American girls, by contrast, were brought up to believe in themselves, to demand respect, even veneration, from their men, whom they treated as equals. In front of them, all the time, was the example of their formidable mothers, women who reigned over their households and their husbands alike, women who perhaps two generations earlier would have stood shoulder to shoulder with their men as they carved out the beginnings of a fortune in their brave new world. Marriage in the early republic had been thought of as a partnership, perhaps not of equals, but of two mutually supportive people, each of whom contributed complementary and equally valuable skills, and this spirit still infused the American household.
It was said that American husbands were the best in the world, and from the standpoint of American women this was true. For the early part of the century, men had greatly outnumbered women and the value attached to this scarcity still lingered. American daughters saw their mothers make decisions on everything, from the building of a house to where in Europe the family should visit that spring, with the funds to do so automatically handed over.
‘American women are more indulged than English women because they eclipse English women in their ability to inspire their husbands; and they are also more extravagant in their personal expenditure, but in this particular they are encouraged by their husbands,’ confirmed John Morgan Richards, an American who had come to England at eighteen and spent the next sixty years living there, interspersed with visits to the States. ‘In all matters of pleasure-making, amusements and travelling the American woman sets the pace.’
Sons were of course welcomed, especially as able successors in the care and increase of family wealth, but daughters were seen as the way forward, the family member who could boost the status and fortunes of a whole generation. The girl who made a successful marriage could lift herself and her whole family upwards, so that daughters were cosseted and cared for like hothouse plants, cherished not only for themselves but for their potential. Almost from birth they were educated in everything, from riding to music, languages, painting, history and dancing, that was supposed to fit them for a position in American society – or for marriage into the English aristocracy.
To a father, accustomed to the position of power held by women both in his own home and in society, a daughter was often a little princess rather than, as in England, a somewhat disregarded junior member of the household. As Juliette Adam put it (in the North American Review): ‘The young girl is the aristocracy, the luxury, the art, the crown of American society.’ As such, American daughters were used to demanding – and having their demands met.
Thus when Grace, the daughter of Richard Wilson,2 cabled her father from Paris: ‘Father, what shall I do? I’m supposed to sail on the Teutonic and Worth doesn’t have my dresses ready,’ he did not hesitate but immediately sent for his brother-in-law, who worked for him, and despatched him to Paris that afternoon to pay whatever was needed to secure Grace’s dresses and allow her to sail as planned. It is impossible to imagine the owner of a stately home in England doing the equivalent: sending his agent to Paris to chase up a daughter’s dresses – if only for the very good reason that such a daughter would never have been lucky enough to have a Worth dress. Any spare cash would have been spent on the estate, or perhaps a couple of new hunters for his sons.
In 1890 George W. Smalley, the American correspondent to The Times, was writing that ‘in matters of costume the Englishwoman of today is a far more admirable person than she was ten years ago,’ as he marvelled at the chic of the women in the Sunday-morning promenade of the smart in Hyde Park. It was, he concluded, because ‘the American has taught her English cousin how to dress, and her cousin has learnt the lesson and now dresses almost as well as her teacher’.
For to young American girls wonderful clothes were not a luxury but a necessity, making them infinitely better, and more seductively, clad than their English counterparts. After a ball she went to in Cowes where she wore a beautiful grey tulle dress, Belle Wilson wrote to her sister: ‘it was so lucky that I had pretty dresses as everyone talked so much about our clothes … I don’t believe I should have found it [Cowes Week] so amusing if I had not worn my best clothes and been conscious that we were decidedly the best-dressed women there.’ She ruined most of her dresses walking in the gardens afterwards and said Cowes was harder on clothes than Newport – but no matter, she had a devoted father to buy her more.
The equality of the American girl with her brothers was reflected in her financial status. American fathers often left sons and daughters equal portions or, if they did not, made sure the girls were handsomely provided for. By the time the Gilded Age dawned the American girl’s individual rights were enshrined in law: by about 1850 most states had given married women the right to hold on to their own property (in England the Married Women’s Property Act was not passed until 1870, nor, once married, did a married woman have a legal identity).
Women in America were powerful entities; in a few states they even had the vote. And as the novelist Elinor Glyn wrote: ‘The traditional contempt for woman, as the weaker vessel, which the average Englishman has inherited as a second nature, was cancelled in America by genuine respect for the gallantry of the women who endured the hardships and shared the risks of pioneering days, and the chivalrous feelings natural to virile men were fostered to a wonderful degree in their sons by the influence of Victorian idealism.
‘The second cause … of the enslavement of American men by their women is very easy to understand … The American woman is unquestionably the most beautiful, the best-dressed, best-turned-out and consequently the most attractive of all women. She takes infinitely more trouble about her looks…’
It was quite true. Preserving their complexions, all-important in those days when little or no make-up was worn, was an article of such faith among well-off Americans that often even little girls wore veils when sent out to play to avoid the damaging rays of the sun. Silk gloves protected the hands, and veils were worn by smart women during most of the summer, including for activities like tennis and swimming; porcelain skins were the result. This freshness, often with vivid colouring thanks to their more athletic lives, was one of American girls’ chief beauties. It compared favourably with the ‘enamelling’3 used by some Edwardian beauties (including Queen Alexandra), often dusted with a light veil of pearl powder. Make-up was considered ‘fast’, but women often used aids like burnt matchsticks to darken eyelids or Indian ink to draw in eyebrows – a focus of beauty for Edwardian women – with belladonna to brighten eyes and enlarge pupils.4 Some used geranium or poppy petals to stain their lips.
