temptation to give some others which are not unusual. I am informed that
$400 can easily be charged for an afternoon dress, $1000 for an evening
dress, $200 for a coat and skirt; that it is quite easy to spend $5000 a
year on underclothes and $250 on an aigrette. I observe a Maison Lewis
Ascot hat, price $477. Yantorny will not make a shoe under $60; a pair
of his shoes made of feathers is priced by him at $2400.
As for totals: I have private information of an expenditure of $30,000 a
year on dress; one of $70,000 is reported to me from America. I have
seen a bill for dress and lingerie alone, incurred at one shop, for
$35,000 in twelve months.
4
It might be thought that this ghastly picture speaks for itself, but
evidently it does not, as hardly anybody takes any notice of the
question. I will venture to draw attention to the results of what is
happening, ignoring the abnormal figures, because I wish to reason from
what happens all the time rather than from what happens now and then, to
figure the position in which the world finds itself because women do not
hesitate to spend upon their clothes a full ten per cent of the
household income. This figure is correct: such inquiries as I have been
able to make among women of my acquaintance prove it. Out of a joint
income of $12,500 a year one woman spends $1350 a year on clothes;
another, out of $5750 a year, last year $655; a third, out of $8000 a
year $700, but she is a "dowdy."
In households of moderate means, where a certain social status is kept
up, where, for instance, a woman takes $500 a year out of $5000, while
her husband dresses well on $200, when all expenses have been paid,
there is money for little else; fixed charges, children, service, taxes,
swallow up the rest. There is hardly anything left for books, barely for
a circulating library; there is very little for the theater and for
games; holidays are taken in hideous lodgings at the seaside because a
comfortable bungalow costs too much. The money that should have provided
the most important thing in human life, namely pleasure, is on the
woman's back.
In the lower classes the case is, in a way, still worse. I do not mean
workmen's wives, for any old rag will serve the slaves,--but their
daughters! Recently a coroner's inquest in Soho showed that a girl had
practically starved herself to death to buy fine clothes, and it is not
an isolated case. For the last eight years I have been investigating the
condition of workwomen, and, so far as typists, manicurists, and
tea-shop girls are concerned, I assert that their main object in leaving
the homes where they are kept is to have money for smart clothes; they
flood the labor market at blackleg prices, to buy finery and for no
other reason. They go further: while making the necessary inquiries for
my novel, _A Bed of Roses_, I scheduled the cases of about forty London
prostitutes. In about twenty-five per cent of the cases the original
cause, direct or contributory, was a desire for luxury which took the
form of fine clothes. Now these women tell one what they think one would
like to hear, and, where they scent sympathy, as much as possible
attribute their fall to man's deceit. But acumen develops in the
investigator; the figure of twenty-five per cent is correct or may even
be an underestimate.
The conclusion is that from fifteen thousand to twenty-five thousand
women now on the streets of London have been brought there by a desire
for self-adornment. Meanwhile there is no labor available for the poor
consumer, because the energy of the dressmaker is diverted toward the
rich; while Miss So-and-So is paid $4000 a year to design hats, the
workwoman wears a man's cap rescued from the refuse heap.
I shall be told that the rich are not responsible for the luxurious
desires of the poor; but that is evidently nonsense: the rich themselves
are not innocent of prostitution. I have had reported the case of a
well-paid Russian dancer whose dress bills are paid by two financiers;
that of a French actress who calmly states that she needs three lovers,
one for her hats, one for her lingerie, and one for her gowns; and a
close inquiry into the "bridge losses" which occasionally provoke the
fall of rich men's daughters will show that these are dressmakers'
bills. All this is not without its effect upon the poor. The girl of the
lower classes, hypnotized by fashion plates, compelled to witness at the
doors of fashionable churches, in the street, at the music halls, and
even at the picture palaces, the continuous streaming past of the
fashion pageant, develops an intolerable desire for finery. You may say
that she is wrong, that she should practice self-denial, but this is not
an age of self-denial; luxury is in the air, we despair of happiness and
take to pleasure, we feel the future life too far ahead, we want to
enjoy. It is natural enough, especially for girls who are young and who
feel unfairly outclassed by richer women who are neither as young nor as
beautiful; but still it is base. If baseness is to go, the lesson must
come from the top; if there is to be self-denial, then _que messieurs
les assassins commencent!_ Until the rich woman realizes that her
example is her responsibility it will be fair to say that the Albemarle
Street $500 gown has its consequence in a prostitute on the Tottenham
Court Road.
