Visit ebookmass.

com to download the full version and

explore more ebook or textbook

Practice Makes Perfect: French Conversation 3rd

Edition Eliane Kurbegov

_____ Click the link below to download _____

https://ebookmass.com/product/practice-makes-perfect-french-
conversation-3rd-edition-eliane-kurbegov/

Explore and download more ebook or textbook at ebookmass.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

Practice Makes Perfect: French Conversation, Premium Third

Edition Eliane Kurbegov

https://ebookmass.com/product/practice-makes-perfect-french-
conversation-premium-third-edition-eliane-kurbegov/

Practice Makes Perfect: Basic French Eliane Kurbegov

https://ebookmass.com/product/practice-makes-perfect-basic-french-
eliane-kurbegov/

Practice Makes Perfect: Basic French, Premium Third

Edition Kurbegov

https://ebookmass.com/product/practice-makes-perfect-basic-french-
premium-third-edition-kurbegov/

Basic French 2nd Edition Eliane Kurbegov

https://ebookmass.com/product/basic-french-2nd-edition-eliane-
kurbegov/
Basic French 2nd Edition Eliane Kurbegov

https://ebookmass.com/product/basic-french-2nd-edition-eliane-
kurbegov-2/

Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Conversation, Premium 3rd

Edition Jean Yates

https://ebookmass.com/product/practice-makes-perfect-spanish-
conversation-premium-3rd-edition-jean-yates/

Practice Makes Perfect: Complete French Grammar 3rd

Edition Annie Heminway

https://ebookmass.com/product/practice-makes-perfect-complete-french-
grammar-3rd-edition-annie-heminway/

Practice Makes Perfect: French Verb Tenses 3rd Edition

Trudie Booth

https://ebookmass.com/product/practice-makes-perfect-french-verb-
tenses-3rd-edition-trudie-booth/

Practice Makes Perfect: English Conversation Jean Yates

https://ebookmass.com/product/practice-makes-perfect-english-
conversation-jean-yates-2/
Copyright © 2021 by McGraw Hill. All rights reserved. Except as
permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of
this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by
any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the
prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-26-425730-0
MHID: 1-26-425730-9

The material in this eBook also appears in the print version of this
title: ISBN: 978-1-26-425729-4, MHID: 1-26-425729-5.

eBook conversion by codeMantra

Version 1.0

All trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners. Rather

than put a trademark symbol after every occurrence of a
trademarked name, we use names in an editorial fashion only, and
to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of
infringement of the trademark. Where such designations appear in
this book, they have been printed with initial caps.

McGraw-Hill Education eBooks are available at special quantity

discounts to use as premiums and sales promotions or for use in
corporate training programs. To contact a representative, please visit
the Contact Us page at www.mhprofessional.com.

Trademarks: McGraw Hill, the McGraw Hill logo, Practice Makes

Perfect, and related trade dress are trademarks or registered
trademarks of McGraw-Hill Education and/or its affiliates in the
United States and other countries and may not be used without
written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their
respective owners. McGraw-Hill Education is not associated with any
product or vendor mentioned in this book.

McGraw Hill Language Lab App

Visit https://ebookmass.com today to explore
a vast collection of ebooks across various
genres, available in popular formats like
PDF, EPUB, and MOBI, fully compatible with
all devices. Enjoy a seamless reading
experience and effortlessly download high-
quality materials in just a few simple steps.
Plus, don’t miss out on exciting offers that
let you access a wealth of knowledge at the
best prices!
Extensive audio recordings (requiring Internet connection) are
available to support your study of this book. Go to
www.mhlanguagelab.com to access the online version of this
application. Also available for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.
Search “McGraw Hill Language Lab” in the iTunes app store, Google
Play or Amazon App store for Android.

TERMS OF USE

This is a copyrighted work and McGraw-Hill Education and its

licensors reserve all rights in and to the work. Use of this work is
subject to these terms. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act
of 1976 and the right to store and retrieve one copy of the work,
you may not decompile, disassemble, reverse engineer, reproduce,
modify, create derivative works based upon, transmit, distribute,
disseminate, sell, publish or sublicense the work or any part of it
without McGraw-Hill Education’s prior consent. You may use the
work for your own noncommercial and personal use; any other use
of the work is strictly prohibited. Your right to use the work may be
terminated if you fail to comply with these terms.

THE WORK IS PROVIDED “AS IS.” McGRAW-HILL EDUCATION AND

ITS LICENSORS MAKE NO GUARANTEES OR WARRANTIES AS TO
THE ACCURACY, ADEQUACY OR COMPLETENESS OF OR RESULTS
TO BE OBTAINED FROM USING THE WORK, INCLUDING ANY
INFORMATION THAT CAN BE ACCESSED THROUGH THE WORK VIA
HYPERLINK OR OTHERWISE, AND EXPRESSLY DISCLAIM ANY
WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED
TO IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR
A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. McGraw-Hill Education and its licensors do
not warrant or guarantee that the functions contained in the work
will meet your requirements or that its operation will be
uninterrupted or error free. Neither McGraw-Hill Education nor its
licensors shall be liable to you or anyone else for any inaccuracy,
error or omission, regardless of cause, in the work or for any
damages resulting therefrom. McGraw-Hill Education has no
responsibility for the content of any information accessed through
the work. Under no circumstances shall McGraw-Hill Education
and/or its licensors be liable for any indirect, incidental, special,
punitive, consequential or similar damages that result from the use
of or inability to use the work, even if any of them has been advised
of the possibility of such damages. This limitation of liability shall
apply to any claim or cause whatsoever whether such claim or cause
arises in contract, tort or otherwise.
 Contents