Later on in their lives, American women, always to the forefront, spent time dyeing their hair. For redheads, as red hair holds its pigment longer than any other colour, this was particularly difficult, as the process took two days: first the hair was dyed black, then green, then finally red (Alva Vanderbilt and other russets would retire from society for forty-eight hours to accomplish this, a disappearance tactfully overlooked by everyone else).
Another trait that allured Englishmen was the American girl’s ability to talk to boys, a skill she had been practising all her life. While English boys went to boarding school and their sisters, taught mainly by a series of governesses, spent their days in a large house often down a long drive with no nearby playmates, and very few other children deemed ‘suitable’ as friends within carriage-driving distance, young Americans, especially girls, were groomed during their teenage years in preparation for the adult social life awaiting them, meeting boys on an easy basis from childhood on.
‘This afternoon was dancing school and I wore my white dress and some lilies of the valley,’ recorded the sixteen-year-old Gertrude Vanderbilt in her 1891 diary. ‘The nice fellow who asked me last week for the german danced the lancers, the court quadrille and several round dances with me. The one who has no ear for music I danced several round dances with (he is beginning to improve) and the german. I danced with a good many other fellows tha
t I don’t often dance with.’ And a week later: ‘Alfred had a party of fellows and we went to the circus after lunch.’
Teenage Americans also learnt many of their social skills through a series of small parties almost like a junior ‘season’, such as the one noted by Gertrude Vanderbilt: ‘Bill had a dinner of young girls and fellows tonight.’ These gatherings, called ‘Sociables’, were groups of forty or fifty young people who played parlour games, sang songs and danced or in summer went driving or picnicking. There were no such excitements for their English upper-class opposite numbers.
Although they saw plenty of the opposite sex, these young American girls were always chaperoned, with mothers ever vigilant. Even at twenty, when Gertrude, clad in a black jacket and dark sable furs, wanted to go for a walk with a young man with whom she had made an afternoon date hoping her mother would be out, she had to resort to subterfuge.
‘I had come in from lunch hoping to find Mama out. It was on the strength of that I made the appointment. The man at the door, in response to my question, informed me she was not out and had not ordered the carriage. I saw the only plan for me was not to go upstairs for to get to my room I would have to pass Mama’s boudoir, where she would almost certainly be.’ They managed to slip out and ‘we no sooner got outside the door than his whole manner changed. His face lit up and he began to laugh. I did the same, out of pure happiness being out alone like this, and without Mama having discovered.’
Spending so much of their time with their contemporaries, with more freedom and far fewer restrictions than in Europe, gave these future American debutantes a social confidence and ease of manner missing in their English contemporaries – and helped them develop the quickness and repartee so fascinating to Englishmen. In contrast, many English girls had hardly spoken to a young single man – the sort that in a year or so they would be expected to marry – before they had ‘come out’, so that they were shy and nervous rather than natural and friendly.
As Corelli remarked of the American girl: ‘Perhaps the chief note in the ever-ascending scale of her innumerable attractions is her intense vitality … She is full of energy as well as charm. If she sets out to enjoy herself, she enjoys herself thoroughly. She talks and laughs freely…’
Their very Americanness was another point in their favour. A young English girl from a lower level of society who had been married for her money could shame the aristocrat in many ways, from insisting that her parents be produced on public occasions to speaking with the wrong accent – to sum up, by obviously coming from a different class. As for accent, the only American accent that some English recognised was a Southern one, which was regarded as gentlemanlike – many younger sons had settled in the South to try for a cotton fortune – and to the average untuned English ear it was impossible to place any other.
Few of these perceived drawbacks affected the American girl. ‘We are apt to accept without further enquiry, provided they come from a sufficient distance, people who are charmingly dressed, appropriately housed, and boundlessly hospitable,’ said the magazine Vanity Fair. ‘It has happened that members of that exclusive body, the “Four Hundred”, have been dreadfully shocked to find some compatriot who is taboo on the other side of the water received with open arms in Mayfair and Belgravia.’
American parents were usually too far away to embarrass. ‘The American mother is a tedious person,’ wrote Oscar Wilde.5 He could have been speaking of Mrs Leiter, mother of the beautiful Mary, whose malapropisms were a byword. She expressed admiration for a sharp-witted person’s quickness at ‘repertoire’; when she received someone in her negligée she begged their pardon for appearing in her ‘nom de plume’; and when told by someone at Newport that Mary looked too delicate to sit on the porch in the evening, replied: ‘You are mistaken, my daughter is one of the most indelicate girls you ever knew.’
