with regard to the child. Indications in modern novels and modern
conversation are not wanting to show that a type of woman is arising who
believes in a new kind of matriarchate, that is to say, in a state of
society where man will not figure in the life of woman except as the
father of her child. Two cases have come to my knowledge where English
women have been prepared to contract alliances with men with whom they
did not intend to pass their lives,--this because they desired a child.
They consider that the child is the expression of the feminine
personality, while after the child's birth, the husband becomes a mere
excrescence. They believe that the "Wife" should die in childbirth, and
the "Mother" rise from her ashes. There is nothing utopian about this
point of view, if we agree that Feminists can so rearrange society as to
provide every woman with an independent living; and I do not say that
this is the prevalent view. It is merely one view, and I do not believe
it will be carried to the extreme, for the association of human beings
in couples appears to respond to some deep need; still, it should be
taken into account as an indication of sex revolt.
That part of the programme belongs to the ultimates. Among the
transitory ideas, that is, the ideas which are to fit Feminism into the
modern State, are the endowment of motherhood and the lien on wages. The
Feminists do not commit themselves to a view on the broad social
question whether it is desirable to encourage or discourage births.
Taking births as they happen, they lay down that a woman being
incapacitated from work for a period of weeks or months while she is
giving birth to a child, her liberty can be secured only if the fact of
the birth gives her a call upon the State. Failing this, she must have a
male protector in whose favor she must abdicate her rights because he is
her protector. As man is not handicapped in his work by becoming a
father, they propose to remove the disability that lies upon woman by
supplying her with the means of livelihood for a period surrounding the
birth, of not less than six weeks, which some place at three months.
There is nothing wild in this scheme, for the British Insurance Act
(1912) gives a maternity endowment of seven dollars and fifty cents
whether a mother be married or single. The justice of the proposal may
be doubted by some, but I do not think its expediency will be
questioned. On mere grounds of humanity, it is barbarous to compel a
woman to labor while she is with child; on social grounds it is not
advantageous for the race to allow her to do so: premature births,
child-murder, child-neglect by working mothers, all these facts point to
the social value of the endowment.
4
The last of the transitory measures is the lien on wages. In the present
state of things, women who work in the home depend for money on husbands
or fathers. The fact of having to ask is, in the Feminists' view, a
degradation. They suggest that the housekeeper should be entitled to a
proportion of the man's income or salary, and one of them, Mrs. M. H.
Wood, picturesquely illustrates her case by saying that she hopes to do
away with "pocket-searching" while the man is asleep. Mrs. Wood's ideas
certainly deserve sympathy; though many men pay their wives a great deal
more than they are worth and are shamefully exploited--a common modern
position--it is also quite true that many others expect their wives to
run their household on inadequate allowances, and to come to them for
clothes or pleasure in a manner which establishes the man as a pasha.
When women have grown economically independent, no lien on wages will be
required, but meanwhile it is interesting to observe that there has
recently been formed in England a society called "The Home-makers' Trade
Union", one of whose specific objects is, "To insist as a right on a
proper proportion of men's earnings being paid to wives for the support
of the home."
Generally speaking, then, it is clear that women are greatly concerned
with the race, for all these demands--support of the mother, support of
the child, rights of the household--are definitely directed toward the
benevolent control by the woman of her home and her child. I have
alluded above to these Feminist intentions: they affect the immediate
conditions as well as the ultimate.
Among the ultimates is a logical consequence of the right of woman to be
represented by women. So long as Parliamentary Government endures, or
any form of authority endures, the Feminists will demand a share in this
authority. It has been the custom during the Suffrage campaign to
pretend that women demand merely the vote. The object of this is to
avoid frightening the men, and it may well be that a number of
Suffragists honestly believe that they are asking for no more than the
vote, while a few, who confess that they want more, add that it is not
advisable to say so; they are afraid to "let the cat out of the bag",
but they will not rest until all Parliaments, all Cabinets, all Boards
are open to women, until the Presidential chair is as accessible to them
as is the English throne. Already in Norway women have entered the
National Assembly: they propose to do so everywhere. They will not
hesitate to claim women's votes for women candidates until they have
secured the representation which they think is their right, that is, one
half.