Preface
1 Meeting people
2 Making conversation and making plans
3 Discussing leisure activities
4 Discussing current events
5 Watching sports events
6 Celebrating and having fun
7 Accomplishments
8 Making comparisons
9 Asking for help
10 Departures
11 Communicating in a remote environment

Answer key
 Preface

Have you already spent considerable time learning French

vocabulary and grammar? Are you ready to learn the language that
real Francophones speak in a spontaneous and authentic manner? In
that case, this is the right book for you. You have some knowledge
of French, and you probably want to embark on activities that will
allow you to engage in conversations with native speakers of French.
That is precisely the aim of this book!
My personal experience as a student of languages as well as a
teacher of French is that the most appealing aspect of language
study lies in your ability to interact with other people in the target
language, gaining ever greater insights into new cultures.
Although learning vocabulary and grammatical concepts is
important, it is but one avenue toward real communication. Therein
lies the fun! Once you have established the fundamentals of
language, it is time to aim at practical applications, setting the stage
for personal interactions, and, above all, an understanding of the
target culture.
Language does not merely consist of words and structures; it is
also a representation of the perspectives and points of view of real
people. Growing up in France, I became accustomed to acting
humbly, for instance questioning whether I truly deserved a
compliment instead of simply accepting it and thanking the giver for
it—as Americans do. So, when I first came to the States, it took me
a while to understand that an appropriate reply to a compliment
such as What a pretty dress! is Thank you rather than Really, you
think so?
 Therefore, to help you gain an understanding of cultural
differences between U.S. culture and French culture, I have tried to
create as many culturally appropriate scenarios as possible in this
conversation book so that you can appreciate situations you might
encounter in France: transportation strikes, Bastille Day celebrations,
shopping at the Fnac (a chain of stores specializing in electronics
and books). I also created Chris, an American student in France, so
that you could meet French people and face authentic French
situations through his eyes. Although the cultural focus is on France,
the communicative aspects of language emphasized throughout the
book are applicable to all Francophone cultures. Furthermore,
because my goal is to give you the skills required for conversation,
dialogues are often written in the informal register (with tu) except
for interactions that require the formal register (with vous), for
example, with salespeople, waitpersons, or business associates.
The book is divided into eleven units. Each unit is guided by a
theme, such as current events, leisure time, or asking for help. You
can focus on specific units or themes of interest, or you may opt to
travel through the chapters in the order they are presented. The
latter approach will allow you to become familiar with the characters
who reappear throughout the chapters and meet new ones as you
go through the book.
The conversational style of the lessons aims at developing a
confident speaking style. Beginning with an opening conversation,
followed by grammatical notes, syntactical structures, and study of
word usage, all elements are focused on the typical problems of
native English speakers.
Each unit features several engaging dialogues that illustrate
practical, interesting, and culturally relevant conversational
situations. For example, in one chapter, you will learn that travel and
leisure activities in France are at times impacted by labor strikes.
Useful, high-frequency conversational phrases are highlighted in the
dialogues, then clarified and illustrated for your use. A variety of
exercises help you put new knowledge into practice. The Answer key
provides quick and easy feedback. You will get practice in using new
concepts and will be encouraged to construct personalized
conversations. And this Premium Third Edition is supported by
streaming audio via app and online, including recordings of all 47
dialogues in the book and the answers to more than 40 exercises.
This book will enhance your conversational skills by exposing you
to high frequency phrases and sentences used in spontaneous
conversations and provide opportunities to practice them in a variety
of formats.
À vous de jouer!
 Meeting people

Dialogue 1
Chloé meets a young American at a party. She has never met
him face-to-face, but she seems to know him . . .
 EXERCICE 1.1
Jugez de votre compréhension. Check your
comprehension. Write T for true or F for false.

1. ________ Chris connaît déjà Chloé.

2. ________ Chris est français.

3. ________ Chloé est américaine.

4. ________ Chris est l’ami de Didier.

5. ________ Chloé traduit des méls en français.

Improving your conversation

Review the following explanations of some interesting phrases
found in the previous dialogue. Make them your own.

Bonjour
To say hello, the words bonjour (literally, good day), bonsoir
(literally, good evening), or salut (hi) may be used. Bonjour is
usually used until around six P.M., whereas bonsoir is used after
six P.M. On the other hand, salut can be used any time of day.

Ça va bien?
 This question has several variations. Ça va? may be interpreted
as How are you?, How’s it going?, or Is everything OK?
Therefore, there is flexibility in the response.

The question Ça va bien? is more specific and requires a yes

or no answer.

Moi, je/toi, tu/lui, il/elle, elle

In English, voice inflexion and tone are used to emphasize the
subject; in French, emphasis is conveyed by adding a stress
pronoun before the subject pronoun.

C’est ça
Use this phrase to confirm what someone says to you.

Je vois
 Use this phrase to confirm that you understood what was
conveyed to you.

Je pige
This phrase is slang for Je comprends (I understand).

