This was so only of the expression, not of the nature. American womanhood still stood for all the best of its kind. Removed from the chief temptations offered by Old World conditions, it knew no taint, felt no canker at its heart. Its head was often in the wrong, but its heart never. The importation of European customs and manners, as well as of European fashions, had worked its will upon the outward bearing of the American woman; but European morals, then at a low ebb in all the Latin countries and not too high in England herself, had not yet succeeded in gaining foothold among our women. Moreover, except among the extreme devotees of the fashionable world, domesticity was still the keynote of the life of the American woman. Here is the testimony to this effect born by Fenimore Cooper, a writer whose eyes were never closed to the follies and foibles of his nation and whose pen was rather given to blame than praise:
"Foreigners are apt to say that we children of this western world do not submit to the tender emotions with the same self-abandonment as those who are born nearer to the rising sun; that our hearts are as cold and selfish as our manners; and that we live more for the lower and grovelling passions than for sentiment and the affections. Most sincerely do we wish that every charge which European jealousy and European superciliousness have brought against the American character was as false as this. That the people of this country are more restrained in the exhibition of all their emotions than those across the great waters we believe; but that the last feel the most we shall be very unwilling to allow. Most of all shall we deny that the female form contains hearts more true to all its affections, spirits more devoted to the interests of its earthly head, or an identity of existence more perfect than those with which the American wife clings to her husband. She is literally 'bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.' It is seldom that her wishes cross the limits of the domestic circle, which to her is earth itself and all that it contains which is most desirable. Her husband and children compose her little world, and beyond them and their sympathies it is rare indeed that her truant affections ever wish to stray. A part of this concentration of the American wife's existence in these domestic interests is doubtless owing to the simplicity of American life and the absence of temptation. Still, so devoted is the female heart, so true to its impulses, and so little apt to wander from house-feelings and home-duties, that the imputation to which there is allusion is just that of all others to which the wives of the Republic ought not to be subject."