least thought of themselves,
even if they were not generally considered, as being of as much
importance in the march of the nation as were their husbands and
fathers. The vision of the mothers of the republic, as they looked
forward upon the path which they hoped to see their daughters tread as
following in their own footsteps, had not been brought to pass. Not that
there was failure of the best among American womanhood; taking it in the
mass, it was pure and high and true. But it was wrongly directed to
bring forth its best potencies, at least in its most representative,
though fortunately not most characteristic, expressions; it had taken
the wrong turning.

This was so only of the expression, not of the nature. American
womanhood still stood for all the best of its kind. Removed from the
chief temptations offered by Old World conditions, it knew no taint,
felt no canker at its heart. Its head was often in the wrong, but its
heart never. The importation of European customs and manners, as well as
of European fashions, had worked its will upon the outward bearing of
the American woman; but European morals, then at a low ebb in all the
Latin countries and not too high in England herself, had not yet
succeeded in gaining foothold among our women. Moreover, except among
the extreme devotees of the fashionable world, domesticity was still the
keynote of the life of the American woman. Here is the testimony to this
effect born by Fenimore Cooper, a writer whose eyes were never closed to
the follies and foibles of his nation and whose pen was rather given to
blame than praise:

"Foreigners are apt to say that we children of this western world do not
submit to the tender emotions with the same self-abandonment as those
who are born nearer to the rising sun; that our hearts are as cold and
selfish as our manners; and that we live more for the lower and
grovelling passions than for sentiment and the affections. Most
sincerely do we wish that every charge which European jealousy and
European superciliousness have brought against the American character
was as false as this. That the people of this country are more
restrained in the exhibition of all their emotions than those across the
great waters we believe; but that the last feel the most we shall be
very unwilling to allow. Most of all shall we deny that the female form
contains hearts more true to all its affections, spirits more devoted to
the interests of its earthly hea