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Show IS IT "JUST LIKE WOMEN?" Thoughtless persons who read about the marriage mar-riage of the English Duke of Roxburghe to the American Miss Goelet will be interested only in one feature of the affair. That feature does not take in the ceremony nor the parties concerned in it so much as it takes in the mob of well dressed women whose struggles to get a peep at the bride defied all efforts of the police to prevent. "Just like women" the thoughtless will say, responding alone to the humor a most unwomanly spectacle provoked. Not so will the serious minded pass upon it. "Just like women" does not apply to all women, else this would be an unhappy, an intolerable existence. ex-istence. The report may be true, and doubtless is true, that ten thousand persons, mostly "well dressed" women, lined five blocks of Fifth avenuo in New York and conducted themselves in a riotous riot-ous manner, but we are certain no womanly woman is counted in that number. No womanly woman will conduct herself so as to earn the contempt of a sensible man. The cravings of curiosity are sorely tempting, but the womanly woman is able to resist re-sist them as she resists the efforts to undermine chastity. She does this so much better than man, preserving her virtue in spite of everything, that we cannot help loving the womanly woman. To the serious man more than to the serious woman, this spectacle at New York is the most shocking. He it is that exalts woman to the imagery im-agery of Ruth in the Old Testament. He loves to find her as John Alden found Priscilla Hope in the early days of New England. He hugs the thought that a resemblance of the Jewish and Puritan maids belongs to his own mother and sisters. sis-ters. His affections arc of the spiritual rather than of the carnal. He goes about in search of a wife. Does he find any Ruths or Priscilla3 in "society?" Does he discover the womanly woman in the ranks of the "Four Hundred?" Must his choice be outside the circle of American girls? This last query appears offensive. It is if it applies to all American girls, but it does not. Americans are not ready to surrender all there is of woman womanly to foreigners. A writer in an English magazine recently set up the American Ameri-can woman as an anarchist in society; that her inclinations were rather to destroy good form than imitate it. American editors resented that charge, as Americans naturally do, although knowing it, is more than half true. The shameful demonstration at New York corroborates the English Eng-lish writer's argument. It is humiliating for an American to make such confession, but the truth must prevail. We care nothing for the American women who marry titled bankrupts, for they are no longer Americans in name if they were ever Americans in heart. A good riddance when they are off for Europe. But the influence of their conduct in "society" has wrought mischief for American women. Display of wealth and the vanity of fashion promote anarchy an-archy only differing in degree from the popular notion of anarchy. It is the American woman and not the foreign woman who yields to it. Xew York is sometimes called a "foreign" city. More than half the population are foreigners, and nearly all foreigners there are poor people with large families. This is one blessing that comes with poverty. The woman who has children to care for and household duties to perform does not neglect them in order to get a peep at a bride in a Fifth avenue wedding. It is the "well dressed" and "prominent" who can gratify that curiosity the woman with servants and the woman without babies at home. Therefore must we conclude that the well dressed mob whom the police could not control at the Goelet-Roxburghe nuptials were all, or nearly all, American women. God help the race whose future depends upon such women. Think of a country w-ith such women wo-men as voters and the candidates for whom they would vote! i |
