The American’s Advantage

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume II, Issue 272, 12 March 1889, Page 3

The American’s Advantage

Sbvrral newspapers have taken advantage of the marriage of the Duke of Marlborough to Mrs Hamersley to call attention to the

way in which American girls are cutting out English girls in the matrimonial market, and have suggested many causes for this. We should say that the main reason is that the American girl is not so missy as her English sister, and that she is brought up to run down her own game. In England, the notion still prevails that a girl is sure to get into mischief if she has not a mother or something of that sort at her elbows. She herself resents this, and takes it out in fast conversation and slangy ways, so that she becomes a singular mixture of a doll »nd tomboy. Her small talk is the very sm illest of small talk. Her mother is always hy her, with palpable suggestions of marriage, which frightens off all suitors. The girl dresses badly, generally with meretricious g»ud; she does not give her natural advantages a fair chance ;at one moment she appears in the hideous garments of the eesthete ; at another she is arrayed in

a mannish tennis costume with a racket in her hand ; at another in the white and limp muslin of innocence. There is always an air of effort in her get-up, and of effort which is a failure.

Now, the American girl has natural taste ; her clothes seem to belong to her, and whatever she may wear, it is put on to the best advantage ; she knows how to ta ! k agreeably, and, be>ng always quite at her ease, puts all those with w om she is thrown ar their ease.

The d .y of the bread and-butrer tomboy is over. English girls must realise this if they want to get married.— American paper.