today the wives might be resting their feet under the bridge tables,
secure in the consciousness that no bobbed haired young poacher was
daring to dance with their husbands, if they had just let prohibitions
enough alone--if they had only not been swept away by the high sport of
gossiping about our Wild Young People, which struck the country in the
summer of 1920. This gossip was an intrinsic phase of the virtue wave
which always immediately precedes a crime wave.
The wives just at this point, instead of sitting tight, made the
strategic mistake of turning the full force of the ammunition of gossip,
which should have been saved for defending husbands from poachers, into
an offensive attack on the flapper's lip stick, on her cigarettes,
and on her petting parties. Whenever two or three wives were gathered
together, their topic was our Wild Young People. That summer, too,
saw the launching of that now seasoned romance about the checking of
corsets. The resolutions at clubs were being resolved. The preachers
were sermonizing. The up-state legislators were drafting bills against
flappers' smoking cigarettes.
Human nature can be pushed just so far. Instead of reforming, the
young things apparently decided one might as well lose a reputation for
stealing a husband as for smoking a cigarette. The whole arsenal for
combating poachers blew up.
To make matters worse, in the excitement of the virtue wave our Wild
Young People had been attacked as a group instead of as individuals.
That was the second mistake. The whole strength of gossip consists in
selecting one member of the clan for calumny, to stand out disgraced
and alone among her exemplary sisters. Because the flappers had been
gossiped about _en masse_, the whole reason for not being gossiped about
had ceased. The poacher of that half generation ago had been the kind of
a girl who stalked her game alone.
But, when all the girls in town are seeking to steal your husband, what
are you going to do about it, if you are a woman of forty-five with a
heaviness around the hips and a disinclination to learn the camel walk?
Nor can you get the poachers off the scent by crossing the trail with an
eligible bachelor. Logically, the young things should have enough sense
to ignore a preempted husband and attend to the serious business of
getting themselves husbands. But they haven't. They seem to prefer the
husbands of the other women. And curiously, the more they engage in
this exotic sport of poaching, the less keen they become about owning a
property for somebody else to poach on.
The real interstate joke on Puritanism is that the flapper, who flaps
because Puritanism has driven her to it, will automatically bring about
its cure. The whole vitality of Puritanism rests on the unswerving
principle of letting not thy right hand know what thy left hand doeth,
if thy left hand is doing something it shouldn't. Puritanism could not
last out a week-end without the able assistance of the standardized
double life.
And that is just what the flappers refuse to respect. They are even
insisting on being taken along on the parties, which, by all the rules
of Rolf and Comstock should be confined to man's double life. Where the
chorus lady was once the only brand that had the proper and improper
equipment to jazz up an evening, now mankind has come to prefer the
flapper, who drinks as much as the Broadwayite, is just as peppy and not
quite so gold-diggish.
"It is so simple," smiles Barbara nonchalantly blowing her smoke rings.
"You old dears set man an impossible standard. As he had always to be
pretending holy emotions whenever he was around you he just naturally
had to get away half the time, to rest the muscles of his inhibitions.
Why, you funny old things actually drove man into his double life, just
as you made all of his best stories have two editions, one for a nice
girl and one for--well say one not so nice. Our crowd has done more than
all of your silly old social hygiene commissions to bring nearer the
single standard--by going part way to meet him."
The preachers are wasting their time when they rail that the flappers
are painting their faces like "fallen women." Of course they are
painting them that way--for the very good reason that mankind has
demonstrated too unmistakably that that kind of woman has "a way with
her."
Not so long ago cosmetics became a moral issue. The curl rag was the
only beautifier that somehow never lost its odor of sanctity--and that
was doubtless because curl rags were a perfectly logical part of the
long-sleeved Canton flannel nightgown civilization. Curls couldn't be so
very wrong when they were so frightfully unbecoming in the making.
And so the "good woman" handed over intact to her weaker sister every
beautifier that the world had been eight thousand years accumulating.
Slowly, timidly the allurements returned. The talcum powder bought for
baby surreptitiously reached the nose. When the half generation ago was
young, we had adopted a certain lip salve, just one shade darker than
the way lips come, explaining, to save our reputations, that we were
keeping our lips from chapping. Rouge too had come coyly, back--but--and
here's the gist of the whole matter--in polite society paint was put on
to imitate nature.