The rich woman herself does not escape scot free. It is obvious that the
woman chiefly occupied with thoughts of dress develops a peculiar kind
of frivolity, that she becomes unfit to think of art, the public
interest, perhaps of love. She is the worst social product, a parasite,
and she is not even always beautiful. Sometimes she is insane: the
investigations of Doctor Bernard Holz and of Doctor Rudolf Foerster
connect the mania for fashion with paranoia, and have elicited
extraordinary facts, such as the collection of clothes by insane women,
and such as cases of pyromania which coincided with a craze for dress.
It is, indeed, quite possible that some women might go mad if they
permanently felt themselves less well-dressed than their fellows; and
that is the crux of the fashion idea. Woman does not desire to be
beautifully dressed: she desires to be more beautifully dressed than her
fellows. She wishes to insult and humiliate her sisters, and, as modern
clothes are costly, she does not hesitate to give full play to human
cruelty, to use all the resources of the rich husband on whom she preys
to satisfy her pride and to apply her arrogant ingenuity to the torture
of her sisters. And I said, "She wants to be more beautiful." Is that
quite right? Partly, though what woman mainly seeks is not to be
beautiful but to be fashionable; the words have become synonymous. Yet
the fashions are not always beautiful; sometimes they are hideous, break
every line of the body, make it awkward, hamper its movements. If women
truly wanted to be beautiful they would not follow the fashions: our
little dark, sloe-eyed women would dress rather like the Japanese, and
our big, ox-eyed beauties would appear as Greeks; but no, Juno, Carmen,
and Dante's Beatrice, all together and all in turn, don first the
crinoline and then the hobble skirt.
Nor do they want to attract men. They think they do but they do not, for
they know perfectly well that few men realize what they wear, that all
they observe is "something blue" or an effect they call "very doggy";
they know also that men do not wed the dangerous smart, but the modest;
that men fear the implication that smart women are unvirtuous, and that
they certainly fear their dressmakers' bills. Nor is it even true that
women want many new clothes so as to be clean: if that were true, men in
their well-worn suits could not be touched with a pitchfork. The truth
is that changes in fashion are a habit and a hysteria, an advertisement,
an insult offered by wealth to poverty, a degradation of women's
qualities which carries its own penalty in the form of growing mental
baseness.
5
Well, what shall we do? Women must wear a uniform. Strictly, they
already do wear a uniform, for what is a fashion but a uniform? Some
years ago when musquash coats (and cheaper velveteen) were "in", and
hats were very small, there were in London scores of thousands of young
women so exactly alike that considerable confusion was caused at tube
stations and such other places where lovers meet; this simplifies the
problem of choosing the new uniform. Let it not be thought that I wish
women to dress in sackcloth, though they will certainly dress in
sackcloth if ever sackcloth comes in; I do not care what they wear,
provided they do not continually alter its form, and provided it is not
too dear. The way in which old and young, tall and short, fat and thin,
force themselves into the same color and the same shape is sheer
socialism; I merely want to carry the uniform idea a little further, to
make it a _permanent_ uniform.
We already have uniforms for women, apart from the fashions, uniforms
which never change: those of the nurse, the nun, the parlor-maid, the
tea-girl. We have national costumes, Dutch, Swiss, Irish, Japanese,
Italian; we have drill suits and sports dresses. And they are not ugly.
All these uniformed women have as good a chance of marriage as any
others, and her ladyship gains as many proposals on the golf links as at
night on the terrace. I would suggest that women should have two or
three uniforms of a kind to be decided, which would never change, and, I
repeat, they need not be ugly uniforms.