Merci pour...
Use this phrase to thank someone for something specific.

Pas de quoi / il n’y a pas de quoi

Use either of these phrases as a reply for a thank you. Know
that pas de quoi is an abbreviated version of il n’y a pas de
quoi and is therefore more informal than the longer phrase.

Même
Use this word to intensify and give emphasis to what you just
said.

EXERCICE 1.2
Visit https://ebookmass.com today to explore
a vast collection of ebooks across various
genres, available in popular formats like
PDF, EPUB, and MOBI, fully compatible with
all devices. Enjoy a seamless reading
experience and effortlessly download high-
quality materials in just a few simple steps.
Plus, don’t miss out on exciting offers that
let you access a wealth of knowledge at the
best prices!
Other documents randomly have
different content
“They read it for its story of adventure, and for its rare way of telling
the story,” I ventured, in answer. “They read it for its style.”

“Style! Gemini! Style! I should smile! I can write a better book than
that myself!”

“Then it might pay you as a business venture to set yourself about

it.”

“It’s by a man named Stevenson, and he’s written other stories. Are
they all as bad?”

Strange he should make such a criticism of Louis Stevenson, in

literature pronouncedly the successful man. For success in the
abstract, and successful men and women in the concrete—the word
success is here used in its vulgar, popular sense, in reference to
material advancement, not to ethical or spiritual development—he
worships. Success is a chief god in his pantheon,—to have returns
greater than one’s effort or worth deserve. Yet he believes with the
author of Lorna Doone, “the excess of price over value is the true
test of success in life.” None of us would think of saying Shakespeare
was a success; or Milton; or John Brown; or Martin Luther. But Pope,
with his clever money-making, we might call a success, as did Swift
in 1728: “God bless you, whose great genius has not so transported
you as to leave you to the constancy of mankind, for wealth is
liberty, and liberty is a blessing fittest for a philosopher.”

The means to end, the processes by which the successful issue of a

matter is gained, our neighbor of St. Louis tells you with a smile not
to be finikin about. Many who have had success have not been. Look
at all history, from Abraham to Joe Smith and Cecil Rhodes and
many of our millionaires. He himself is not, he declares, but his acts
often contradict his assertion. So long as a man, or a woman, “gets
there,” it does not matter much how. “Work through a corporation or
trust,” he tells you, and smiling at you with honest eyes, adds, “A
corporation can do things the individual man would not.” The one
who succeeds is the model; he is to be envied; he is the ideal the
ancients sought—the happy man. Pass by noblesse oblige, human
heartedness, elevation that would not stoop to exploit human labor,
human need, and human sacrifice—that is, as corporations pass
these qualities by.

In short, let us, in fact, and not by legend alone, have the character
formerly ascribed by average English folk to the Yankee.

Assumption of excellence, he knows, goes far toward persuading

people that you have it. There is not so great difference in people
after all, this democrat believes. When one has every material
privilege that will allow him to assume, that will hedge and fence his
assumption about, he is pretty apt to succeed, he thinks, and be
cried up as a man of extraordinary virtue, of taste, of attainment. In
any success, commonly so-called, he asks little of the great marks by
which a man should be judged. “He has done this.” “He has got
that.” “He is clever,” he says. He rarely cries, “He is honest.” “He is
true.”

Marriage he is not so apt as the brilliant woman beside him to

consider impermanent. This is wholly a result of convention, for
women, by their very nature and the conditions of married life, cling
more closely to the permanence of the union.

In marital relations he has more liberty. When she asks him if she
may, or in her phrase “can,” do so and so, and in rehearsing the
matter says he “let her,” he accepts her homage and the servile
status she voluntarily assumes. You exclaim that men for many
centuries have been apt to do this. Entirely, if offered him by such an
enchantress.

“If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,

How shall men grow?”
Toward women, with all his subtlety, he is possessed of a certain
naïveté, which renders him a most agreeable companion, and much
at the mercy of such associates.

On an express leaving St. Louis at nine of the morning and headed

toward the East, two of these men were one day riding. A stretch of
level land, encrusted in snow and flooded with sunshine glowing
warm and yellow three weeks after the winter solstice, lengthened
the way. By three in the afternoon the sight of the passengers was
strained from the pulsation of the train, and reading gave place to
lassitude.

“Say,” yawned one of the men, “do you think marriage is a failure?”

“Failure! failure!” answered the other. “The biggest kind of a success!

Failure! Holy smoke! Why I’ve just married my third wife. Failure! It
beats electric lights all hollow.”

“I don’ know,” answered the questioner, dyspeptically. “I don’ know.

I go home every week or ten days. My wife isn’t glad to see me. I’m
going home now. She won’t be glad. They think more of you when
you’re not home so much.”

“Whee-u-u-u,” whistled number two.

With a holiday on his hands no man is more awkward. The secret of

giving himself to enjoyment he does not know. His relaxation takes
crudest form. Holiday enjoyment means in many cases sowing
money in barbaric fashion, in every thinkable triviality that entails
expense. That which he has bent every nerve toward getting, for
which he has grown prematurely careworn, the possession of which
vulgar philosophy counts the summa summarium of life, this he
must scatter broadcast, not in the real things of art and literature
and bettering the condition of the less fortunate, but in sordid
pleasure and vacuous rushing hither and yon. It is his way of
showing superiority to the cub who has not the money-making
faculty, or who holds different ideas of the value of living. Upon such
merrymaking he has been known to indulge in Homeric laughter
over his own excess, and in tones heralds used in the days of
Agamemnon. Physically he breathes deeper and is broader chested
than many men; he has more voice, and he puts it out the top of the
throat.