These are the bases, roughly outlined, on which can be established a
lasting peace.
I do not want to exaggerate the difficulties and perils which are bound
up in this revolutionary movement, but it is abundantly clear that it
presupposes profound changes in the nature of women and of men. While
man will be asked for more liberalism and be expected to develop his
sense of justice (which has too long lain at the mercy of his erratic
and sentimental generosity), woman will have to modify her outlook. She
is now too often vain, untruthful, disloyal, avaricious, vampiric;
briefly she has the characteristics of the slave. She will have to
slough off these characteristics while she is becoming free, she will
have to justify by her mental ascent the increase in her power.
Feminists are not blind to this, and that is why they lay such stress
upon education and propaganda.
One of the most profound changes will, I think, appear in sex relations.
The "New Woman", as we know her to-day, a woman who is not so new as the
woman who will be born of her, is a very unpleasant product; armed with
a little knowledge, she tends to be dogmatic in her views and offensive
in argument. She tends to hate men, and to look upon Feminism as a
revenge; she adopts mannish ways, tends to shout, to contradict, to
flout principles because they are principles; also she affects a
contempt for marriage which is the natural result of her hatred of man.
The New Woman has not the support of the saner Feminists. Says Ellen
Key, in _The Woman Movement_, "These cerebral, amaternal women must
obviously be accorded the freedom of finding the domestic life, with its
limited but intensive exercise of power, meagre beside the feeling of
power which they enjoy as public personalities, as consummate women of
the world, as talented professionals. But they have not the right to
_falsify life values_ in their own favor so that they themselves shall
represent the highest form of life, the 'human personality', in
comparison with which the 'instinctive feminine' signifies a lower stage
of development, a poorer type of life." If this were the ultimate type,
very few men would be found in the Feminist camp, for the coming of the
New Woman would mean the death of love. If the death of love had to be
the price of woman's emancipation, I, for one, would support the
institution of the zenana and the repression of woman by brute force;
but I do not think we need be anxious.
If the New Woman is so aggressive, it is because she must be aggressive
if she is to win her battle. We cannot expect people who are laboring
under a sense of intolerable injury to set politely about the righting
of that injury: when woman has entered her kingdom she will no longer
have to resort to political nagging; her true nature will affirm itself
for the first time, for it is difficult to believe that it has been able
to affirm itself under the entirely artificial conditions of androcracy.
Already some women to whom a profession or mental eminence has given
exceptional freedom show us in society that women can be free and yet
be sweet. Indeed they almost demonstrate the Feminist contention that
women must be free before they are sweet, for are not these women--of
whom all of us can name a few--the noblest and most desirable of their
kind? The New Woman is like a freshly painted railing: whoever touches
it will stain his hands, but the railing will dry in time.
There is one type of woman, however, whom I venture to call "Old Woman",
who is probably a bitterer foe of Feminism than any man, and that is the
super-feminine type, the woman for whom nothing exists except her sex,
who has no interests except the decking of her body and the quest of
men. This woman, who once dominated her own species, still represents
the majority of her sex. It is still true that the majority of women are
concerned with little save the fashions, novels, plays, and vaudeville
turns. These women want to have "a good time" and want nothing more;
they are ready to prey upon men by flattering them; they encourage their
own weakness, which they call "charm", and generally aim at being
pampered slaves, because, from their point of view, it pays better than
being working partners. Evidence of this is to be found in women's
shops, in the continual change in fashions, each of which is a signal to
the male, and in the continual increase in the sums spent on adornment:
it is not uncommon for a rich woman to spend five hundred dollars on a
frock; two hundred and fifty dollars has been given for a hat; and
twenty-five thousand dollars for a set of furs.
As Miss Beatrice Tina very well says, "Woman is woman's worst enemy",
though she is not referring to this type. So long as woman maintains
this attitude, compels men to forget her soul in the contemplation of
her body, so long will she remain a slave, for this preoccupation goes
further than clothes.
