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Updated: May 7, 2025
Casimir who wishes to have you under his own supervision, and that you are therefore staying in his house under the chaperonage of his sister." I laughed at the idea of Zara playing the chaperon, and told her she was far too young and beautiful to enact that character. "Do you know how old I am?" she asked, with a slight smile. I guessed seventeen, or at any rate not more than twenty.
The question of the chaperone in America is peculiarly perplexing. The consternation of the hen whose brood of ducklings took to the water is a fit symbol of the horrified amazement with which an old-world "duenna" would be filled if she attempted to "look after" a bevy of typical American girls, with their independent yet confused ideas of social requirements in the matter of chaperonage.
Even those girls who immigrate with their families and sustain an affectionate relation with them are yet often curiously free from chaperonage. The immigrant mothers do not know where their daughters work, save that it is in a vague "over there" or "down town."
And she may do this without being one iota less a lady if she is one to begin with. Now appears the complication. As a business woman, the self-reliant young girl does not need a chaperone. As a society woman, this inexperienced, sensitive, human-nature-trusting child does need a chaperone. She is, therefore, subject to what we may call intermittent chaperonage.
Perhaps the property taboo has been as persistent as any other of the restrictions which have continued to surround woman through the ages. Before marriage, the girl who is "well brought up" is still carefully protected from contact with any male. The modern system of chaperonage is the substitute for the old seclusion and isolation of the pubescent girl.
She consulted with her niece, well married and socially aspiring if not yet installed in the citadel. It was a happy thought; the niece had the very thing, "a delightful gentleman," lately arrived in the city. So it fell out that Boye Mayer, under the chaperonage of Mrs. Kirkham, was brought to call and asked to fill a seat at the formidable dinner. Formidable was hardly a strong enough word.
Men do not treat her as an equal. They woo her for a wife. In the same manner the boy does not play with the girl. The relations between young people very readily degenerate. The dance hall, with its curse of drink, its lack of chaperonage and of reasonable discipline, helps this along its downward course.
Aunt Abigail smoothed a wrinkle in her skirt, and for the first time since undertaking the chaperonage of the Terrace girls, she looked a trifle discomfited. "I found such an interesting story in the garret," she said, "a continued story it was, and it ran through an entire year, fifty-two numbers. I had a little difficulty in finding every instalment, but I succeeded at last.
For, let alone immediate convenience of chaperonage, the young man found unexpected entertainment in this typical South Saxon, relic, as it struck him, of a bygone age and social order. Might not that tough and somewhat clumsy body, that crafty, jovial, yet non-committal countenance, have transferred themselves straight from the pages of Geoffrey Chaucer into nineteenth-century life?
If she seems to be influenced at present by the French and Italian examples, we may be sure that she is too intelligent and too fond of freedom to long tolerate any system of chaperonage that she cannot control. She will find a way to modify the traditional conventionalities so as not to fetter her own free spirit.
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