To watch the purple dog-tooth violet push up through dead leaves in

March; to listen in his fragrant, sunlit spring to the song of the
thrush or the delectable yearning of the mourning-dove; to know the
quivering windflowers that freshen soil under oak and hickory—all
this is to him as the yellow primrose to Peter Bell. There is no
pleasure without an end—that end being money.

The blooded mare in his stable needs exercise and he likes not
another to drive her lest she lose response to his voice and hand.
But it is really a bore to drive; what interest is there in sitting in a
wagon and going round and round? He must be doing something.
He forgets the retaliation nature takes upon grooves in human life
and that discountenancing of innocent pleasures is the first step
toward dementia paralytica and the end of interest in his fair and
buoyant world. He will probably die suddenly in middle age, for he is
too extreme in expenditure of himself, and too small an eater of the
honey of life. Honey-eaters have terrene permanence.

This man and woman are not disproportionate neighbors. What will
be their record to the reading of Prince Posterity?

The lands that border the Big Muddy have more of the old American
spirit than the extreme East. The proportions of the old American
blood are there greater than upon the sea-coast, where Europeans
of a tradition far different from the ideals and enthusiasms of our
early comers have dropped and settled, and in such numbers that
they can and do knit their old mental and social habits into a
garment which is impervious to true American influences.
Our old American teachings!—for instance, the estimate of the
greatness of work, the dignity of labor of any sort whatever—that, it
was once claimed, was a great reason our republic existed to
demonstrate to the world the dignity of work, of bodily exertion
directed to some economic purpose, to produce use, adapt material
things to living. “That citizen who lives without labor, verily how evil
a man!”—’Αργὸος πολίτης χεῖνος ὡς χαχός γ’ ἀνήρ, and such
sentiments as this of Euripides dominated our democracy.

But in our eastern sea-coast cities, what with the development of an

idle, moneyed class, and the settling down of millions of immigrants,
the European conception of work’s inherent ignobleness has grown
to strong hold.

“Work is not a disgrace, but lack of work is a disgrace,” “Ἔργον δ

ουδὲν ὄνειδος, αεργίη δέ τ’ ὄνειδος. And Hesiod’s words hold to the
present day among genuine Americans.

Possibly with the great Middle West and its infinite “go,” optimism,
and constructive breadth, and with such men and women as these
types by the Big Muddy, the preservation of Americanism really lies—
but it must be with their greater spiritualization and greater moral
elevation for the future.
 THE NEW ENGLAND WOMAN
In order to give her praises a lustre and beauty peculiar and
appropriate, I should have to run into the history of her life—a task
requiring both more leisure and a richer vein. Thus much I have said
in few words, according to my ability. But the truth is that the only
true commender of this lady is time, which, so long a course as it
has run, has produced nothing in this sex like her.
Bacon, of Queen Elizabeth

Die Ehelosigkeit eines Theils des weiblichen Geschlechts ist in dem

monogamischen Gesellschaftszustande eine nicht zu beseitigende
statistische Nothwendigkeit.
Gustave Schönberg
 THE NEW ENGLAND WOMAN
Throughout our fair country there has long been familiar, in actual
life and in tradition, a corporate woman known as the New England
woman.

When this woman landed upon American shores, some two hundred
and fifty years ago, she was doubtless a hearty, even-minded, rosy-
cheeked, full-fleshed English lass. Once here, however, in her
physical and mental make-up, under pioneer conditions and
influenced by our electric climate, a differentiation began, an
unconscious individualizing of herself: this was far, far back in the
time of the Pilgrim Mothers.

In this adaptation she developed certain characteristics which are

weakly human, intensely feminine, and again passing the fables of
saints in heroism and self-devotion. Just what these qualities were,
and why they grew, is worth considering before—in the bustle of the
twentieth century and its elements entirely foreign to her primitive
and elevated spirit—she has passed from view and is quite forgotten.

In the cities of to-day she is an exotic. In the small towns she is

hardly indigenous. Of her many homes, from the close-knit forests of
Maine to the hot sands of Monterey, that community of villages
which was formerly New England is her habitat. She has always
been most at home in the narrow village of her forebears, where the
church and school were in simpler days, and still at times are—even
to our generation measuring only with Pactolian sands in its hour-
glasses—the powers oftenest quoted and most revered. From these
sources the larger part of herself, the part that does not live by
bread alone, has been nourished.
It was in the quiet seclusion of the white homes of these villages
that in past generations she gained her ideals of life. Such a home
imposed what to women of the world at large might be inanity. But,
with a self-limitation almost Greek, she saw within those clapboard
walls things dearest to a woman’s soul,—a pure and sober family
life, a husband’s protective spirit, the birth and growth of children,
neighborly service—keenly dear to her—for all whose lives should
come within touch of her active hands, and an old age guarded by
the devotion of those to whom she had given her activities.