We were still doing our make-up as man conducted his double life--with
intent to deceive the general public. We still belonged at heart to
the Puritan era, in spite of our wicked fox-trot. All may have been
artificial below the neck, from our Gossard corsets with their phalanx
of garters on to our hobble skirts. But above the neck, we pretended it
was natural.
The flapper has changed all that. She has turned the lady up side down,
as well as the world. For the flapper is _au naturale_ below the neck.
Above the neck she is the most artificially and entertainingly painted
creature that has graced society since Queen Elizabeth. With one bold
stroke of a passionately red lip stick, she has painted out Elaine the
Fair and the later-day noble Christie Girl and painted in an exotic
young person, meet to compete alike with a Ziegfield show girl, with a
heaven-born Egyptian princess or even a good Queen Bess, who could not
move her face after it was dressed up for the morning. And Bess was the
Virgin Queen. The American-Victorian is indeed the only era in history
when cosmetics became a moral issue. Even in dour Cromwellian England,
rouge registered the wrong politics but not immorality. We are merely
getting back to normalcy in cosmetics--back behind the dun wall of the
Victorian era.
And it is the flapper who has done it for us. What's more, she has
done it frankly and purposefully--because the reformer, in his naive
innocence, has explained to her that what she is doing is wicked and
will get that kind of "results." Similarly those of 'em who had not yet
taken off their corsets at dances, promptly did so when shocked elders
began repeating the corset checking story. Dear heart, the only reason
that they had not done so before was because the little dears hadn't
heard that the worst people were using ribs instead of whalebone that
season.
Vice would die out from disuse, if the reformers did not advertise.
THE WOWZER IN THE SOUTH SEAS
[Illustration: Frederick O'Brien finds the South Seas purified and
beautified by the Missionaries.]
FREDERICK O'BRIEN
All over the South Seas the censor has had his day. From New Guinea to
Easter Island, he has made his rules and enforced them. Often he wrote
glowing pages of prose and poetry about his accomplishments, for reading
in Europe and America. He was usually sincere, and determined. He felt
that it was up to him to make over the native races to suit his own
ideas of what pleased God and himself. When he had the lower hand, he
prayed and strove in agony to change the wicked hearts of his flock to
Clapham or Andover standards; he suffered the contumelies of heathen
jibes, and now and again--often enough to make a cartoon popular--he was
hotpotted or baked on hot stones as a "long pig." When he converted the
king or chief, and he always directed his sacred ammunition at the upper
classes, he took advantage of every inch of spiritual and governmental
club put in his hand, and smote the pagan hip and thigh. His sole effort
was to make the South Seas safe for theocracy, and to _strafe_ Satan.
Of course, he was a missionary. It is doubtful if any other urge than a
religious one could have infused into those canny migrants of the past
century the extraordinary zeal that characterized their singular labors
in the exquisite and benighted isles of the tropics.
To leave the melancholy and futuristic atmosphere of seminaries and
bethels where the ghosts and penalties of millions of sins cast down
their hearts, where few baths and drab clothes, dark homes and poor
food, made all conscious of dwelling in a vale of tears, and after half
a year or more of hard, ship fare and the rough discipline of a tossing
windjammer, to find themselves in the most magnificent scenes on the
globe, and amid the richest bounty, was trial enough of the unstable
soul of man. That they--most of them--resisted the temptations of the
tropical demon, that they continued to preach fire and brimstone, to
remain flocked and shod, pantaletted and stayed, is proof enough of
their cementation to the rock of ages.
The men were even subjected to direr spells. They were youths, the rude
boys of farm and hamlet, schooled in simple studies, untried by the
wiles of siren blandishments. If married, their courtships had been
without passion, and their wedded years without competition, and
generally without other incidents than children.
A typical union of this kind I find in an old diary of the wife of one
of the most famous propagandists of the American God in Polynesia. He
was of Yale and Andover, and she of Bradford, the daughter of a Marlboro
deacon. She was twenty-four and he a little older when her cousin called
upon her at her Marlboro home, to ask if she would "become connected
with a missionary now an entire stranger, attach herself to a little
band of pilgrims, and visit the distant land of Hawaii."
