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MODERN WOMEN
AND
WHAT IS SAID OF THEM
A REPRINT OF
A SERIES OF ARTICLES IN THE
SATURDAY REVIEW
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
MRS. LUCIA GILBERT CALHOUN
NEW YORK
_J. S. REDFIELD, PUBLISHER_
140 FULTON STREET
1868
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by
J. S. REDFIELD,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the
Eastern District of New York.
EDWARD O. JENKINS,
_PRINTER AND STEREOTYPER_,
No. 20 North William St.
ADVERTISEMENT.
The following papers on Woman were originally published in the columns
of the London SATURDAY REVIEW. Some of them have already been reprinted
in the literary and daily journals of this country, and they have
excited no little discussion and comment among readers of both sexes.
Whether agreeing or not with the writer, it is impossible not to concede
the eminent ability with which the various subjects are handled. No
series of essays has appeared in the English language for many years
which has been so extensively reprinted and so generally read.
The authorship of these papers has been attributed to different
individuals, male and female; but it is more than probable that the
writers whose names have been mentioned in this connection are precisely
those who have had nothing whatever to do with them. It is not unlikely
that, in due time, the publisher of this volume may be in possession of
authentic information on this head, and that the name of the author may
then appear on the title-page.
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION, 5
I.--THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD, 25
II.--FOOLISH VIRGINS, 34
III.--LITTLE WOMEN, 43
IV.--PINCHBECK, 52
V.--PUSHING WOMEN, 61
VI.--FEMININE AFFECTATIONS, 73
VII.--IDEAL WOMEN, 83
VIII.--WOMAN AND THE WORLD, 93
IX.--UNEQUAL MARRIAGES, 101
X.--HUSBAND-HUNTING, 109
XI.--PERILS OF "PAYING ATTENTION," 118
XII.--WOMEN'S HEROINES, 128
XIII.--INTERFERENCE, 138
XIV.--PLAIN GIRLS, 148
XV.--A WORD FOR FEMALE VANITY, 157
XVI.--THE ABUSE OF MATCH-MAKING, 167
XVII.--FEMININE INFLUENCE, 177
XVIII.--PIGEONS, 188
XIX.--AMBITIOUS WIVES, 198
XX.--PLATONIC WOMAN, 206
XXI.--MAN AND HIS MASTER, 215
XXII.--THE GOOSE AND THE GANDER, 225
XXIII.--ENGAGEMENTS, 235
XXIV.--WOMAN IN ORDERS, 243
XXV.--WOMAN AND HER CRITICS, 253
XXVI.--MISTRESS AND MAID, ON DRESS AND UNDRESS, 262
XXVII.--AESTHETIC WOMAN, 272
XXVIII.--WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK? 281
XXIX.--PAPAL WOMAN, 291
XXX.--MODERN MOTHERS, 300
XXXI.--PRIESTHOOD OF WOMAN, 309
XXXII.--THE FUTURE OF WOMAN, 319
XXXIII.--COSTUME AND ITS MORALS, 329
XXXIV.--THE FADING FLOWER, 339
XXXV.--LA FEMME PASSEE, 347
XXXVI.--PRETTY PREACHERS, 355
XXXVII.--SPOILT WOMEN, 364
INTRODUCTION.
The "Woman Question" will not be put to silence. It demands an answer of
Western legislators. It besets college faculties. It pursues veteran
politicians to the fastnesses of so-called National Conventions. Under
the sacred sounding-boards of New England pulpits has its voice been
heard, and its unexpected ally, the London SATURDAY REVIEW, introduces
it to the good society of English drawing-rooms. That this introduction
comes in the form of diatribe and denunciation is a matter of the least
moment. Judgment will finally rest, not on the conclusions of the
special pleader, but on the strength of the case of the accused.
Something, clearly, is wrong with fashionable women. They accept the
thinnest gilt, the poorest pinchbeck, for gold. They care more for a
dreary social pre-eminence than for home and children. They find in
extravagance of living and a vulgar costliness of dress their only
expression of a vague desire for the beauty and elegance of life. Is
it, therefore, to be inferred that the race of noble women is dying out?
St. Paul was hardly less severe than the London SATURDAY, if less
explicit, in his condemnation of the fashionable women of his day, yet
we look upon that day as heroic. Certainly neither London nor New York
can rival the luxury of a rich Roman matron, yet it was not the luxury
of her women which destroyed the empire, and Brutus's Portia was quite
as truly a representative woman as the superb Messalina. John Knox
thought that things were as bad as they could possibly be when he
thundered at vice in high places; and if there had been a John Knox in
the court of Charles the Second, he would have sighed for a return of
the innocent days of his great-grandfather.
On the whole, that hope which springs eternal suggests that the
fashionable women of the reign of Victoria, and of our seventeenth
President, are not essentially more discouraging than all the
generations of the thoughtless fair who danced idly down forgotten
pasts. Nay, we may even hope that they are better. If they will not
actually think, yet the fatal contagion of the newspaper and the modern
novel communicates to them an intellectual irritation which might
almost stand for a mental process. If they have not ideas, they have
notions of things, and however inexact and absurd these may be, they are
better than emptiness.
