It must not, however, be forgotten or unnoted that, while the American woman is thus rich in a heritage unequalled by that granted to any of her sisters, being world-heir instead of heir to a race, she has some corresponding disadvantages to overcome in her effort to influence as a racial representative the currents of world-thought and world-progress. She has behind her no national tradition stretching far back into a past so remote that it has ceased to be effect and has become merely foundation. The American woman, alone of all the representatives of the higher cultures, has no effective nationality to shape her trend. She is a product of her time only, not of time and ancient tradition mingled; she has no distinct nationality of growth and line of progress. Every other woman of Caucasian race has a past to which to refer as inspiration and cause, a past which is a story of upward growth, of ever-increasing culture. The American woman found her culture ready for her--was already, at her birth, the child and expression of the highest civilization known to her day. She had no need of exerting formative influence upon her race; all was already done to her hand. Thus she lacks the greatest of all traditions--the tradition of growth and development.
Yet, though not of native production, though lacking the influence of constant-trending nationality, the American woman is and always has been strongly individual. While she is not an indigenous development, not a result of racial growth and broadening, yet her development has been essentially characteristic. She has reached forward upon lines of variant trend from those of her sisters of other cultures, and she is truly a product of her country in that she has been shaped by the conditions of the time and circumstances of that country's birth. There was breathed into her from the first the informing spirit of the typical American civilization the spirit of freedom. And into her nature has also come another spirit distinctively American--the spirit of the wilderness subdued and conquered, of a barren land made to yield its treasures to the arm of the pioneer the spirit of conquest. There is no new gift of mind or soul brought to her by other nations that has not been modified by these twin spirits. Thus, though heir to all nations and peoples, though product of all cultures, she remains typically American in dominant traits, in the path in which she has chosen to set her feet. Latin and Teuton, Slav and Celt, she has in her veins the blood of them all; but she is still less their result than their modification, and she is still the child of America even more than of the world which has given her life.