.
To-day, man has no existence; he does not talk in the
drawing-room, but is a dummy. The woman lives one life, the
man another, and they are totally distinct from each other.
The Best Complexion in the World.
She is as new as a man born to-day is new; she is made up of
restlessness and fidgetiness long before she is twenty-five.
But she is very beautiful; she has the best complexion in
the world--better than that of any European woman. She is
also well built and handsome. You see fine specimens of the
American woman in Kentucky and Massachusetts.
A few miles distant from the Athens of old--what would be
but a short railway journey in these days--lay Sparta. The
Spartans were imperialists, and they wanted to conquer the
whole of Greece. The Spartan woman, as I have remarked, was
like the American woman of to-day. She never dreamed of
lovers; her idea was nothing less than conquering man; she
never thought of him as more than a fellow athlete.
The Spartan Woman Ruined Sparta.
There was no womanhood in them, no more than in so many
sticks. The Athenians said that they were very fine, but
there was nothing feminine about them. They were far richer,
too, than the men, for the men went to the wars and died,
and the women thus became rich. Aristotle said that the
Spartan woman was sure to ruin Sparta very quickly. And so
she did, for we find Sparta trying to rule Greece in the
fourth century B.C.; in the third century she was sinking;
in the second century she had ceased to exist.
Modern British men and women, what are they? That is what I
want to bring out. A nation can never survive with women of
the Spartan type, which, as I have told you, is the American
woman of to-day. The Romans were the same, and they ruined
their empire. They had one idea, an all-absorbing idea which
killed all ideas of religion, of art, of everything--the
idea of empire. They spent their entire life in that one
absorbing pursuit--domination; in such a country woman has
no place.