"Worse, decidedly worse," says our implacable critic; "when women were
content with looking pretty before marriage, and with good housekeeping
after, they were uninteresting certainly, but they were respectable. Now
they dabble in all things; are weakly aesthetic, weakly scientific,
weakly controversial, and wholly prosy, and contemptible." Dabbling is
pitiful, certainly, and weakness has few allies, but let us do justice
even to the weak dabblers. AEsthetic, or scientific, or controversial
training has but recently been made possible to women. Their previous
range of study had been very narrow. It is not strange that the least
attainments should seem to them very profound and satisfactory, and the
most manifest deductions pass for original conclusions. It is natural
that their undisciplined faculties should grapple feebly with
difficulties, and be quite unequal to argument. This is no reason for
flinging the baffling volumes at their heads; better so educate their
heads that the volumes shall no longer baffle.
Scolded because they have not an idea beyond dress, laughed at when
they try to think of something better, a word may certainly be said for
the good temper and the patience even of the fashionable women, who
would be wiser if they could.
The fault is, we are assured, that these women take up books only to
enhance their matrimonial value, and with no thought of the worth of
study. Let us be just. What business or the professions are to most men,
marriage is to most women. Men qualify themselves, if they can, for that
competitive examination which is always going on, and which insures
clients to the best lawyers, and business to the best merchant, and
parishes to the best preacher. Women, compelled to wait at home for the
wooing which changes their destiny, qualify themselves with attractions
for that competitive examination which all marriageable young women feel
that they undergo from every marriageable young man. Each has an eye to
business. One does not feel that the motive in the one case is any
higher than in the other.
It is very bad, of course, that marriage should be a matter of business.
It is, perhaps, the most tragic of all perversions. But, evidently, the
evil is not to be abated by jeremiads, nor by lectures to young women,
no, nor even by brilliant editorials. So long as women believe that
inglorious ease is better than work, so long as they are taught that
they are born to be the gentle dependents of a stronger being, so long
as courage and capacity are held to be "strong-minded," so long as the
range of employments for women is narrow, and the standard of wages
lower than men's, so long they will seek in marriage a home, a larger
liberty of action, an establishment, a servant who shall supply them
with money and insure them ease without effort of their own.
Men take the business opening which seems most congenial and most
profitable. Women do the same thing, and their choice naturally falls
upon marriage as altogether the most promising speculation of their very
small list. The remedy seems to be to give women as thorough mental
training as men receive, to make their training tend as directly to the
business of earning their bread and their pretty feminine adornments,
and for the same work to pay them the same wages. If it be objected that
fashionable women will not work, let it be answered that work itself
would be fashionable if it were held to be a dignity, and not a
drudgery, and that the really fine and thoughtful leaders of society
could easily establish the new order of things. In an aristocratic
country, where labor is the badge of caste, it would be difficult to
make it honorable. In a democracy like our own, it is the most
contemptible snobbishness which frowns on the honest earning of money.
The accusation of prodigal and senseless expenditure in dress must stand
unrefuted. Sums which would adorn our cities with pleasure-gardens, with
libraries, with galleries of art, are spent on perishable gauds that
have not even beauty to commend them. Charities might be founded, lives
be enriched with travel, all lands laid under contribution with the
money that every year flows into Stewart's drawers, and the strong-boxes
of fashionable dress-makers. But the jewelled prodigals who spend it are
not more selfish, perhaps, than we plain folks who carp.
Again, it is a mistake. They have the money. They mean to secure all the
pleasure that money can buy. They have that feminine sensuousness which
delights in color, and odor, and richness of fabric. Their sense of
beauty is untaught. A little lower in the scale of civilization they
would pierce their noses, and dye their finger-nails, and wear strings
of glass beads. A little higher, they would sacrifice the splendid shawl
to a rare marble, banish the chromo-lithograph, and turn the solitaire
ear-drops into a lovely picture, and build a conservatory with the price
of lace flounces. A little higher still, and we might have model
lodging-houses, and foundling hospitals, and music in the squares given
us by kindly women who had saved the money from milliner, and jeweller,
and silk-mercer.
But standing just where they are, clothes seem to these same undeveloped
women the best things money can buy; and a lack of culture confuses them
as to the attributes of clothes. Just now our fashionable women are
bitterly reprehended for copying the dress of the "Anonymas," who
establish the very pronounced fashions of Paris. Half of them do not
know what model they have taken. The other half accept the various and
tasteless costumes, not because they are devised by "Anonyma," but
because they are striking. There is something in the commonplaceness of
fashionable life which smothers all originality of thought, of action,
even of device in costume; and the women who give most time and money to
dress, to whom one would look for perfection in that mixed art, are
almost invariably the women who are exact reproductions of their
neighbors in this regard, as in their house-furnishing, their equipages,
and their manners.