The American father, thought Wilde, was better, largely because he was never seen in London. ‘He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher,’ while Americans were so different and so far from the English system that the word ‘class’ was meaningless when applied to them. Their very openness and lack of shyness emphasised this. As Frederick Martin, socialite and writer, observed of his young female compatriot: ‘[she] starts her social progress unhampered by caste and tradition’.
This freedom, however, did not extend from the social to the moral sphere. Sons, and particularly daughters – destined to be the moral compass of the home – grew up with the ideals of purity and innocence. For girls, even their names added to this impression of flowerlike innocence – Daisy, Violet, Pansy, May, Rose, Lily; Lilian Price, aware of this, changed her name to Lilly when she came to New York and added to her aura of fragrant purity by invariably dressing in white. She would create a sensation when she arrived at the Coaching Club Parade, dressed in foaming white, from the ostrich feathers curling over her huge hat to the tips of her shoes. Once in her seat, she would open her white silk parasol, conscious of the effect she was producing.
This ideal of blameless, rigorous morality naturally carried on into marriage. With society ruled by women, for whom the retention of a rich spouse was all-important, fidelity – or rather the appearance of fidelity – was everything. Nowhere in the American ideal of marriage was there room for the discreet affairs and liaisons between members of the same social set that took place across the Atlantic in the Prince of Wales’s circle or among the Souls6, with the tacit complicity of those around them.
Most young American girls were ferociously chaperoned, their mothers sticking to them like burrs and any contact that could possibly sully their purity forbidden, including, of course, any mention of sex. Edith Jones, brought up in the heart of well-bred American society, was so ignorant of, and so dreading, ‘the whole dark mystery’ that just before getting married she summoned up the courage to question her mother, who had always refused to allow any mention of it.
‘[I] begged her, with heart beating to suffocation, to tell me “what being married was like”. Her handsome face at once took on the look of icy disapproval which I most dreaded. “I never heard such a ridiculous question!” she said impatiently, & I felt at once how vulgar she thought me.
‘But in the extremity of my need I persisted. “I’m afraid, Mamma – I want to know what will happen to me!”
‘The coldness of her expression deepened to disgust. She was silent for a dreadful moment; then she said with an effort: “You’ve seen enough pictures & statues in your life. Haven’t you noticed that men are – made differently from women?”
‘“Yes,” I faltered blankly.
‘“Well, then?”
‘I was silent, from sheer inability to follow, & she brought out more sharply: “Then for heaven’s sake don’t ask me any more silly questions. You can’t be as stupid as you pretend!”’ And that was all.
It was not difficult to be ignorant in those days when no one, ever, talked openly about sex to the young. ‘Girls know absolutely nothing until they are married,’ wrote the seventeen-year-old Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton to her confidant the Rev. Elwin Whitwell. ‘They are taught that everything is wrong, and then plunged suddenly right into the middle of it.’
Even Leonie Leslie, brought up with the other Jerome sisters in the more free-and-easy atmosphere of France, shirked the issue. She had taught her four sons to walk on a drawing-room sofa above which hung a Poussin, The Marriage of Thetis and Peleus,7 in which, as she remembered, ‘debauched cherubs are lowering a red canopy over the amorous couple while sunburned satyrs carry off white-thighed Bacchantes with obvious intent’. When the children asked ‘But what are they doing?’ Leonie could only reply: ‘Having a lovely picnic.’
* * *
Another factor in the popularity of the American girls who came to England was that they were ready and able to talk to anyone on equal terms. ‘There would be great difficulty in finding an American woman who would be prepared to
take a back seat,’ said John Morgan Richards, the American entrepreneur who lived in England most of his life. Such girls also had more to talk about, as most were more cosmopolitan. Some had travelled around Europe in their fathers’ yachts, usually accompanied by friends of their parents, so that they had lived in a sort of floating house party, with visits to places of interest en route – all good conversational material.
Most were better educated than English girls, taken by their mothers to Europe to learn languages and study art and music. When Consuelo Vanderbilt was sent to spend time with the youngest Lansdowne daughter, while her parents were staying with the Viceroy and Vicereine of India, Lord and Lady Lansdowne, at Government House, she was surprised to find ‘how scanty was her knowledge. Little time or trouble was spent on the education of English girls. It was still customary for them to have a good homespun governess. They read Miss Young’s History of Greece. But Virgil, Gibbon, Hallam and Green were unknown to them. I pitied the limited outlook. Later on I was to find that English girls suffered many handicaps.’
What Consuelo did not then realise, of course, was that English education was of a different sort – though often scanty in the schoolroom, it was a good training for the kind of life they hoped and expected they would lead: marriage to a ‘suitable’ young man, with a future life spent largely in the country, with perhaps seasons in London. That is, very much like that of their parents.
Although confined largely to the schoolroom, the daughter of an English landowning aristocrat (and most aristocrats were landowning) absorbed much of the expected behaviour of the wife of such a man from her mother. With her mother she would take food to cottages, visit the sick, attend fêtes, and as she grew older gradually join gatherings of her parents’ friends or meet them during some of the long country-house visits exchanged between cousins, friends and connections.
The Husband Hunters Page 4