*As observed by a noted Italian journalist and world traveller.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Carlo_Napoleone_Gallenga
Female delicacy in Italy is looked upon as a pure crystal which the faintest breath of the world may contaminate. It is a sweet, tender flower, equally dreading the scorching meridian ray and the blast of the northern gale. The Italians believe in a virginity of the soul, without which personal chastity has any value in their eyes. To secure this moral innocence – and this may be a grievous error in a civilised age – they know no better means than an entire abstraction from, and ignorance of, the world.
The independence of the Yankee girl begins at the earliest stage of boarding-girl life – with the choice of her books, of her dancing-master, of her congregation, of her minister. She makes no mystery of her predilection for her teacher, because he is "a spruce, good-looking fellow;" for her preacher, because he has "such very white hands." She subscribes to cotillon parties, shines off at fancy fairs, tasks the purse-gallantry of her admirers of flower auctions.
She walks home late at night with her routs, arm-in-arm with her favourite partner, by moonlight, on the shady side of the road. She steams off up the Hudson, down the Ohio, and comes back none the worse for the exercise and excitement. Not the slightest shade of uneasiness, at home, on account of her protracted absence. She introduces a "travelling friend" to the old lady, who sits down to make tea for them; finally, she coolly informs her parents that she has been "popped at," and that "her mind is made up," unless, indeed, she prefers the fuss and eclat of a runaway match.
It is but justice to say, however, that this unbounded latitude is seldom, if ever, attended with mischievous results. Thanks, perhaps to natural coldness of temperament, or to the popularity of marriage in those wide-spreading settlements, the American young lady s seldom at a loss for a well-intentioned suitor. She very early acquires the calculating habits of the country. She is her own Duenna and Chaperone. She learns to value her admirers according to their worth.
Romance is all very well in books. but marriage is a matter of prose. A faux pas is seldom heard of, or, if ever, all worldly advantages have been duly weighed, and even that apparent imprudence is the result of the most consummate policy. Nowhere are most absurdly disproportionate matches more universally the order of the day. Nowhere is Mammon more invariably the torch-bearer of Hymen than amongst these very damsels whose choice is so utterly free from parental control.
Before she leaves school, a Yankee girl – God bless her! – has a thorough knowledge of the world. Else what were the good of the millions of novels she feasts upon? Her look is proud and daring; her step firm and secure. Modesty she scorns as want of sincerity and frankness; delicacy she spurs as lack of proper spirit and independence. With the exception of a few luckless words, excepted from the English dictionary by an over-nice notion of prudery – for a list of them, vide Sam Slick – there is hardly a subject of conversation she would dream of rebuking or discountenancing.
By this early training is she fitted for every department of public life: ready to enter the lists as an orator, an agitator, a journalist. The wide world is the stage she acts on. The drudgery of housekeeping devolves on the mercenary landlady of a Broadway boarding-house. Man fags himself into a dyspepsia at his counter: woman reads, flirts, and gives herself airs in all the luxuries of a hired drawing-room.
So much for Eve's share of the common lot of mortals.