Upon these splendidly monotonous fine ladies flashes the vision of
"Anonyma," with her meretricious beauty, and her daring toilettes.
Amenable to no social Mrs. Grundy, her love of dress develops itself in
bold contrasts of color, in bizarre and showy ornaments, in picturesque,
and often in grotesque and tawdry effects. But whatever the details, the
whole is always striking. Our women longing for the new, accept the
absurd; desiring the picturesque, take the bizarre, and eager for the
elegant, content themselves with the costly.
Nor does the fact that our present fashionable evening costume is
immodest, of necessity impugn the modesty of the women who wear it. That
they are wanting in fineness of perception must be admitted. But women
of fashion accept without question the dictum of their modistes. La
Belle Hamilton, the famous beauty of the reign of Charles the Second, so
delicately modest and pure that she passed unbreathed upon by scandal
through that most dissolute court, is painted in a costume that the
fastest of New York belles would not venture to wear at the most
fashionable of receptions. The gracious and self-sacrificing and womanly
women of our revolution, wore dresses cut lower than those of their
great-grand-daughters, as any portrait-gallery will show. The dress is
indefensible, but let us not be too ready to condemn the wearer for
worse sins than thoughtlessness and vanity.
One doubts if there is a single Becky Sharp the less, (poor Becky!)
since Thackeray gave such terrible immortality to their great prototype.
The satirist is not the reformer. The satirized do not see themselves in
the exaggerated type. They go their way, and thank God that they are not
as these others. The critic of the London SATURDAY, beginning, perhaps,
with the intention of telling sad and sober truth about a class, has
ended with a list of the follies and faults of individuals, and these
are set down with the keen and unconvincing clearness of the satirist.
It is a good thing indeed, that any aspect of the "woman question"
should claim place, week after week, in a leading English journal. It is
a good thing that it has been thought wise to reprint these essays here.
All this talk about the wrong ways of women suggests that there is a
right way, as yet very much involved in the dust of discussion and the
fogs of speculation. All these accusations against her folly imply a
proportionate tribute to her possible wisdom, if once she can get a fair
chance to be wise.
What the reviewer urges against the effect of fashionable life on the
intellect, cannot be gainsayed. But in America, at least, the injury to
the young men is greater apparently than to the young women. At any
evening party in New York, at any "Hop" in Newport or Saratoga, the
faces of the men are of a lower type, their talk is more inane, their
manners are more vulgar. The girls are empty enough, heaven knows! but
they seem capable of better things, most of them. And they are not so
wholly spoiled in character. I have found very fashionable girls capable
of large sacrifices for love, or kindred, or obedience to some divine
voice. This proves that they have only to be taught that there is
something better than being very fashionable, to take it thankfully. But
the men seemed sordid and selfish, and grown worldly-wise before their
time.
Yet it might make us both more just and more generous to remember that
during our time of peril as a nation, these very ranks of purposeless
men furnished us soldiers and money, and a cheerful faith in the cause,
just as these very legions of idle women gave us workers and nurses.
There is this cheer for American readers of these pages: What we have
been told is our national sin of extravagance, the too pronounced
character of our social life, the frivolity and ignorance of our women,
the lack of a universal and high-toned society, we find not to be inborn
defects peculiar to our system of government, and hopeless of change,
but vices, also, of an old and cultivated and dignified nation.
A cheerful optimist may well believe that we are in a transition state;
that women, impatient of the old life which was without thought and
culture and motive, in the blind struggle to something better have
fallen for the time on something worse; that with the movement of the
age toward mutual helpfulness, man to man, women will move not less
steadily, if more slowly, and come gradually into truer relations with
each other and with men. It will not hurt woman to be criticised. She
has too long been assured of her angelhood, and denied her womanhood. It
will not help her very greatly to be criticised as if she were being
tomahawked. If they who come to scoff would but remain to teach! There
has been much ungentle judgment of men by women, of women by men.
Thoreau said, "Man is continually saying to Woman, 'Why are you not more
wise?' Woman is continually saying to Man, 'Why are you not more
loving?' Unless each is both wise and loving there can be no real
growth."
L. G. C.
THE
MODERN WOMEN.
THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD.
Time was when the stereotyped phrase, "a fair young English girl," meant
the ideal of womanhood; to us, at least, of home birth and breeding. It
meant a creature generous, capable, and modest; something franker than a
Frenchwoman, more to be trusted than an Italian, as brave as an
American, but more refined, as domestic as a German and more graceful.
It meant a girl who could be trusted alone if need be, because of the
innate purity and dignity of her nature, but who was neither bold in
bearing nor masculine in mind; a girl who, when she married, would be
her husband's friend and companion, but never his rival; one who would
consider their interests identical, and not hold him as just so much
fair game for spoil; who would make his house his true home and place of
rest, not a mere passage-place for vanity and ostentation to go through;
a tender mother, an industrious house-keeper, a judicious mistress. We
prided ourselves as a nation on our women. We thought we had the pick
of creation in this fair young English girl of ours, and envied no other
men their own.