To this should be added another gift of the gods which this woman
ever bore in mind with calmness—a secluded ground, shaded by
hemlocks or willows, where should stand the headstone marking her
dust, over which violets should blossom to freshening winds, and
robin call to mate in the resurrection time of spring, and in the dim
corners of which ghostly Indian pipes should rise from velvet mould
to meet the summer’s fervency.

Under such conditions and in such homes she had her growth. The
tasks that engaged her hands were many, for at all times she was
indefatigable in what Plato calls women’s work, τὰ ἔνδον. She rose
while it was yet night; she looked well to the ways of her household,
and eat not the bread of idleness. In housekeeping—which in her
conservative neighborhood and among her primary values meant,
almost up to this hour, not directing nor helping hired people in
heaviest labors, but rather all that the phrase implied in pioneer days
—her energies were spent—herself cooking; herself spinning the
thread and weaving, cutting out and sewing all family garments and
household linen; herself preserving flesh, fish, and fruits. To this she
added the making of yeast, candles, and soap for her household,
their butter and cheese—perhaps also these foods for market sale—
at times their cider, and even elderberry wine for their company, of
as fine a color and distinguished a flavor as the gooseberry which
the wife of immortal Dr. Primrose offered her guests. Abigail Adams
herself testifies that she made her own soap, in her early days at
Braintree, and chopped the wood with which she kindled her fires.
In such accomplishments she was one of a great sisterhood,
thousands of whom served before and thousands after her. These
women rarely told such activities in their letters, and rarely, too, I
think, to their diaries; for their fingers fitted a quill but awkwardly
after a day with distaff or butter-moulding.

These duties were of the external world, mainly mechanical and

routine, and they would have permitted her—an untiring materialist
in all things workable by hands—to go many ways in the wanderings
of thought, if grace, flexibility, and warmth had consorted with the
Puritan idea of beauty. She had come to be an idealist in all things
having to do with the spirit. Nevertheless, as things stood, she had
but one mental path.

The powers about her were theocratic. They held in their hands her
life and death in all physical things, and her life and death per omnia
sæcula sæculorum. They held the right to whisper approval or to
publish condemnation. Her eager, active spirit was fed by sermons
and exhortations to self-examination. Nothing else was offered. On
Sundays and at the prayer-meetings of mid-week she was warned
by these teachers, to whom everybody yielded, to whom in her
childhood she had been taught to drop a wayside courtesy, that she
should ever be examining head and heart to escape everlasting hell-
fire, and that she should endure so as to conduct her devoted life as
to appease the anger of a God as vindictive as the very ecclesiasts
themselves. No escape or reaction was possible.

The effect of all this upon a spirit so active, pliant, and sensitive is
evident. The sole way open to her was the road to introspection—
that narrow lane hedged with the trees of contemplative life to all
suffering human kind.

Even those of the community whose life duties took them out in
their world, and who were consequently more objective than
women, even the men, under such conditions, grew self-examining
to the degree of a proverb, “The bother with the Yankee is that he
rubs badly at the juncture of the soul and body.”

In such a life as this first arose the subjective characteristics of the

New England woman at which so many gibes have been written, so
many flings spoken; at which so many burly sides have shaken with
laughter ἄσβεστος. Like almost every dwarfed or distorted thing in
the active practical world, “New England subjectivity” is a result of
the shortsightedness of men, the assumption of authority of the
strong over the weak, and the wrongs they have to advance self
done one another.

Nowadays, in our more objective life, this accent of the ego is

pronounced irritating. But God’s sequence is apt to be irritating.

The New England woman’s subjectivity is a result of what has been

—the enslaving by environment, the control by circumstance, of a
thing flexible, pliant, ductile—in this case a hypersensitive soul—and
its endeavor to shape itself to lines and forms men in authority
dictated.

Cut off from the larger world, this woman was forced into the
smaller. Her mind must have field and exercise for its natural activity
and constructiveness. Its native expression was in the great
objective world of action and thought about action, the macrocosm;
stunted and deprived of its birthright, it turned about and fed upon
its subjective self, the microcosm.

Scattered far and wide over the granitic soil of New England there
have been the women unmarried. Through the seafaring life of the
men, through the adventures of the pioneer enchanting the hot-
blooded and daring; through the coaxing away of sturdy youthful
muscle by the call of the limitless fat lands to the west; through the
siren voice of the cities; and also through the loss of men in war—
that untellable misery—these less fortunate women—the unmarried
—have in all New England life been many. All the rounding and
relaxing grace and charm which lie between maid and man they
knew only in brooding fancy. Love might spring, but its growth was
rudimentary. Their life was not fulfilled. There were many such
spinners.

These women, pertinacious at their tasks, dreamed dreams of what

could never come to be. Lacking real things, they talked much of
moods and sensations. Naturally they would have moods. Human
nature will have its confidant, and naturally they talked to one
another more freely than to their married sisters. Introspection plus
introspection again. A life vacuous in external events and interrupted
by no masculine practicality—where fluttering nerves were never
counterpoised by steady muscle—afforded every development to
subjective morbidity.

And expression of their religious life granted no outlet to these

natures—no goodly work direct upon humankind. The Reformation,
whatever magnificence it accomplished for the freedom of the
intellect, denied liberty and individual choice to women. Puritanism
was the child of the Reformation. Like all religions reacting from the
degradations and abuses of the Middle Ages, for women it
discountenanced community life. Not for active ends, nor of a
certainty for contemplative, were women to hive together and live
independent lives.

