The Lily and the Prairie Flower

Abstract

WHAT IS the American girl made of? a manufacturer of cosmetics asked recently. Sugar and spice and everything nice? Not since the days of the Gibson Girl: There's a new American beauty ... she's tease and temptress, siren and Gamin, dynamic and demure . . . easily the most exciting woman in the world. . . .' Although the terms of this description are striking, even more impressive is the notion that this person is new and surprising, original. In actual fact she is perhaps the most publicized of American types. A study of heroines in modern French, British and American films differentiated among the women each culture seems admire most. It is reported that the usual French heroine is a bad woman: when a man must choose between a good woman and a bad, ordinarily he prefers the latter. The British heroine does not fit either category but is rather a fine woman loved by both good and bad men. The good man is satisfied with her as she is and the bad man degrades her-he does not yield her ennobling influences as he is apt do in American films. Only the American girl, indeed, attempts reconcile both principles and model herself according a new procedure in which sexual wickedness is merely an external ornament, a . . . stimulus wholesome love.2 Two years earlier, the editors of Time had anticipated this opinion. In their view a girl of this sort is uniquely endowed, especially charming: to millions of Americans, the pert, sexy but basically 'nice' American girl that Betty [Grable] plays on the screen is young American womanhood at its best.3 This person, then, whose distinctive quality is moral dualism, embodies the most popular current American opinion of love. However exciting the