"What could I say? We thoroughly discussed the subject. Next week is
the anticipated, dreaded interview of final decision. Last night I could
neither eat nor close my eyes in sleep."
The suitor came. "The early hours of the evening were devoted to
refreshments, to free family sociality, to singing, and to evening
worship. Then one by one the family dispersed, leaving two of similar
aspirations, introduced as strangers, to separate at midnight as
interested friends.
"In the forenoon, the sun had risen high in the heavens, when it looked
down upon two of the children of earth giving themselves wholly to their
heavenly Father, receiving each other from his hand as his good gift,
pledging themselves to each other as close companions in the race of
life, consecrating themselves and their all to a life-work among the
heathen."
After six months on the wave, she approaches the "land of darkness
whither I am bound. When I reflect on the degradation and misery of
the inhabitants, follow them into the eternal world, and forward to the
great day of retribution, all my petty sufferings dwindle to a point."
They anchor, and "soon the islanders of both sexes came paddling out
in their canoes, with their island fruit. The men wore girdles, and
the women a slight piece of cloth wrapped around them, from the hips
downward. To a civilized eye their covering seemed to be revoltingly
scanty. But we learned that it was a full dress for daily occupation."
The note of nudity this really remarkable woman struck at her first
sight of the welcoming savages, was the keynote of the new domination of
the islands from Hawaii to Australia. The censors were convinced that
it was a state of ungodliness. Their reasoning was based on the fig leaf
tied about them by the first man and woman when they became conscious of
sin, and it proceeded to the logical teaching that the less of the body
exposed the more godly the condition. When they found this nakedness
associated with a relation of the sexes utterly opposed to their own,
and when, especially, the first white wives on the South Sea beaches,
found the joyous, handsome, frolicsome women of the islands, making
ardent love to their husbands, the innate heinousness of bodily bareness
became fixed as a guiding star towards bringing the infidel to the true
worship.
Clothe them and sanctify them, became the motto. From the wondrous
Marquesas valleys to the American naval station of Samoa, the bonnet,
the bonnet of a half century ago, is the requirement of decency in
the coral or bamboo church, as it is in the temples of New York. The
nightgown or Mother Hubbard of Connecticut became the proper
female attire for natives in the house of God, and thus, by gradual
establishment of a fashion, in their straw homes, and everywhere.
Chiefesses were induced to don calico, and chiefs the woolen or denim
trousers of refinement. The trader came to sell them, and so business
followed the Bible. Tattooing, which, with the Polynesians and
Melenesians, was probably a race memory of clothing in a less tropical
clime, was condemned bitterly by the white censors as causing nudity. A
man or woman whose legs and body were covered with marvellous arabesques
and gaudy pictures of palms and fish was not apt to hide them under
garments.
And here the censor also had an ally in the trader. The two joined,
unwittingly, to break down both the old morale of the pagan and the
new morality of the converts. The censorious cleric said that the Lord
disliked nakedness, or, at least, that unclothedness was unvirtuous,
while the seller of calico and alcohol advised the purchase of his goods
for the sake of style. He ridiculed tattooing and nudity, but he also
laughed with ribaldry at the religious arguments. The confused indigene,
driven by admonition and shame put on the hot and griming stuffs, and
finally, had them kept on him by statute. The censor in the South Seas
achieved his highest reach of holy effort. He had made into law the
_mores_ his sect or tribe had coined into morals, and was able to punish
by civil tribunal the evildoers who refused to abide by his conception
of the divine wish.
But here, old Mother Nature revolted. All over the world it would appear
that she is not in touch with the divinity that shapes the ends of the
censors. The clothing donned by the natives of the South Seas killed
them. They sweated and remained foul; they swam, and kept on their
garments; they were rained on, and laid down in calico and wool,
They abandoned the games and exercises which had made them the finest
physical race in the world, and took up hymn books and tools. The
physical plagues of the whites decimated them. They passed away as the
_tiaré_ Tahiti withers indoors. The censored returned to the rich earth
which had bred them, and taught them its secrets and demands. Only a
mournful remnant remains to observe the censorship.