We admired the languid grace and subtle fire of the South; the docility
and affectionateness of the East seemed to us sweet and simple and
restful; the vivacious sparkle of the trim and sprightly Parisienne was
a pleasant little excitement when we met with it in its own domain; but
our allegiance never wandered from our brown-haired girls at home, and
our hearts were less vagrant than our fancies. This was in the old time,
and when English girls were content to be what God and nature had made
them. Of late years we have changed the pattern, and have given to the
world a race of women as utterly unlike the old insular ideal as if we
had created another nation altogether. The girl of the period, and the
fair young English girl of the past, have nothing in common save
ancestry and their mother-tongue: and even of this last the modern
version makes almost a new language through the copious additions it has
received from the current slang of the day.
The girl of the period is a creature who dyes her hair and paints her
face, as the first articles of her personal religion; whose sole idea of
life is plenty of fun and luxury; and whose dress is the object of such
thought and intellect as she possesses. Her main endeavor in this is to
outvie her neighbors in the extravagance of fashion. No matter whether,
as in the time of crinolines, she sacrificed decency, or, as now in the
time of trains, she sacrifices cleanliness; no matter either, whether
she makes herself a nuisance and an inconvenience to every one she
meets.
The girl of the period has done away with such moral muffishness as
consideration for others, or regard for counsel and rebuke. It was all
very well in old-fashioned times, when fathers and mothers had some
authority and were treated with respect, to be tutored and made to obey,
but she is far too fast and flourishing to be stopped in mid-career by
these slow old morals; and as she dresses to please herself, she does
not care if she displeases every one else. Nothing is too extraordinary
and nothing too exaggerated for her vitiated taste; and things which in
themselves would be useful reforms if let alone become monstrosities
worse than those which they have displaced so soon as she begins to
manipulate and improve. If a sensible fashion lifts the gown out of the
mud, she raises hers midway to her knee. If the absurd structure of wire
and buckram, once called a bonnet, is modified to something that shall
protect the wearer's face without putting out the eyes of her companion,
she cuts hers down to four straws and a rosebud, or a tag of lace and a
bunch of glass beads.
If there is a reaction against an excess of Rowland's Macassar, and hair
shiny and sticky with grease is thought less nice than if left clean and
healthy crisp, she dries and frizzes and sticks hers out on end like
certain savages in Africa, or lets it wander down her back like Madge
Wildfire's, and thinks herself all the more beautiful the nearer she
approaches in look to a maniac or a negress. With purity of taste she
has lost also that far more precious purity and delicacy of perception
which sometimes mean more than appears on the surface. What the
_demi-monde_ does in its frantic efforts to excite attention, she also
does in imitation. If some fashionable _devergondee en evidence_ is
reported to have come out with her dress below her shoulder-blades, and
a gold strap for all the sleeve thought necessary, the girl of the
period follows suit next day; and then wonders that men sometimes
mistake her for her prototype, or that mothers of girls not quite so far
gone as herself refuse her as a companion for their daughters. She has
blunted the fine edges of feeling so much that she cannot understand why
she should be condemned for an imitation of form which does not include
imitation of fact; she cannot be made to see that modesty of appearance
and virtue ought to be inseparable, and that no good girl can afford to
appear bad, under penalty of receiving the contempt awarded to the bad.
This imitation of the _demi-monde_ in dress leads to something in manner
and feeling, not quite so pronounced, perhaps, but far too like to be
honorable to herself or satisfactory to her friends. It leads to slang,
bold talk, and fastness; to the love of pleasure and indifference to
duty; to the desire of money before either love or happiness; to
uselessness at home, dissatisfaction with the monotony of ordinary life,
and horror of all useful work; in a word, to the worst forms of luxury
and selfishness, to the most fatal effects arising from want of high
principle and absence of tender feeling.
The girl of the period envies the queens of the _demi-monde_ far more
than she abhors them. She sees them gorgeously attired and sumptuously
appointed, and she knows them to be flattered, feted, and courted with a
certain disdainful admiration of which she catches only the admiration
while she ignores the disdain. They have all for which her soul is
hungering, and she never stops to reflect at what a price they have
bought their gains, and what fearful moral penalties they pay for their
sensuous pleasures. She sees only the coarse gilding on the base token,
and shuts her eyes to the hideous figure in the midst, and the foul
legend written around the edge.
It is this envy of the pleasures, and indifference to the sins, of these
women of the _demi-monde_ which is doing such infinite mischief to the
modern girl. They brush too closely by each other, if not in actual
deeds, yet in aims and feelings; for the luxury which is bought by vice
with the one is the thing of all in life most passionately desired by
the other, though she is not yet prepared to pay quite the same price.