In a book recently published,[7] an account is given of the late Empress
of Austria, who was evidently one of the lowest of the slave type. It is
noteworthy that she had no love for her children because their coming
had impaired her beauty. Now I do not suggest that Feminists are arrayed
against the care of the body; far from it, for the campaign has many
associates among those who support physical culture, the fresh-air
movement, ancient costume revival, and the like; but Feminists are well
aware that concentration on adornment diverts woman from the development
of her brain and her soul, and enhances in her the characteristics of
the harem favorite. One tentative suggestion is being made, and that is
a uniform for women. The interested parties point out that men
practically wear uniform, that there is hardly any change from year to
year in their costume, and that any undue adornment of the male is
looked upon as bad form. Thus, while few men can with impunity spend
more than five hundred dollars a year on their clothes, many women do
not consider themselves happy unless they can dispose of anything
between five and twenty times that amount. This, while involving the
household in difficulties, lowers the status of woman by lowering her
mentality.
[7] _My Past_, by COUNTESS MARIE LARISCH.
Feminists do not ask for sumptuary laws, having very little respect for
the law, but for a new vision, which is this: Man, intellectually
developed, decks himself in no finery, because it is not essential to
his success; woman must likewise abandon frippery if she is to have
energy enough to reach his plane. They propose to attain their object by
the force of their example, and I have received several letters on the
subject, which show that the idea of fixing the fashions is not
entirely wild, for fashion consists after all in wearing what everybody
wears, and if an influential movement is started to maintain the costume
of women on a very simple basis, it may very well prevail and kill much
of their purely imitative vanity by showing them that undue devotion to
self-adornment is very much worse than immoral: in other words, that it
is in bad taste.
Incidentally the Feminists believe that the downfall of many women is
procured by the offer of fine clothes. They hope, therefore, to derive
some side-profits from the simplification of woman's dress.
The question also arises as to whether woman can become intellectually
independent, whether she does not naturally depend upon the opinion of
man. It is suggested that not even rich women are actually independent,
that women place marriage above their art, their work; but I do not
think this is a very solid objection, for the vaunted independence of
men is not so very common; they currently take many of their opinions
from their reading in newspapers and books, and must often subordinate
their views and their conduct to the will of their employer. The main
answer to this suggestion is that we must not consider woman as she
was, but woman "as she is becoming", as a creature of infinite
potentialities, as virgin ground.
It may be _petitio principii_ to say that, as woman has produced so much
that is fine, she would have produced very much more if she had not been
hampered by law and custom, derided by the male, but bad logic is often
good sense. This should commend itself to men who are no longer willing
to support the idea that women are inherently inferior to them, but who
are willing to give them an opportunity to develop in every field of
human activity. Thus and thus only, if man will readjust his views,
expel _vir_ and enthrone _homo_, can woman cease to appear before him as
a rival and a foe, realize herself in her natural and predestined role,
that of partner and mate.[8]
[8] Note: This chapter should be taken as the summary of an intellectual
position. Its points are considered in detail in the four chapters that
follow.
III
UNIFORMS FOR WOMEN
1
The change which has come over politics reflects closely enough the
change which has come about in the direction of man's desire. In times
of peace, diplomacy and the affairs of kings have given place to wages
and the housing of the poor; that which was serious has become pompous;
that which was of no account now stands in the foreground. And so it
is not absurd to suggest that one of those things which once made jests
for the comic paper and the Victorian paterfamilias has, little by
little, with the spread of wealth, become a problem of the day, a
problem profound and menacing, full of intimations of social decay, not
far remote in its reactions from the spread of a disease.
That problem is the problem of women's dress, or rather it is the
problem of the fashions in women's dress. Women have never been content
merely to clothe themselves, nor, for the matter of that, until very
recently, have men; but men have grown a new sanity, while women, if we
read aright the signs of the times, have grown naught save a new
insanity. We have come to a point where, for a great number of women,
the fashions have become the motive power of life, and where, for almost
every woman, they have acquired great importance. Women classify each
other according to their clothes; they have corrupted the drama into a
showroom; they have completely ruined the more expensive parts of the
opera house; they have invaded the newspapers in myriad paragraphs, in
fashion-pages, and do not spare even the august columns of the most
dignified papers. This preoccupation does not exist among men. We have
had our dandies and we still have our "nuts" and dudes; but it never
served a man very well to be a dandy or a beau, and most of us to-day
suspect that if the "nut" were broken, he would be found to contain no
kernel.