Men's uniforms are not ugly; I would any day exchange my lounge suit for
the uniform of a guardsman--if I might wear it. In this "if" is the
essence of the whole idea, the whole practicability of it. Men wear
uniform, that is to say lounge suits in certain circumstances, morning
coats in others, evening clothes in yet others. They never vary. We are
told that they vary. Tailors show new suitings, the papers print
articles about men's fashions, and perhaps a button is added or a lapel
is lengthened, and that is all. Nobody cares. Men follow no fashions so
far as the fable of men's fashions is true; they dare not do so, because
to do so serves them ill in society. A man who dares to break through
the uniform idea of his sex is generally dubbed a "bounder"; if he is
one of the very young, fancy-socked, extreme-collared kind, people smile
and say, "It'll wear off with time." And women, who tolerate the dandies
at tea-time, love the others.
The uniform would have to be brought in by a group of leaders of fashion
determined to abolish fashion. I could sketch a dozen uniforms, but
women would make a great to-do, forgetting that most fashions are
created by men, so I will confine myself to timid suggestions.
1. For general outdoor wear the coat and skirt is the best, together
with a blouse. Lace and insertion should be abandoned, and I feel that
the skirt is too long for walking; sometimes it is certainly too tight
to enable a woman to get into an omnibus or railway carriage gracefully.
Probable price, complete, $50.
2. For summer wear, a plain blouse and skirt; not the atrocious blouse
ending at the belt, but the beautiful tunic-blouse that falls over the
hips. Both blouse and skirt would need to be made of a permanently
fixed, plain, and uni-colored material. Total cost, $25.
3. If the skirt were shortened, leggings, gaiters, and stockings would
have to be standardized; the shoe buckle, being too costly, would
disappear.
4. A fixed type of hat, without feathers or aigrettes, made in straw and
trimmed with flowers; produced in scores of thousands, it ought not to
cost more than $2.50.
5. A fixed type of evening gown, price $24 or $32, without any lace or
trimmings, sequins, paillettes; without overlays of flimsies of any
kind; no voile, no chiffon, no tulle, no muslin, but a stuff of good
quality, hanging in straight folds. Jewelry to be banned.
6. The afternoon dress should be completely suppressed; it responds to
no need.
7. The total annual cost would be about $150.
I shall be asked whether this can be done. I think it can. Recently the
Queen of Italy created a vogue for coral ornaments among the Roman
ladies so as to restore their livelihood to the fishermen of Torre del
Greco. That points the way; we do not need sumptuary laws, though, in
times to come, when capitalism is nothing but a historical incident, we
may have passed through such laws into a fuller freedom. It is enough
to decree that any variation from the new standard is _bad form_. Human
beings will break all laws, but they shrink if you tell them that they
are infringing the rules of etiquette. There are many men to-day who
would like to wear satin and velvet: they dare not because it is bad
form. If, therefore, a permanent clothing scheme were established by
strong patrons, if it were agreeable to the eye, which is easy to
arrange, I believe that fashions could be fixed because it would be
known that a woman who went beyond the uniform must either be
disreputable or suffer from bad taste.
6
I shall be told that I am warring against art. That is not true: some
fashions are beautiful, some are hideous. Who would to-day wear the
crinoline? Who would wear the gigot sleeve? They are ugly--but, stay!
Are they? Will they not be worn in an adapted form some time within the
next generation? They will, because fashions are not works of art; they
are only fashions. Women do not adapt the fashions to themselves, they
adapt themselves to the fashions, and it is a current joke that even
woman's anatomy is adjusted to suit the clothes of the day.
Doubtless I shall be challenged on this, and told that woman's
individuality expresses itself in her clothes. That again is not true;
the girl with a face like a Madonna will wear a ballet skirt if it comes
in, and if she has to "adapt" the ballet skirt to the Madonna idea I
should like to know how it is going to be done. Indeed the one thing
woman avoids doing is expressing her individuality; she wants what Oscar
Wilde called "the holy calm of feeling perfectly dressed", that is, like
everybody else, and a little more expensively.
It may be retorted, however, that uniform is not cheap. That again is
untrue. When a uniform is standardized, turned out in quantities and
never varied, it can be made very cheaply. Men's clothing, which is not
fully standardized, is such that no man need spend more than $250 a
year. That is the condition I want for women. Of course it will make
unemployed, and our sympathy will be invoked for dressmakers thrown out
of work: that is the old argument against railways on behalf of coaches,
against the mule-jenny, against every engine of human progress, and it
is sheer barbarism. Labor redistributes itself; money wasted on women's
clothes will be used in other trades which will reabsorb the labor and
make it useful instead of sterile.