Unfortunately, she has already paid too much, all, indeed, that once
gave her distinctive national character. No one can say of the modern
English girl that she is tender, loving, retiring, or domestic. The old
fault so often found by keen-sighted Frenchwomen, that, she was so
fatally _romanesque_, so prone to sacrifice appearances and social
advantages for love, will never be set down to the girl of the period.
Love, indeed, is the last thing she thinks of, and the least of the
dangers besetting her. Love in a cottage, that seductive dream which
used to vex the heart and disturb the calculations of prudent mothers,
is now a myth of past ages. The legal barter of herself for so much
money, representing so much dash, so much luxury and pleasure; that is
her idea of marriage; the only idea worth entertaining.
For all seriousness of thought respecting the duties or the consequences
of marriage, she has not a trace. If children come, they find but a
stepmother's cold welcome from her; and if her husband thinks that he
has married anything that is to belong to him--a _tacens et placens
uxor_ pledged to make him happy--the sooner he wakes from his
hallucination and understands that he has simply married some one who
will condescend to spend his money on herself, and who will shelter her
indiscretions behind the shield of his name, the less severe will be his
disappointment. She has married his house, his carriage, his balance at
the banker's, his title; and he himself is just the inevitable condition
clogging the wheels of her fortune; at best an adjunct, to be tolerated
with more or less patience as may chance. For it is only the
old-fashioned sort, not girls of the period _pur sang_, that marry for
love, or put the husband before the banker.
But she does not marry easily. Men are afraid of her; and with reason.
They may amuse themselves with her for an evening, but they do not take
her readily for life. Besides, after all her efforts, she is only a
poor copy of the real thing; and the real thing is far more amusing than
the copy, because it is real. Men can get that whenever they like; and
when they go into their mother's drawing-rooms, to see their sisters and
their sisters' friends, they want something of quite different flavor.
_Toujours perdrix_ is bad providing all the world over; but a continual
weak imitation of _toujours perdrix_ is worse. If we must have only one
kind of thing, let us have it genuine; and the queens of St. John's Wood
in their unblushing honesty, rather than their imitators and
make-believes in Bayswater and Belgravia. For, at whatever cost of
shocked self-love or pained modesty it may be, it cannot be too plainly
told to the modern English girl that the net result of her present
manner of life is to assimilate her as nearly as possible to a class of
women whom we must not call by their proper--or improper--name. And we
are willing to believe that she has still some modesty of soul left
hidden under all this effrontery of fashion, and that, if she could be
made to see herself as she appears to the eyes of men, she would mend
her ways before too late.
It is terribly significant of the present state of things when men are
free to write as they do of the women of their own nation. Every word of
censure flung against them is two-edged, and wounds those who condemn as
much as those who are condemned; for surely it need hardly be said that
men hold nothing so dear as the honor of their women, and that no one
living would willingly lower the repute of his mother or his sisters. It
is only when these have placed themselves beyond the pale of masculine
respect that such things could be written as are written now; when they
become again what they were once they will gather round them the love
and homage and chivalrous devotion which were then an Englishwoman's
natural inheritance. The marvel, in the present fashion of life among
women, is how it holds its ground in spite of the disapprobation of men.
It used to be an old-time notion that the sexes were made for each
other, and that it was only natural for them to please each other, and
to set themselves out for that end. But the girl of the period does not
please men. She pleases them as little as she elevates them; and how
little she does that, the class of women she has taken as her models of
itself testifies.
All men whose opinion is worth having prefer the simple and genuine girl
of the past, with her tender little ways and pretty bashful modesties,
to this loud and rampant modernization, with her false red hair and
painted skin, talking slang as glibly as a man, and by preference
leading the conversation to doubtful subjects. She thinks she is piquant
and exciting when she thus makes herself the bad copy of a worse
original; and she will not see that though men laugh with her they do
not respect her, though they flirt with her they do not marry her; she
will not believe that she is not the kind of thing they want, and that
she is acting against nature and her own interests when she disregards
their advice and offends their taste. We do not see how she makes out
her account, viewing her life from any side; but all we can do is to
wait patiently until the national madness has passed, and our women have
come back again to the old English ideal, once the most beautiful, the
most modest, the most essentially womanly in the world.
FOOLISH VIRGINS.
The heroines of the London season--the fillies, we mean, who have been
entered for the great matrimonial stakes, and have been mentioned in the
betting--have by this time exchanged the fast pleasures of the town for
the vapid pastimes of the country. We do not of course concern ourselves
with those poor simple girls who only repeat the lives and morals of
old-fashioned English homes, and who are too respectable and too modest
to be pointed at as the girls of the season. We speak of the fast
sisterhood only. After three months of egregious dissipation they enter
duly upon the next stage of their regular yearly alternations. Three
months of headlong folly are succeeded by three months of deadly
_ennui_. Action and reaction are always equal. The pains and weariness
of moral crapulousness arise in nice proportion to the passion of the
debauch. It is a dismal hour when we look on the withered leaves of last
night's garland.