Men have escaped the fashions and therewith they have spared themselves
much loss of energy and money. For it is not only the fashions that
matter: it is the cost of women's clothes, the intrinsic cost; it is
their continual changes for no reason, changes which sometimes produce,
and sometimes destroy, beauty; sometimes promote comfort, and often
cause torture. But always by their drafts upon its wealth, women lead
humanity nearer to poverty, envy, discontent, frivolity, starvation,
prostitution,--to general social degradation. Nothing can mitigate these
evils until woman is induced to view clothing as does the modern man,
until, namely, she decides to wear a uniform.
2
The costliness of women's clothes would not be so serious if the
fashions did not change at so bewildering a speed. We have come to a
point where women have not time to wear out their clothes, flimsy though
they be; where we ought to welcome the adulteration of silk and wool;
where we ought to hope that every material may get shoddier and more
worthless, so that the new model may have a chance to justify its short
life by the badness of the stuff. To-day women will quite openly say, "I
won't buy that. I couldn't wear it out." They actually _want_ to wear
out their clothes! The causes of this are obvious enough. We are told
that there are "rings" in Paris, London, and Vienna which decree every
few months that the clothes of yesterday have become a social stigma;
this is true, but much truer is the view that women are in the grasp of
a new hysteria; that, lacking the old occupations of brewing, baking,
child-rearing, spinning, they are desperately looking for something to
do. They have found it: they are undoing the social system.
It was not always so. It is true that all through history, even in
biblical times, moralists and preachers inveighed against the gewgaws
that woman loves. They cried out before they were hurt; if he were alive
to-day, Bossuet might, for the first time, fail to find words.
To the old curse of cost we have added change, as any student of costume
will confirm; for in past ages the clothing of women did not change very
rapidly. There is hardly any difference between the costume of 1755 and
that which Queen Marie Leszczynska wore ten years later; in Greece,
between B.C. 500 and 400, the Ionic _chiton_ and _himation_ varied but
little; the Doric _chiton_ did not vary at all; the variations in the
over-mantle were not considerable. Any examination of early sculpture,
of Attic vases, or of terra cottas, will show that this is true. The
ladies of Queen Elizabeth's court, together with their royal mistress,
wore the same kind of clothes through their adult years. Their clothes
were sometimes costly, but when bought they were bought, and until worn
out were not discarded. And our grandmothers had that famous
black-silk dress, so sturdy that it stood up by itself, very like a
Victorian virtue; it lasted a lifetime, sometimes became an heirloom.
There was no question then of fashion following on fashion at a whirling
pace. Women were clothed, sometimes beautifully, sometimes hideously,
but at any rate they scrapped their gowns only when they were worn out;
now they scrap them as soon as they have been worn. The results of this
I deal with further on, but here already I can suggest these results by
quoting a few facts. Before me lies one of Messrs. Barker's
advertisements; it seems that there are reception gowns, restaurant
gowns; that there are coats for the races, and coats for the car, wraps
for one thing, and wraps for another--and the advertisement adds that
these are the "latest novelties" for "the coming season", and that all
this is "for the spring." And then there is an advertisement of Messrs.
Tudor Brothers, who have gowns for Ascot, and--this is quite true--gowns
for Alexandra Day.
I have looked in vain for gowns for July 23, for gowns to be worn
between a quarter past eleven and half-past twelve in the morning, and
for special mourning gowns for a cousin's stepfather. Some occasions are
shamefully disregarded. They are not disregarded by everybody; at least
I presume that the lady quoted by Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson in her lecture
in March, who possessed one hundred and ten nightdresses, could cope
with any eventuality; there is also the lady, mentioned to me by a
friend who made some American investigations for me, who possesses one
hundred and fifty pairs of slippers. There is, too, the _Bon Marche_ in
Paris, where, out of a staff of six thousand to seven thousand, are
employed fifteen hundred dressmakers, and where there is a special
workroom for the creation of models.
