o Dr. Mary Walker, to the female mayors of
Wyoming, to the presidential ambitions of Mrs. Belva Lockwood; but
these are mere adjuncts, not explanations, of the question under
consideration. The European visitor to the United States _has_ to
write about American women because they bulk so largely in his view,
because they seem essentially so prominent a feature of American life;
because their _relative_ importance and interest impress him as
greater than those of women in the lands of the Old World, because
they seem to him to embody in so eminent a measure that intangible
quality of Americanism, the existence, or indeed the possibility, of
which is so hotly denied by some Americans.

Indeed, those who look upon the prominent role of the American woman
merely as one phase of the "new woman" question--merely as the
inevitable conspicuousness of woman intruding on what has hitherto
been exclusively the sphere of man--are many degrees beside the point.
The American note is as obvious in the girl who has never taken the
slightest interest in polities, the professions, or even the bicycle,
as in Dr. Mary Walker or Mrs. Lockwood. The prevalent English idea of
the actual interference of the American woman in public life is
largely exaggerated. There are, for instance, in Massachusetts 625,000
women entitled to vote for members of the school committees; and the
largest actual vote recorded is 20,140. Of 175,000 women of voting age
in Connecticut the numbers who used their vote in the last three years
were 3,806, 3,241, and 1,906. These, if any, are typical American
States; and there is not the shadow of a doubt that the 600,000 women
who stayed at home are quite as "American" as the 20,000 who went to
the poll. The sphere of the American woman's influence and the reason
of her importance lie behind politics and publicity.

It seems a reasonable assumption that the formation of the American
girl is due to the same large elemental causes that account for
American phenomena generally; and her _relative_ strikingness may be
explained by the reflection that there was more room for these great
forces to work in the case of woman than in the case of man. The
Englishman, for instance, through his contact with public life and
affairs, through his wider experience, through his rubbing shoulders
with more varied types, had already been prepared for the working of
American conditions in a way that his more sheltered womankind had
not been