But the curious spirit of inversion which tries to make the assumed
infinite of a finite nature, which had sacrificed a race to an invented
god, persists even in the South Seas. One of the most distinguished
authors, who has chosen that delectable clime for his researches was
arrested for napping on his own _paepae_ partly clothed. The parson
informed upon him, and the _gendarme_ fined him. In the British South
Seas, where I was recently, prohibition had cast a blight upon the more
poetical whites. I remember one night when my vessel was anchored for a
few hours in the roadstead of a lonely island, a group of civil servants
and a minister of the Church of England had come aboard to buy what
comforts they might from our civilized caravan. They sat on deck
clinking glasses occasionally, talking of cities where a man might
be freed from the "continuous spying of the uncoo good." That was the
phrase they used, being English or Scots, and when the word was passed
that we up-anchored with the turn of the tide at midnight, they sang
in a last burst of lively furor a song of Dionysian regret. One stanza
lingers with me:--
Whack the cymbal! Bang the drum!
Votaries of Bacchus!
Let the popping corks resound,
Pass the flowing goblet round!
May no mournful voice be found,
Though wowzers do attack us!
In the darkness I called to them as they went down the gangway into
their boat, "What is a wowzer?"
"'E's a bloomin' ---- 'oo wants to do unto others wot 'e's bleedin'
well done to 'imself."
The wowzers are more active in Hawaii, the most temperate portion of
Polynesia, than in the Maori isles of New Zealand. A law passed at the
last session of the Hawaiian legislature prohibits "any person over
fourteen years of age from appearing upon the streets of Honolulu in
a bathing suit unless covered suitably by an outer garment reaching at
least to the knees." There is a ferment in Honolulu over the arrest and
punishment of offenders against this new censorship. It is the result
of the control by the spiritual, or perhaps, lineal, descendants of the
first South Sea censors, of the great grand-children of those men who
wore the girdles of leaves at the landing of the Marlboro school teacher
a hundred years ago. The girdle-wearers are members of the Hawaiian
legislature--soon to be succeeded by Japanese-native-born--and the
censors, likely, are wives of financiers and sugar factors. Again the
feeble remnant of the Hawaiian race voted against the girdle.
A friend of mine, grandson of the estimable missionary and his bride of
the New England of a century ago, thus comments upon the law in a paper
sent to me:--
The facts which caused the passage of the law were, that certain
residents of Waikiki were donning their bathing suits at home, walking
across and along the public streets to the sea and returning in the same
state of undress.
If the bathing suits had been of the old-style no objection to this
would have been made. The woman's bathing suit of the olden days were
a cumbrous swaddling garment, high-necked, long-sleeved, full-skirted,
bloomer-breeched and stockinged.
Simultaneously with the outbreak of the street parade era, above noted,
there came with spontaneous-combustion-like rapidity, a radical change
in the style of female bathing suits "on the street at Waikiki."
First the sleeves, then the stockings, then the skirts, then the main
portion of the garment covering the legs, successively disappeared,
until the low-necked, sleeveless, legless one-piece suit became "the
thing"; and women clad in garments scantier than the scantiest on the
ballet stage, were parading Kalakaua avenue in the vicinity of the Moana
hotel, to the scandal and disgust of some; the devouring gaze of others;
and the interested inspection of whomsoever chose to inspect!
It was a startling sight to the uninitiated--probably unduplicated in
any other civilized country.
The South Pacific or the heart of Africa would probably have to be
visited to find virtuous women so scantily clad, making such exhibition
of their persons in public-more particularly on the public streets.
This scantiness of dress became the subject of protest, of
justification, of discussion in press, in public and in private
throughout the community.
The practice was violently attacked as tending to lewdness and scandal;
as vigorously defended as a question of personal taste and liberty, and
as a matter concerning safety and comfort in swimming.