In her simple home, and by making the best of spare moments, the
undirected impulse of the spinster produced penwipers for the
heathen and slippers for the dominie. But there was, through all the
long years of her life, no dignified, constructive, human expression
for the childless and husbandless woman. Because of this lack a
dynamo force for good was wasted for centuries, and tens of
thousands of lives were blighted.

In New England her theology ruled, as we have said, with an iron

and tyrannous hand. It published the axiom, and soon put it in
men’s mouths, that the only outlet for women’s activities was
marriage. No matter if truth to the loftiest ideals kept her single, a
woman unmarried, from a Garden of Eden point of view and the
pronunciamento of the average citizen, was not fulfilling the sole and
only end for which he dogmatized women were made—she was not
child-bearing.

In this great spinster class, dominated by such a voice, we may

physiologically expect to find an excess of the neurotic altruistic
type, women sickened and extremists, because their nature was
unexpressed, unbalanced, and astray. They found a positive joy in
self-negation and self-sacrifice, and evidenced in the perturbations
and struggles of family life a patience, a dumb endurance, which the
humanity about them, and even that of our later day, could not
comprehend, and commonly translated into apathy or
unsensitiveness. The legendary fervor and devotion of the saints of
other days pale before their self-denying discipline.

But instead of gaining, as in the mediæval faith, the applause of

contemporaries, and, as in those earlier days, inciting veneration and
enthusiasm as a “holy person,” the modern sister lived in her small
world very generally an upper servant in a married brother’s or
sister’s family. Ibsen’s Pillar of Society, Karsten Bernick, in speaking
of the self-effacing Martha, voices in our time the then prevailing
sentiment, “You don’t suppose I let her want for anything. Oh, no; I
think I may say I am a good brother. Of course, she lives with us
and eats at our table; her salary is quite enough for her dress, and—
what can a single woman want more?... You know, in a large house
like ours, it is always well to have some steady-going person like her
whom one can put to anything that may turn up.”

Not such estimates alone, but this woman heard reference to herself
in many phrases turning upon her chastity. Her very classification in
the current vernacular was based upon her condition of sex. And at
last she witnessed for her class an economic designation, the
essence of vulgarity and the consummation of insolence
—“superfluous women;” that is, “unnecessary from being in excess
of what is needed,” women who had not taken husbands, or had
lived apart from men. The phrase recalls the use of the word
“female”—meaning, “for thy more sweet understanding,” a woman—
which grew in use with the Squire Westerns of the eighteenth
century, and persisted even in decent mouths until Charles Lamb
wrapped it in the cloth of gold of his essay on Modern Gallantry, and
buried it forever from polite usage.

In another respect, also, this New England spinster grew into a

being such as the world had not seen. It is difficult of explanation.
Perhaps most easily said, it is this: she never by any motion or
phrase suggested to a man her variation from him. All over the
world women do this; unconsciously nearly always; in New England
never. The expression of the woman has there been condemned as
immodest, unwomanly, and with fierce invective; the expression of
the man been lauded. Das Ewig-Weibliche must persist without
confession of its existence. In the common conception, when among
masculine comrades she should bear herself as a sexless sort of half-
being, an hermaphroditic comrade, a weaker, unsexed creature, not
markedly masculine, like her brother or the present golfing woman,
and far from positively feminine.

All her ideals were masculine; that is, all concrete and human
expression of an ideal life set before her was masculine. Her religion
was wholly masculine, and God was always “He.” Her art in its later
phases was at its height in the “Spectator” and “Tatler,” where the
smirking belles who matched the bewigged beaux of Anne’s London
are jeered at, and conviction is carried the woman reader that all her
sex expressions are if not foul, fool, and sometimes both fool and
foul.

In this non-recognition of a woman’s sex, its needs and expression

in home and family life, and in the domination of masculine ideals,
has been a loss of grace, facile touch in manner, vivacity, légèreté; in
short, a want of clarity, delicacy, and feminine strength. To put the
woman’s sex aside and suppress it was to emphasize spinster life—
and increase it. It is this nullification of her sex traits that has led the
world to say the New England woman is masculine, when the truth
is she is most femininely feminine in everything but sex—where she
is most femininely and self-effacingly it.

It is in this narrowness, this purity, simplicity, and sanctity, in this

circumspection and misdirection, that we have the origin of the New
England woman’s subjectivity, her unconscious self-consciousness,
and that seeming hermaphroditic attitude that has attracted the
attention of the world, caused its wonder, and led to its false
judgment of her merit.

Social changes—a result of the Zeitgeist—within the last two

generations have brought a broadening of the conception of the
“sphere” of women. Puritan instincts have been dying. Rationalism
has to a degree been taking their place. While, on the other hand,—
one may say this quite apart from construing the galvanic twitchings
of a revived mediævalism in ecclesiastic and other social affairs as
real life—there have also come conceptions of the liberty and dignity
of womanhood, independent or self-dependent, beyond those which
prevailed in the nunnery world.