The lovely and unlovely beings who are now living depressed days far
from Belgravia and the Row have, it is true, but joyless orgies to look
back upon. Their pleasures gave but a pinchbeck joviality after all,
were but a thin lacker spread over mercenary cares and heart-aching
jealousies--not the jealousies of passion, but the nipping vulgar
vexation with which a shopkeeper trembles lest a customer should go to
his rival over the way. Still there was excitement--the excitement of
outdoing a rival in shamelessness of apparel, in reckless abandonment of
manner, in the unblushing tolerance of impudent speech, in all the other
elements of ignoble casino-emulation. Above all, there was the tickling
excitement of knowing that all this was in some sort clandestine; that
ostensibly, and on the surface, things looked as if they were all
exhibiting human nature at its stateliest, most dignified, and most
refined pitch. The consciousness that the thin surface only conceals
some of the worst elements of character in full force and activity must
give a pleasantly stinging sensation to an acutely cynical woman.
However, this is all over for a time.
For a time the half-dressed young Maenads of the season will be found
clothed and in their right minds. And what sort of a right mind is it?
We know the kind of preparation which they have had for the business of
the season--for flirting, husband-hunting, waltzing, dressing so as to
escape the regulations of the police, and the rest. For this their
training has been perfect. But wise men agree that education should
comprehend training for all the parts of life equally--for pleasure not
less than for business, for hours of relaxation as well as for hours of
strain and pressure, for leisure just as much as for active occupation.
Education is supposed to arm us at every point. Nobody in this world was
ever perfectly educated. Everybody has at least one side on which he is
weak--one quarter where temptations are either not irresistible, or else
are not recognised as alluring to what is wrong. But we all know that
training, though never perfect, can make the difference between a
decently right and happy life and a bad, corrupt half-life or no life.
What does training do for the nimble-footed young beauties of the London
ball-room? It makes them nimble-footed, we admit. And what else?
The root-idea of the training of girls of the uppermost class in this
country is perhaps the most absolutely shameless that ever existed
anywhere out of Circassia or Georgia. It puts clean out of sight the
notion that women are rational beings as well as animals, or that they
are destined to be the companions of men who are, or ought to be, also
something more than animals. It takes the mind into account only as an
occasionally useful accident of body. The mind ought to be developed a
little, and in such a way as to make the body more piquant and
attractive. Like the candle inside a Chinese lantern, it may serve to
light up and show to advantage the pretty devices outside. But the
outside is the important thing, and the inside only incidental.
Insipidity of mind is perhaps a trifle objectionable, because there are
a few young men of property who dislike insipidity, and who therefore
might be lost from the toils in consequence. It is a crotchet and an
eccentricity in a man to desire a wife with a bright mind, but since
there are such persons, it is just as well to pay a slight attention to
the mind in odd moments when one is not engaged upon the more urgent
business of the body. You don't know what may happen, and it is possible
that the most eligible _parti_ of a season may dislike the idea of
taking a female idiot to wife. Still it would be absurd to change the
entire system of up-bringing for our girls merely because here and there
a man has a distaste for a fool.
The majority of men are incapable of gauging power of intellect and
fineness of character. But the veriest blockhead and simpleton who ever
lounged in a doorway or lisped in Pall Mall can tell a fine woman when
he sees her, and is probably able to find pleasure and hope in the
spectacle. It is these blockheads and simpletons who thus set the mode.
They fix the standard of fashionable female education. Education, or the
astounding modern conception of it, means preparation of girls for the
marriage market. If a girl does not get well married, it were better for
her and for her mother also if she had never been born, or had been cast
with a millstone round her neck into the sea. Whom she marries--whether
a man old enough to be her father, whether a pattern of imbecility,
whether a man of a notoriously debauched character--this matters not a
jot. Only let him have money. This being the conception of marriage, and
marriage being the aim of all sagacious up-bringing, as most men
unhappily are more surely taken on their animal than on their rational
side, it is perfectly natural that you should strive to bring up a
worthy family of attractive young animals. And let us pause upon this.
If the idea which, even at its best, would be so deplorably imperfect,
were rationally carried out, still it would not be so absolutely
pestilent and debasing as it is. Physical education, rightly practiced,
is a fine and indispensable process in right living. If the system had
for its end the rearing of really robust and healthy creatures, it would
mean something. On the contrary, however, anybody who makes a tour
through fashionable rooms in the season may see that, in a vast quantity
of cases, the heroines of the night are just as sorrily off in bodily
stamina as they are for intellectual ideas and interests. Here we again
encounter the fundamental blunder, that it is only the outside about
which we need concern ourselves. Let a woman be well dressed (or
judiciously undressed), have bright eyes, a whitish skin, rounded
outlines, and that suffices. All this a wise English mother will
certainly secure, just as a wise Chinese woman will take care to have
tiny feet, plucked eyebrows, and black finger-nails.
