Spoiled U. S. Women?

According to the urbane Spectator, famed 100-year-old English weekly review, it is "a common saying and the usual remark" in England to observe:

"American women are so spoiled!"

With tenderest charity and gallant condescension, The Spectator has just raised up U. S. females from the gutter of spoilage thus:

"Are they spoiled? . . . When they are ill, they have to go to hospital, to get the care that an ordinary Englishwoman . . . would get from her servant as a matter of course. . . . There are many towns in America without one single, solitary servant, towns where all the women have to do their own housework, cooking, most of the washing, and usually the gardening! ...

"The ordinary American is not rich. . . . Salary or income may be larger than that of his opposite in England, but his expenses are bigger; and that is why, were he living in England, his wife could have one servant, possibly two of them. . . . Certainly her children are a help to her very soon. . . . By the time he [an American boy] is seven years old he is a handy man in the house, with chores to do, which he really does. Then take the little girls. . . . At the age when her little English cousin is having her hands washed for her and her frock buttoned, Mamie is promoted--note the word--to setting the table and tidying the odds and ends after meals. . . .

"That is why American women do their housekeeping so deftly and with so little fuss. They have always known how! They have grown up without servants, and it has never occurred to them that there is anything derogatory--or splendid--about housework or cooking. Everybody does it! . . . The wife of the ordinary middle-class American cannot then, in the nature of things, be spoiled. . . .

"The millionaires of America, though much in the public eye, are in a microscopic minority, and it is no fairer to judge [American women] by the wives of millionaires than it would be, for example, to generalize about Englishwomen from the riders in the Row or the owners of boxes at the Opera."