2
No sooner does the summer vacation arrive than most schoolgirls have prepared for it a full program of work. Very rarely does the American girl spend the summer vacation resting at home, even if her family owns a house at a summer resort. She may keep two weeks for herself to rest, and spend the remainder in temporary employment.
A great number work as leaders of summer camps,
Sports hold importance among girls
or as typists in commercial establishments. During the fruit-picking seasons many move out to the orchards to work picking apples and cherries.
But the American girl's absorption in work has narrowed the horizon of her knowledge and left her limited in culture. This applies even to students in higher studies, though most of them are very skilled indeed in their field of specialization; and it is very rare that we find an American girl who commands
a foreign language in addition to her own, or who knows even a little about the countries of the other worlds.
The girl admits this great gap in her knowledge. She says: I study and work at the same time, and sports and social life take up my free hours; so I cannot now attend to culture — I shall postpone that until after forty, and then I shall be permitted to give myself to literature, learning, and poetry!!
Faced with this unbridled desire of the American girl for work and self-reliance, one asks how she looks upon the future: is her aim in life only to secure a profession to live by?
It may be said that however far the American girl goes in study and work, her first wish is marriage; there is hardly a girl in the world who looks toward married life and fights to attain it like the American girl. For the sake of her marriage she is ready to sacrifice her work and her profession. Often a girl makes enrolling at the university a means of meeting a young man to marry.
Unlike the Arab girl, whose family still 'spares' her the trouble of choosing the right husband, the American girl is responsible for choosing her life's partner. She must undertake the search for him herself, even if it requires leaving her town and moving to live in a new community in another town.
But the American girl does not let her wish take command of the wheel of her life, or paralyze her activity in earning her living, so long as she is not bound to a fiancé or a husband.
I once asked a student in the physics courses the reason for her strenuous effort to gain her degree, since she said she preferred married life and the raising of children to it. She laughed and said: 'Of course my wish is marriage — but that does not mean that I must squat at home to "wait for my portion," as an Eastern girl would say. Here in America, unlike your countries, if a girl sits at home waiting for "the matchmakers," she is branded with idleness and laziness, and the young men keep away from her!'
Then she went on, enumerating the reasons that make her continue her studies: 'I must obtain a profession that secures my life financially if, say, I do not marry, for I hate to be a burden on my family. And there is another reason: if it should happen that I part from my husband, or that he leaves me with children, I would then be able to earn my living and support my children by the sweat of my brow.'
The American girl finds no difficulty in getting to know a young man she hopes to marry in the future, for American society is built upon the mixing of the sexes, and is tolerant to a great extent of a girl's keeping company with a young man. And we should