A popular feeling has been growing that a woman’s sphere is

whatever she can do excellently. What effect this will have on social
relations at large we cannot foresee. From such conditions another
chivalry may spring! What irony of history if on New England soil!!
Possibly, the custom that now pertains of paying women less than
men for the same work, the habit in all businesses of giving women
the drudging details,—necessary work, indeed, but that to which no
reputation is affixed,—and giving to men the broader tasks in which
there is contact with the world and the result of contact, growth,
may ultimately react, just as out of injustice and brutalities centuries
ago arose a chivalrous ideal and a knightly redresser.

The sparseness of wealth, the meagreness of material ideals, and

the frugality, simplicity, and rusticity of New England life have never
allowed a development of popular manners. Grace among the
people has been interpreted theologically; never socially. Their
geniality, like their sunshine, has always had a trace of the northeast
wind—chilled by the Labrador current of their theology. Native wit
has been put out by narrow duties. The conscience of their theology
has been instinctively for segregation, never for social
amalgamation. They are more solitary than gregarious.

We should expect, then, an abruptness of manner among those left

to develop social genius—the women—even among those travelled
and most generously educated. We should expect a degree of
baldness and uncoveredness in their social processes, which possibly
might be expressed by the polysyllable which her instructor wrote at
the end of a Harvard Annex girl’s theme to express its literary
quality, “unbuttoned”—unconsciously.

When you meet the New England woman, you see her placing you in
her social scale. That in tailor-making you God may have used a
yardstick different from the New England measure has not yet
reached her consciousness; nor that the system of weights and
measures of what Sir Leslie Stephen calls “the half-baked civilization
of New England” may not prevail in all towns and countries. Should
you chance not to fit any notch she has cut in her scale, she is apt to
tell you this in a raucous, strident voice, with a schoolma’am air in
delivery of her opinion. If she is untravelled and purely of New
England surroundings, these qualities may be accented. She is
undeniably frank and unquestionably truthful. At all times, in
centuries past and to-day, she would scorn such lies as many women
amazingly tell for amusement or petty self-defence.

It is evident that she is a good deal of a fatalist. This digression will

illustrate: If you protest your belief that so far as this world’s
estimate goes some great abilities have no fair expression, that in
our streets we jostle mute inglorious Miltons; if you say you have
known most profound and learned natures housed on a Kansas farm
or in a New Mexico cañon; nay, if you aver your faith that here in
New England men and women of genius are unnoticed because
Messrs. Hue and Cry, voicing the windier, have not appreciated
larger capacities, she will pityingly tell you that this larger talent is
supposititious. If it were real, she continues, it must have risen to
sight and attracted the eye of men. Her human knowledge is not
usually deep nor her insight subtle, and she does not know that in
saying this she is contradicting the law of literary history, that the
producers of permanent intellectual wares are often not recognized
by their contemporaries, nor run after by mammonish publishers.
And at last, when you answer that the commonest question with our
humankind is nourishment for the body, that ease and freedom from
exhausting labor must forerun education, literature, art, she retorts
that here is proof she is right: if these unrecognized worthies you
instance had the gifts you name, they would be superior to mere
physical wants.

If you have longanimity, you do not drive the generality closer; you
drown your reflections in Sir Thomas Browne: “The iniquity of
oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy and deals with the memory of
men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.... Who knows whether
the best of men be known, or whether there be not more
remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the
known account of time?”

Her narrow fatalism, united with the conservatism and aristocratic

instincts common to all women from their retired life and ignorance
of their kind, gives the New England woman a hedged sympathy
with the proletarian struggle for freer existence. It may be lack of
comprehension rather than lack of sympathy. She would cure by
palliations, a leprosy by healing divers sores. At times you find her
extolling the changes wrought in the condition of women during the
last seventy years. She argues for the extension of education; her
conservatism admits that. She may not draw the line of her
radicalism even before enfranchisement. But the vaster field of the
education of the human race by easier social conditions, by lifting
out of money worship and egoism,—this has never been, she
argues, and therefore strenuously insists it never will be.

Her civic spirit is Bostonesque. A town’s spirit is a moral and spiritual

attitude impressed upon members of a community where events
have engendered unity of sentiment, and it commonly subordinates
individual idiosyncrasies.

The spirit Boston presents includes a habit of mind apparently

ratiocinative, but once safely housed in its ism incredulously
conservative and persistently self-righteous—lacking flexibility. Within
its limits it is as fixed as the outline of the Common. It has externally
a concession and docility. It is polite and kind—but when its
selfishness is pressing its greediness is of the usurious lender. In our
generation it is marked by lack of imagination, originality, initiative.
Having had its origin in Non-conformity, it has the habit of seeing
what it is right for others to do to keep their house clean—pulling
down its mouth when the rest of the world laughs, square-toeing
when the rest trip lightly, straight-lacing when the other human is
erring, but all the time carrying a heart under its east-wind stays,
and eyes which have had a phenomenal vision for right and wrong
doing—for others’ wrongdoing especially; yet withal holding under
its sour gravity moral impulses of such import that they have
leavened the life of our country to-day and rebuked and held in
check easier, lighter, less profound, less illuminated, less star-striking
ideals.