As all these people must find something to do, they create, unless they
merely steal from the dead; but one thing they always do, and that is
destroy yesterday. Out of their activities comes a continual stream of
new colors and new combinations of colors, of high heels and low heels,
gilt heels and jeweled heels; they give us the spat that is to keep out
the wet and then the spat that does not keep out the eye. Before me lies
a picture of a spat made of lace; another of a skirt slit so high as to
reveal a jeweled garter. That is creation, and I suppose I shall be told
that that is art. It is art sometimes, and very beautiful, but beauty
does not make it live; in fact beauty causes the creation to die more
swiftly, because the more appealing it is, the more it is worn: as soon
as it is worn by the many, the furious craving for distinction sweeps
down upon it and slays it. There are several mad women in the St. Anne
asylum in Paris whose peculiar disease is that they cannot retain the
same idea for more than a few seconds; they ring the changes on a few
hundreds of ideas. Properly governed, their inspirations might be
valuable in Grafton Street.
I do not think the end is near; indeed, fashions will be more extreme
to-morrow than they are to-day. The continual growth of wealth, and the
difficulty of spending it when it clots in a few hands, will make for a
greater desire to spend more, more quickly, more continually, and in
wilder and wilder forms. The women are to-day having individual orgies;
to-morrow will come the saturnalia.
3
There is a clear difference between the cost of women's clothes and of
men's. It is absolutely impossible to dress a woman of the comfortable
classes for the same amount per annum that will serve her husband well.
I must quote a few figures taken from Boston, New York, and London.
_Boston._--Persons considered: those having $4500 to $7500 a year.
Average price of a suit (coat and skirt), $40 ready to wear; made
by a dressmaker of slight pretensions, $125 to $225.
Afternoon dresses, ready to wear, $125 to $225.
Evening dresses, absolute minimum, $50; fashionable frocks, $200 to
$350.
On an income of $7500 a woman's hat will cost $25; variation, $20
to $45; hats easily attain $125.
Veils attain $5. Opera cloaks in stores, $90 to $250. Dressmakers
charge $450 to $600.
_New York._--Winter street dress, $225.
Skunk muff and stole, $200.
Hats for the year, at least $250 to $300.
Footwear, $250 per annum.
I am informed that a lady in active society can "manage with care" on
$2500, but really needs $4500 to $5000.
A "moderate" wardrobe allows for "extremely simple" gowns costing $125
each; the lady in question requires at least six new evening dresses and
six remodeled, per annum. She wore an average set of furs, price $1500.
_London._--Debenham & Freebody blouse, $10.
Ponting's Leghorn hat, $8. Gorringe straws, $12 to $14.
I am informed that where the household income is $3500 to $7500 a year
the ordinary prices are as follows:
Coats and skirts, $50 to $75.
Evening dresses, $75 to $120.
Hats, $7.50 to $20.
Silk stockings are cheap at $1.50, and veils at $1.50.
Now these are all moderate figures and will shock nobody, but if they
are compared with the prices paid by men, they are, without any question
of fashion, outrageous. I believe they are high because it is men and
not women who pay, because the dressmaker trades on man's
sex-enslavement. But I am concerned just now less with causes than
with facts, and would rather ask how the modest $100 evening gown
compares with the man's $63 dress suit (by a good tailor). How does the
$63 coat and skirt compare with a man's lounge suit, price $36 by
anybody save Poole, and by him only $52.50? No man has, I believe, paid
more than $9 for a silk hat, while his wife pays at least $20. The point
is not worth laboring, it is obvious; while every man knows that a "good
cut" does not account for the discrepancy, as he too pays, but pays
moderately, for the art of a good tailor. And, mark you, apart from
cost, men's clothes last indefinitely, while women's, if they have the
misfortune to last, must be given away.