Those "old-style suits" he refers to, "full-skirted, bloomer-breeched"
were the godly ones brought to Hawaii by the censors, but which
gradually disappeared with the influx of rich tourists from America,
and the importation by Honolulu merchants of the flimsier and less
concealing kind. This new generation of whites that has sought escape
from the "cumbrous, swaddling garment" embraces the flapper, who at
Waikiki is a beautiful and wholesome sight. Browned by years of exposure
to the beach sun, charmingly modelled, and with the grace and freedom of
limb of the surf-board rider and canoeist, she has no consciousness of
guilt in her emergence dripping from the sea, in her lying in the breeze
upon the sand, nor in her walks to and from her bungalow nearby. And she
refuses to be censored.
The commentator, proprietor of the oldest newspaper in the islands, and
himself a noted diplomat, lawyer and revolutionist--he took up a rifle
against Liliuokalani--says so:--
The law has been observed by a few, ignored by a few, and caricatured by
the many. It is not an uncommon thing to see a woman walking the streets
in Waikiki in the scantiest of bathing suits, with drapery of the
flimsiest suspended from her shoulders and floating behind upon the
breeze.
The police have made a few feeble and spasmodic attempts to persuade
observance of the law, with some ill-advised attempts to enforce
individual ideas of propriety on the beach itself.
On the whole, the law is either openly and flagrantly violated or
rendered farcical by the contemptuous manner of its semi-observance.
And, cautiously but firmly, the grandson of the first missionaries to
Hawaii, himself living six decades in Honolulu, a church member and
supporter of all evangelical and commercial progress, gives advice to
the people of his territory. Urging that those opposed to the bathing
suit law try legally to secure its repeal, but that all obey it while it
is on the statute books, he says:--
As to the question of attire on the beach, there are modest and immodest
women to be found everywhere, regardless of their clothes. It is
impossible to legislate modesty into a person who is innately immodest,
and it is therefore useless to try and do so. The attire of a woman on
the beach at Waikiki as well as her conduct elsewhere, should therefore
be left to the individual woman herself.
That is the last word of a very shrewd, wealthy, experienced, religious
son of censors. But wowzerism dies hard in America or in the South Seas.
The Anglo-Saxon American has it in his blood as an inheritance from
the rise of Puritanism four hundred years ago, while with many it is an
idiosyncrasy to be explained by the glands regulating personality. In
fact, I feel that this is the enemy the would-be free must fight. We
must attack and extirpate the wowzerary gland.
REFORMERS: A HYMN OF HATE
[Illustration: Dorothy Parker hating Reformers.]
DOROTHY PARKER
I hate Reformers;
They raise my blood pressure.
There are the Prohibitionists;
The Fathers of Bootlegging.
They made us what we are to-day--
I hope they're satisfied.
They can prove that the Johnstown flood,
And the blizzard of 1888,
And the destruction of Pompeii
Were all due to alcohol.
They have it figured out
That anyone who would give a gin daisy a friendly look
Is just wasting time out of jail,
And anyone who would stay under the same roof
With a bottle of Scotch
Is right in line for a cozy seat in the electric chair.
They fixed things all up pretty for us;
Now that they have dried up the country,
You can hardly get a drink unless you go in and order one.
They are in a nasty state over this light wines and beer idea;
They say that lips that touch liquor
Shall never touch wine.
They swear that the Eighteenth Amendment
Shall be improved upon
Over their dead bodies--
Fair enough!
Then there are the Suppressors of Vice;
The Boys Who Made the Name of Cabell a Household Word.
Their aim is to keep art and letters in their place;
If they see a book
Which does not come right out and say
That the doctor brings babies in his little black bag,
Or find a painting of a young lady
Showing her without her rubbers,
They call out the militia.
They have a mean eye for dirt;
They can find it
In a copy of "What Katy Did at School,"
Or a snapshot of Aunt Bessie in bathing at Sandy Creek,
Or a picture postcard of Moonlight in Bryant Park.
They are always running around suppressing things,
Beginning with their desires.
They get a lot of excitement out of life,--
They are constantly discovering
The New Rabelais
Or the Twentieth Century Hogarth.
Their leader is regarded
As the representative of Comstock here on earth.
How does that song of Tosti's go?--
"Good-bye, Sumner, good-bye, good-bye."