It is a spirit featured not unsimilarly to the Lenox landscape—safe,

serene, inviting, unable in our day to produce great crop without the
introduction of fresh material—and from like cause. A great glacier
has pressed on both human spirit and patch of earth. But the sturdy,
English bedrock of the immaterial foundation was not by the glacier
of Puritanism so smoothed, triturated, and fertilized as was Berkshire
soil by the pulverizing weight of its titanic ice flow.
This spirit is also idealistic outside its civic impulses,—referring
constantly to the remote past or future,—and in its eyes the abstract
is apt to be as real as the concrete. To this characteristic is due not
only Emersonism and Alcottism—really old Platonism interpreted for
the transcendental Yankee—but also that faith lately revivified,
infinitely vulgarized, as logically distorted as the pneuma doctrine of
the first century, and called “Christian Science.” The idealism of
Emerson foreran the dollar-gathering idealism of Mrs. Mary Baker
Eddy as the lark of spring foreruns the maple worm.

This idealism oftenest takes religious phases—as in its Puritan origin

—and in many instances in our day is content with crude expression.
Of foregone days evidence is in an incomplete list—only twenty-five
—of Brigham Young’s wives, some of whom bore such old New
England patronymics as Angell, Adams, Ross, Lawrence, Bigelow,
Snow, Folsom. May a fleeing of these women to Mormonism be
explained by their impatience and heart-sickness at their unsexing
social condition and religious spirit?—with the admitting to the great
scheme of life and action but one sex and that the one to which
their theocratic theologians belonged?

Speculations of pure philosophy this New England woman is inclined

to fear as vicious. In dialectics she rests upon the glories of the
innocuous transcendentalism of the nineteenth century forties.
Exceptions to this rule are perhaps those veraciously called “occult;”
for she will run to listen to the juggling logic and boasting rhetoric of
Swamis Alphadananda and Betadananda and Gammadananda, and
cluster about the audience-room of those dusky fakirs much as a
swarm of bees flits in May. And like the bees, she deserts cells filled
with honey for combs machine-made and wholly empty.

Illuminated by some factitious light, she will again go to unheard-of

lengths in extenuating Shelley’s relations to his wives, and in
explaining George Eliot’s marriage to her first husband. Here, and for
at least once in her life, she combats convention and reasons upon
natural grounds. “I don’t see the wickedness of Rudolph,” said one
spinster, referring to the tragedy connecting a prince of Austria and a
lady of the Vetchera family. “I don’t see why he shouldn’t have
followed his heart. But I shouldn’t dare say that to any one else in
Boston. Most of them think as I do, but they would all be shocked to
have it said.”

“Consider the broad meaning of what you say. Let this instance
become a universal law.”

“Still I believe every sensible man and woman applauds Rudolph’s

independence.”

With whatsoever or whomsoever she is in sympathy this woman is

apt to be a partisan. To husband, parents, and children there could
be no more devoted adherent. Her conscience, developed by
introspective and subjective pondering, has for her own actions
abnormal size and activity. It is always alert, always busy, always
prodding, and not infrequently sickened by its congested activity.
Duty to those about her, and industry for the same beneficiaries, are
watchwords of its strength; and to fail in a mote’s weight is to gain
condemnation of two severest sorts—her own and the community’s.
The opinion of the community in which she lives is her second
almighty power.

In marriage she often exemplifies that saying of Euripides which

Stobæus has preserved among the lavender-scented leaves of his
Florilegium—“A sympathetic wife is a man’s best possession.” She
has mental sympathy—a result of her tense nervous organization,
her altruism in domestic life, her strong love, and her sense of duty,
justice, and right.

In body she belongs to a people which has spent its physical force
and depleted its vitality. She is slight. There is lack of adipose tissue,
reserve force, throughout her frame. Her lungs are apt to be weak,
waist normal, and hips undersized.
She is awkward in movement. Her climate has not allowed her
relaxation, and the ease and curve of motion that more enervating
air imparts. This is seen even in public. In walking she holds her
elbows set in an angle, and sometimes she steps out in the tilt of the
Cantabrigian man. In this is perhaps an unconscious imitation, a
sympathetic copying, of an admirable norm; but it is graceless in
petticoats. As she steps she knocks her skirt with her knees, and
gives you the impression that her leg is crooked, that she does not
lock her knee-joint. More often she toes in than out.

She has a marvellously delicate, brilliant, fine-grained skin. It is

innocent of powder and purely natural. No beer in past generations
has entered its making, and no port; also, little flesh. In New
England it could not be said, as a London writer has coarsely put it,
that a woman may be looked upon as an aggregate of so many
beefsteaks.

Her eyes have a liquid purity and preternatural brightness; she is the
child of γλαυχῶπις Athena, rather than of βοῶπις Hera, Pronuba, and
ministress to women of more luxuriant flesh. The brown of her hair
inclines to the ash shades.

Her features would in passport wording be called “regular.” The

expression of her face when she lives in more prosperous
communities, where salaries are and an assured future, is a
stereotyped smile. In more uncertain life and less fortunate
surroundings, her countenance shows a weariness of spirit and a
homesickness for heaven that make your soul ache.

Her mind is too self-conscious on the one hand, and too set on lofty
duties on the other, to allow much of coquetterie, or flirting, or a
femininely accented camaraderie with men—such as the more
elemental women of Chicago, Cincinnati, San Francisco, and New
York enjoy. She is farthest possible from the luxuriant beauty of St.
Louis who declared, “You bet! black-jack-diamond kind of a time!”
when asked if she had enjoyed her social dash in Newport. This New
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebookmass.com