An apparently more powerful argument is that uniform would deprive women
of their individuality: it cannot be much of an individuality that
depends upon a frock, and I am reduced to wonder whether some women lose
their personality once their frock is taken off. Still, there is a
little force in the argument, for it seems to lead to the conclusion
that beautiful women will enjoy undue advantage when dressed as are the
ill-favored. But this is not a true conclusion; it is not even true to
say that one cannot be distinctive in uniform, as anybody will realize
who compares a smart soldier with an untidy one. I have myself worn a
soldier's coat and know what care may make of it. Nor do I believe that
the beautiful would win; by winning is meant winning men, but we know
perfectly well that it is not body which wins men: it wins them only to
lose them after a while. It is something else which wins men:
individuality, wit, gaiety, cleverness, or cleverness clever enough to
appear foolish. And we men who wear uniform, does not our individuality
manage to attract? It does; and indeed I go further: I assert that
fashions smother individuality because they are tyrannical and much more
obtrusive than uniforms. Woman's charms are to-day dwarfed because men
are dazzled and misled by the meretricious paraphernalia which clothe
woman; the true charms have to struggle for life. I want to give them
full play, to enable men to choose better and more sanely, no longer the
empty odalisque but the woman whose personality is such that it can
dominate her uniform. That will be a true race and a finer than the game
of sex-temptation which women think they are playing.
It may be said that uniform will do away with class distinctions, that
one will no longer be able to tell a lady from one who is not. That is
not true. What one will no longer be able to tell is a rich woman from a
poor one; and who is to complain of that? Surely it will not be men, for
it is not true, I repeat, that men admire extravagant clothes; nor are
they tempted by them; nor do women dress to tempt them: at any rate, the
seduction of Adam was not compassed in that way.
Besides, women give away their own case: if their clothes were intended
to attract men, then surely married women would cease to follow the
fashions unless, which I am reluctant to conclude, they still desire to
pursue after marriage their nefarious, heart-breaking career.
The last suggestion is that women would not wear the uniform. Not follow
a fashion? This has never happened before.
I adhere therefore to my general view that if woman is to be diverted
from the path that leads straight toward a greater degradation of her
faculties; if household budgets are to be relieved so as to leave money
for pleasure and for culture; if true beauty is to take the place of
tinsel, feathers, frills, ruffles, _poudre de riz_; if middle-class
women are to cease to live in bitterness because they cannot keep up
with the rich; if the daughters of the poor are no longer to be
stimulated and corrupted by example into poverty and prostitution, it
will be necessary for the few who lead the many to realize that
simplicity, modesty, moderation, and grace are the only things which
will enable women to gain for themselves, and for men, peace and
satisfaction out of a civilization every day more hectic.
IV
WOMAN AND THE PAINT POT
It is in a shrinking spirit that I venture to suggest that woman has so
far entirely failed to affirm her capacity in the pictorial arts, for I
address myself to an audience which contains many sculptors and
pictorial artists, an audience of serious and enthusiastic people to
whom art matters as much and perhaps more than life. But it is of no use
maintaining illusions; woman has exhibited, and is exhibiting, very
great artistic capacities in the histrionic art, in dancing, in
executive music, and in literature. There is, therefore, no case for
those who argue that woman has no artistic capacity. She has. I select
but a few out of the many when I quote the actresses, Siddons, Rachel,
La Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry; the dancers, La Duncan, Pavlova,
Genee; the literary women, the Brontes, Madame de Stael, George Eliot,
Sappho, Christina Rossetti; among the more modern, May Sinclair and
Lucas Malet.
