oo often content to be a
mere housewife, there is of course no comparison. The best proof of the
superior place American ladies occupy is to be found in the notions they
profess to entertain of the relations of an English married pair. They
talk of the English wife as little better than a slave; declaring that
when they stay with English friends, or receive an English couple in
America, they see the wife always deferring to the husband and the
husband always assuming that his pleasure and convenience are to
prevail. The European wife, they admit, often gets her own way, but she
gets it by tactful arts, by flattery or wheedling or playing on the
man's weaknesses; whereas in America the husband's duty and desire is to
gratify the wife, and render to her those services which the English
tyrant exacts from his consort. One may often hear an American matron
commiserate a friend who has married in Europe, while the daughters
declare in chorus that they will never follow the example. Laughable as
all this may seem to English women, it is perfectly true that the theory
as well as the practice of conjugal life is not the same in America as
in England. There are overbearing husbands in America, but they are more
condemned by the opinion of the neighborhood than in England. There are
exacting wives in England, but their husbands are more pitied than would
be the case in America. In neither country can one say that the
principle of perfect equality reigns; for in America the balance
inclines nearly, though not quite, as much in favor of the wife as it
does in England in favor of the husband. No one man can have a
sufficiently large acquaintance in both countries to entitle his
individual opinion on the results to much weight. So far as I have been
able to collect views from those observers who have lived in both
countries, they are in favor of the American practice, perhaps because
the theory it is based on departs less from pure equality than does that
of England. These observers do not mean that the recognition of women as
equals or superiors makes them any better or sweeter or wiser than
Englishwomen; but rather that the principle of equality, by correcting
the characteristic faults of men, and especially their selfishness and
vanity, is more conducive to the concord and happiness of a home. They
conceive that to make the wife feel her independence and responsibility
more strongly than she does in Europe tends to brace and expand