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.  In the bleaching of the black and the grey, the change will be the more striking in the former; the recovery of health will be conspicuous in proportion to the gravity of the disease.  America has meant opportunity for women even more in some ways than for men.  The gap between them has been lessened in proportion as the gap between the American and the European has widened.  The average American woman is distinctly more different from her average English sister than is the case with their respective brothers.  The training of the English girl starts from the very beginning on a different basis from that of the boy; she is taught to restrain her impulses, while his are allowed much freer scope; the sister is expected to defer to the brother from the time she can walk or talk.  In America this difference of training is constantly tending to the vanishing point.  The American woman has never learned to play second fiddle.  The American girl, as Mr. Henry James says, is rarely negative; she is either (and usually) a most charming success or (and exceptionally) a most disastrous failure.  The pathetic army of ineffective spinsters clinging apologetically to the skirts of gentility is conspicuous by its absence in America.