THE AMERICAN GIRL AT HOME.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4332, 6 February 1875, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE AMERICAN GIRL AT HOME.

(From the Arcadian —New York.) When the rhythmical rebuker of Lady Clara Yere de Vere advised that relentless young woman to go teach the orphan boy to read and the orphan girl to sew, he probably had more than a dim suspicion that time hung heavy upon her hands. We do not mean to imply a stronger comparison between that imaginary character and the more real one indicated by the title of this paper than is to be inferred from the fact time would hang very heavy upon the hands of the American girl at home —if she were ever at home long enough for time to get that advantage over her. But the truth is, the American girl is generally out. She acquires this habit at that early age when, not yet wholly released from the nursery, her mother takes her for a season to Saratoga, and permits her to become indoctrinated with the mysteries of hop-etiquette. It is at the children’s parties there—those parties the only distinction between which and adult entertainments is that the age of the participants ranges from four to fourteen, instead of from eighteen upwards—that the young lady of whom we are speaking first inhales the air of flirtation and breathes in those molecules of coquetry of which she never succeeds in getting rid. Wo can all understand what t)ie natural effect of such schooling will be, how soon weariness and disgust enter the soul of the child to whom life ought to be vernal and fresh, and what satiety is hers at an age when the natural condition is one of resiliency and joy. Among the sad things of life is certainly to be classed that contempt for simplicity which is ingrained in the heart of the American girl of fashion in very early years. She has drank copiously of the oxymel of precocious coquetry long before she is capable of appreciating the glory of true passion and. the fun of that efflorescence of passion of which true coquetry consists. We are no special admirers of children who are constitutionally shame-faced, who hang their heads .before company, and creep back into sensitive silence as soon as an opportunity permits them to do so. But we admire as little the unblushable effrontery of the hot-house child who has been brought up under the bell-glass of society,” and has nothing natural left in it excepting the original sin, which crops out in the form of impertinence. It is this abnormal self-possession which is the early characteristic of the American girl. For this, she has to thank her mother, and the fashionable _ fools vwho are her mother’s 'friends. It is inevitable that the abdolesoeuce of such a child should be marked with much that is fast and morbid, and trenching on the verge of viciousness. In this school she acquires those meretricious manners, that slang, that swagger, that devil-may-care air, which have rendered her a notoriety wherever she has travelled abroad. The foreigner who comes to this country, and who observes the free-and-easy manners of our youth, and especially of our young girls, is amazed at their boldness and recklessness. We are aware that some bitterness and unfairness have been shown toward the American girl at home ; that she has been maliciously represented as a young lady whoso principal amusements are young men, novels, and candies, and whose only exercise consists in promenading Broadway ; but we are inclined to take a less unfavorable view of the matter than this. At the same time, it is not possible to deny that there is a grain of truth in the charge, and we are not amazed that a whole wheatfield of accusation should spring from a grain that has been planted aud tended with_ such malicious irrigation. Girls are made, it is true, for something else than to fit into some quiet nook at home, and rest contentedly there during the remainder of life. There are some good, pious souls, we know, who would have every young woman, rich and poor, educated in the arts of housekeeping. They "would have Clorinda, whose father is a billionaire, descend to the kitchen, make bread and pastry, and familiarise herself with the practical working out of all the more common recipes in the cook-book, just as they would exact the same task from

Jane Smith, whose papa is not worth anything at all. How far these advisers are in the right it may be difficult to determine ; but the fault with the average American girl, who holds neither a very high nor a very low position in life, is that she does not acquaint herself with any of these processes, aud if, like Henrietta in “ Les Eemmes Savantes,” she were asked what she saw in marriage to attract, all the answer that she could honestly give would be “ A husband.” This is sensible, so far as it goes; but we run in danger, of seeming very humdrum when we add that if a husband is to be expected to remain all that a young and exacting wife wishes him to be, the kitchen and its correlatives must receive a large share of that wife's attention. The point which we wish to make is that the American girl is too much of a gadder. The house where her parents reside is rather a headquarters to her than her home. There she draws her supplies, thither she returns when other resorts begin to fail, and there she recuperates when wearied with the warfare which peripatetic flirtation is sure to entail.

We would-'jinot exchange the freedom in which our girls are brought up for the seclusion in which the French demoiselle is educated, but it would certainly be pleasant if that liberty had not the effect of creating a certain boisterousness of manner which is the direct opposite to everything comprehended in the word lady. The liberty of which we speak might be restrained without developing those over whom the control was exercised into living monuments of conventionality, with nothing individual in manner or expression. The.task may be difficult, but it is surely not impossible; and out of the present rude and raw material we hope to see the American girl of the future emerge possessing all the refinements of her more civilised sisters, and yet with a native fabric of character that no training can annihilate.