If you go into a nursery you will see the process already at work. The
little girl, who would fain exercise her young limbs by manifold rude
sprawlings and rushing hither and thither, and single combats with her
brothers, is tricked out in ribbons and gay frocks, and bid sit still in
solemn decorum. With every year of her growth this principle of
attention to outside trickeries and fineries is more rigidly pursued.
Less and less every year are the nerves and muscles, the restless
activities of arms and legs, exercised and made to purvey new vigor to
the life. The blood is allowed to grow stagnant. The life of the woman,
even as mere animal, becomes poor and morbid and artificial. By dint of
much attention and many devices, the outside of the body is maintained
comely in the eyes of people whose notions of comeliness are thoroughly
artificial and sophisticated. But how can there be any health with high
eating, little exercise, above all, with the mind left absolutely vacant
of all interests? The Belgravian mother does not even understand the
miserable trade she has chosen. She is as poor a physical trainer as she
is poor morally and intellectually.
The truth is that in a human being, even from the physical point of
view, it is rather a dangerous thing to ignore the intellect and the
emotions. Nature resents being ignored. If you do not cultivate her, she
will assuredly avenge herself. If you do not get wheat out of your piece
of ground, she will abundantly give you tares. And there can be no other
rule expressly invented for the benefit of fashionable young women.
Their moral nature, if nobody ever taught them to keep an eager eye upon
it, is soon overgrown, either with flaunting poison plants, or at best
with dull gray moss. The parent dreams that the daughter's mind is all
swept and garnished. Lo, there are seven or any other number of devils
that have entered in and taken possession, more or less permanently. The
human creature who has never been taught to take an interest in what is
right and wholesome will, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, take an
interest in what is wrong and unwholesome. You cannot keep minds in a
state of vacuum. A girl, like anybody else, will obey the bent of the
character which has been given either by the education of design or the
more usual education of mere accidental experience. Everything depends,
in the ordinary course of things, upon the general view of the aims and
objects of life which you succeed, deliberately or by hazard, in
creating.
A girl is not taught that marriage has grave, moral and rational
purposes, itself being no more than a means. On the contrary, it is
always figured in her eyes as an end, and as an end scarcely at all
connected with a moral and rational companionship. It is, she fancies,
the gate to some sort of paradise whose mysterious joys are not to be
analysed. She forgets that there are no such swift-coming spontaneous
paradises in this world, where the future can never be anything more
than the child of the present, indelibly stamped with every feature and
line of its parent. This castle-building, however, is harmless. If it
does not strengthen, still it does not absolutely impoverish or corrupt,
characters. Of some castle-building one cannot say so much. Character
_is_ assuredly corrupted by avaricious dreams of marriage as a road to
material opulence and luxury. There is, indeed, no end to the depraved
broodings which may come to an empty and undirected mind. If the
emotions and the intellect are not tended and trained, they will run to
an evil and evil-propagating seed. Rooted and incurable frivolty is the
best that can come of it; corruption is the worst.
People madly suppose that going to church, or giving an occasional
blanket to a sick old woman, will suffice to implant a worthy conception
of the aims of life. At this moment, some mothers are, perhaps,
believing that the dull virtue of the country will in a few days redress
the balance which had been too much discomposed by the rush and whirl of
the town. As if one strong set of silly interests and emotions could be
effaced at will by simple change of scene, without substitution of new
interests and emotions. Excess of frivolous excitement is not repaired
or undone by excess of mere blankness and nothingness. The dreariness of
the virtue of the _villeggiatura_ is as noxious as the whirl of the
mercenary and little virtuous period of the season. Teach young women
from their childhood upwards that marriage is their single career, and
it is inevitable that they should look upon every hour which is not
spent in promoting this sublime end and aim as so much subtracted from
life. Penetrated with unwholesome excitement in one part of their
existence, they are penetrated with killing _ennui_ in the next.
If mothers would only add to their account of marriage as the end of a
woman's existence--which may be right or it may not--a definition of
marriage as an association with a reasonable and reflective being, they
would speedily effect a revolution in the present miserable system. To
the business of finding a husband a young lady would then add the not
less important business of making herself a rational person, instead of
a more or less tastefully decorated doll with a passion for a great
deal of money. She might awaken to the fact, which would at first
startle her very much no doubt, that there is a great portion of a
universe outside her own circle and her own mind. This simple discovery
would of itself effect a revolution that might transform her from being
an insipid idiot into a tolerably rational being. As it is, the universe
to her is only a collection of rich bachelors in search of wives, and of
odious rivals who are contending with her for one or more of these too
wary prizes. All high social aims, fine broad humanizing ways of
surveying life, are unknown to her, or else appear in her eyes as the
worship of Mumbo Jumbo appears in the eyes of the philosopher. She
thinks of nothing except her private affairs. She is indifferent to
politics, to literature--in a word, to anything that requires thought.
