“Kind nature’s are the best:  those next to best
  That fit us like a nature second-hand;
  Which are indeed the manners of the great.”

In our own national history we have learned to recognize that the personal demeanor of women may be a social and political force.  The slave-power owed much of its prolonged control at Washington, and the larger part of its favor in Europe, to the fact that the manners of Southern women had been more sedulously trained than those of Northern women.  Even at this moment, one may see at any watering-place that the relative social influence of different cities does not depend upon the intellectual training of their women, so much as on the manners.  And, even if this is very unreasonable, the remedy would seem to be, not to go about lecturing on the intrinsic superiority of the Muses to the Graces, but to pay due homage at all the shrines.

It is a great deal to ask of reformers, especially, that they should be ornamental as well as useful; and I would by no means indorse the views of a lady who once told me that she was ready to adopt the most radical views of the women-reformers if she could see one well-dressed woman who accepted them.  The place where we should draw the line between independence and deference, between essentials and non-essentials, between great ideas and little courtesies, will probably never be determined—­except by actual examples.  Yet it is safe to fall back on Miss Edgeworth’s maxim in “Helen,” that “Every one who makes goodness disagreeable commits high treason against virtue.”  And it is not a pleasant result of our good deeds, that others should be immediately driven into bad deeds by the burning desire to be unlike us.

GIRLSTEROUSNESS

They tell the story of a little boy, a young scion of the house of Beecher, that, on being rebuked for some noisy proceeding, in which his little sister had also shared, he claimed that she also should be included in the indictment.  “If a boy makes too much noise,” he said, “you tell him he mustn’t be boisterous.  Well, then, when a girl makes just as much noise, you ought to tell her not to be so girlsterous.”

I think that we should accept, with a sense of gratitude, this addition to the language.  It supplies a name for a special phase of feminine demeanor, inevitably brought out of modern womanhood.  Any transitional state of society develops some evil with the good.  Good results are unquestionably proceeding from the greater freedom now allowed to women.  The drawback is that we are developing, here and now, more of “girlsterousness” than is apt to be seen in less enlightened countries.

The more complete the subjection of woman, the more “subdued” in every sense she is.  The typical woman of savage life is, at least in youth, gentle, shy, retiring, timid.  A Bedouin woman is modest and humble; an Indian girl has a voice “gentle and low.”  The utmost stretch of the imagination cannot picture either of them as “girlsterous.”  That perilous quality can only come as woman is educated, self-respecting, emancipated.  “Girlsterousness” is the excess attendant on that virtue, the shadow which accompanies that light.  It is more visible in England than in France, in America than in England.