At first sight, however, it is curious that I should be able to quote no
composers and no dramatists; it is impossible to take Guy d'Hardelot and
Theresa del Riego seriously. And the women dramatists, taken as a whole,
hardly exist. This would go to show that there is some strength in the
contention that woman is purely executive and uncreative; but this
cannot be true, for the list of writers I have given, which is very far
from being exhaustive, and which is being augmented every day by
promising girl writers, shows that woman has creative capacity, creative
in the sense that she can evolve character and scene, and treat
relations in that way which can be described as art. If, therefore,
there have been no women painters of note, it cannot be because woman
has no creative capacity. It may be suggested that those women who have
creative capacity turn to literature, but that is a very rash
assumption. For creative men turn to any one of the half-dozen forms of
art, and are not monopolized by literature; there is no reason, mental
or physical, why the female genius should be capable of traveling only
along one line. The problem is a problem of direction, a problem of
medium.
My potential opponents will probably deny that there have been, and are,
no women painters. They will quote the names of Angelica Kaufmann, of
Vigee-Lebrun, of Rosa Bonheur, of Berthe Morisot, of Elizabeth Butler;
the more modern will mention Ella Bedford, Lucy Kemp-Welch; the most
modern will put forward Anne Estelle Rice; and one or two may shyly
whisper Maude Goodman. But, honestly, does this amount to anything? I do
not suppose that Lady Elizabeth Butler's "Inkermann" or "Floreat Etona"
will outlive the works of Detaille or of Meissonier, however doubtful be
the value of these men; the fame of Angelica Kaufmann, though enhanced
by the patronage of kings, has not been perpetuated by Bartolozzi, in
spite of that etcher's inflated reputation. Rosa Bonheur's "Horse Fair"
hangs in the National Gallery, and another of her works in the
Luxembourg, but merits which balance those of Landseer are not enough;
and Berthe Morisot walked, it is true, in the footprints of Manet, but
did her feet fill them? The truth of the matter is that there has not
been a woman Velasquez, a woman Rembrandt.
Now, as some of my readers may know, I do not make a habit of belittling
woman and her work. My writings show that I am one of the most extreme
feminists of the day, and I am well aware that woman must not be judged
upon her past, that it is perhaps not enough to judge her on her present
position, and that imagination, the only spirit with which criticism
should be informed if it is to have any creative value, should take note
of the potentialities of woman. But still, though we may write off much
of the past and flout the record of insult and outrage which is the
history of woman under the government of man, we cannot entirely ignore
the present: the present may not be the father of the future, but it is
certainly one of its ancestors. We have to-day a number of women who
paint--the great majority, such as Mrs. Von Glehn, Ella Bedford, Lucy
Kemp-Welch, and others who are hung a little higher over the line, are
rendering Nature and persons with inspired and photographic zeal;
others, such as Anne Estelle Rice, Jessie Dismorr, Georges Banks, are
inclined to "fling their paint pot into the faces of the public." Some
do not abhor Herkomer, others are banded with Matisse; but though to be
Herkomer may not be supreme, and though to be Matisse may perhaps be
insane, it must regretfully be conceded that the heights of the Royal
Academy and of Parnassus (or whatever the painter's mountain may be) are
not haunted by the woman painter. Without being carried away by the
author of "Bubbles", I am not inclined to be carried away by Maude
Goodman and the splendours of "Taller Than Mother." Lucy Kemp-Welch's
New Forest ponies are ponies, but I do not suppose that they will be
trotting in the next century; they do not balance even the work of
Furse.
Let me not be reproached because I use the low standard of the Royal
Academy, for if woman has a case at all she must prove herself on all
planes; it is as important that she should equal the second-rate people
as that she should shine among the first-rate. I do not look for a time
to come when woman will be superior to man, but to a time, quite remote
enough for my speculations, when she will be his equal, when she will be
able to keep up with all his activities. Curiously enough, the advanced
female painters are not so inferior to the advanced men painters as are
the stereotyped women to their masculine rivals. There is excellence in
the work of Anne Estelle Rice and Georges Banks, though they perhaps do
not equal Fergusson; but they are less remote from him in spirit and
realization than are the lesser women from the lesser men. That is a
fact of immense importance, for it is evident that nothing is so hopeful
as this _reduction_ in the inferiority of female painting. It may be
that masculine painting is decaying, which would facilitate woman's
victory, but I do not think so; modern masculine painting has never been
so vigorous, so inspired by an idea since the great religious uprush of
the Primitives.