She reads novels of a kind, because novels are all about love, and love
had once something to do with marriage, her own peculiar and absorbing
business. Beyond this her mind does not stir. Any more positively gross
state one cannot imagine. There are women who are by accident more
degraded physically. _Mutatis mutandis_, there are none more degraded,
morally and intellectually, than those whose minds are constantly bent
upon marriage at any cost, and with anybody, however decrepit, however
silly, and however evil, who can make a settlement.
LITTLE WOMEN.
The conventional idea of a brave, an energetic, or a supremely criminal
woman is a tall, dark-haired, large-armed virago, who might pass as the
younger brother of her husband, and about whom nature seemed to have
hesitated before determining whether to make her a man or a woman--a
kind of debatable land, in fact, between the two sexes, and almost as
much one as the other. Helen Macgregor, Lady Macbeth, Catharine de'
Medici, Mrs. Manning, and the old-fashioned murderesses in novels, are
all of the muscular, black-brigand type, with more or less of regal
grace superadded according to circumstances; and it would be thought
nothing but a puerile fancy to suppose the contrary of those whose
personal description is not already known. Crime, indeed, especially in
art and fiction, has generally been painted in very nice proportion to
the number of cubic inches embodied, and the depth of color employed;
though we are bound to add that the public favor runs towards muscular
heroines almost as much as towards muscular murderesses, which to a
certain extent redresses the overweighted balance.
Our later novelists, however, have altered the whole setting of the
palette. Instead of five foot ten of black and brown, they have gone in
for four foot nothing of pink and yellow; instead of tumbled masses of
raven hair, they have shining coils of purest gold; instead of hollow
caverns whence flash unfathomable eyes eloquent of every damnable
passion, they have limpid lakes of heavenly blue; and their worst
sinners are in all respects fashioned as much after the outward
semblance of the ideal saint as can well be managed. The original notion
was a very good one, and the revolution did not come before it was
wanted; but it has been a little overdone of late, and we are threatened
with as great a surfeit of small-limbed, yellow-headed criminals as we
have had of the man-like black. One gets weary of the most perfect model
in time, if too constantly repeated; as now, when we have all begun to
feel that the resources of the angel's face and demon's soul have been
more heavily drawn on than is quite fair, and that, given "heavy braids
of golden hair," "bewildering blue eyes," "a small lithe frame," "a
special delicacy of feet and hands," and we are booked for the
companionship, through three volumes, of a young person to whom
Messalina or Lucretia Borgia would be a mere novice.
And yet there is a physiological truth in this association of energy
with smallness; perhaps, also, with a certain tint of yellow hair,
which, with a dash of red through it, is decidedly suggestive of nervous
force. Suggestiveness, indeed, does not go very far in an argument; but
the frequent connection of energy and smallness in women is a thing
which all may verify in their own circles. In daily life, who is the
really formidable woman to encounter?--the black-browed,
broad-shouldered giantess, with arms almost as big in the girth as a
man's? or the pert, smart, trim little female, with no more biceps than
a ladybird, and of just about equal strength with a sparrow? Nine times
out of ten, the giantess with the heavy shoulders and broad black
eyebrows is a timid, feeble-minded, good tempered person, incapable of
anything harsher than a mild remonstrance with her maid, or a gentle
chastisement of her children. Nine times out of ten her husband has her
in hand in the most perfect working order, so that she would swear the
moon shone at midday if it were his pleasure that she should make a fool
of herself in that direction. One of the most obedient and indolent of
earth's daughters, she gives no trouble to any one, save the trouble of
rousing, exciting, and setting her agoing; while, as for the conception
or execution of any naughty piece of self-assertion, she is as utterly
incapable as if she were a child unborn, and demands nothing better than
to feel the pressure of the leading-strings, and to know exactly by
their strain where she is desired to go and what to do.
But the little woman is irrepressible. Too fragile to come into the
fighting section of humanity, a puny creature whom one blow from a man's
huge fist could annihilate, absolutely fearless, and insolent with the
insolence which only those dare show who know that retribution cannot
follow--what can be done with her? She is afraid of nothing, and to be
controlled by no one. Sheltered behind her weakness as behind a triple
shield of brass, the angriest man dare not touch her, while she provokes
him to a combat in which his hands are tied. She gets her own way in
everything, and everywhere. At home and abroad she is equally dominant
and irrepressible, equally free from obedience and from fear. Who breaks
all the public orders in sights and shows, and, in spite of king,
kaiser, or policeman X, goes where it is expressly forbidden that she
shall go? Not the large-boned, muscular woman, whatever her temperament;
unless, indeed, of the exceptionally haughty type in distinctly inferior
surroundings, and then she can queen it royally enough, and set
everything at most lordly defiance. But in general the large-boned woman
obeys the orders given, because, while near enough to man to be somewhat
on a par with him, she is still undeniably his inferior. She is too
strong to shelter herself behind her weakness, yet too weak to assert
her strength and defy her master on equal grounds. She is like a
flying-fish, not one thing wholly; and while capable of the
inconveniences of two lives, is incapable of the privileges of either.