Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 September 1876 — Girls' Names. [ARTICLE]

Girls' Names.

In any modem school catalogue or newspaper list of ladies’ names which you may chance to meet, you find an endless iteration of the favorite inflection ie; as if the beauty or attractiveness, if not the respectability, of the young ladies, in some way depended on this liquid and endearing termination. In the short space of one page of the catalogue of a prominent young ladies’ college,—a school of much higher pretensions than the average seminary, ana whose students are of a more advanced and thoughtful age than mere seminary students—one may find (as we have satisfied ourselves by trying) at least the following varieties, viz.: Jenn s e, Nannie, Hattie, Minnie, Margie, Nettie, Nellie, Allie, Addie, Lizzie. Lord Dufferin, the present dignified Governor-General of Canada, has lately chosen to bring this tendency into notice (and so we suppose it prevails in Canada, too) by making it a special topic > n Ids address at the late commencement of a young ladies’ school in Quebec. But he credits the habit, or its exaggeration, to the United States; and thinks the practice, when it becomes a “ national characteristic” is “not without significance.” Some future philologist, perhaps, may pick it up as a remnant of that period when the young women of our most cultivated circles bore the badge of belittlement and patronage, and infer therefrom that the Oriental type of infantile helplessness had certainly survived to this era even in western lands. He will most likely conclude (and does not the evidence tend in that direction ?) that, in our Centennial time, the true idea of “ A perfect Woman nobly planned, To warn, to comfort and command,*’ was not so much as suspected or sought after. We do not remember that any journal of “Woman’s Rights” and enfranchisement has ever thought it pertinent to speak of this subject; but surely it bears a direct relation to the mental growth and capacity of the sex. The literary non de plume of a feminine author indicates to some extent the force of her mind; and we know just as well what to expect from the Lillie Linwoods and Mattie Myrtles, as we do from the George Eliots. You can scarcely pen a more suggestive satire against the helpfulness and independence of woman than to wrap her up in such terms of daily coddling and childish endearment as the pet names against which Lord Dufferin protests. For instance, persistently to call the two great chieftains of woman’s advanced status, Lizzie Cady Stanton, and Susie B. Anthony, would crush, at one stroke, the revolution they have so much at heart. Under such sweet persiflage it would sink into languid imbecility, and furnish fresh food for laughter.—“ Home and Society" in Scribner for September.