We have spoken of the women of fashion. What shall we say of the men?
They are neither refined nor intellectual. They have a certain
shrewdness coupled, perhaps, with the capacity for making money. Their
conversation is coarse, ignorant, and sometimes indecent. They have not
the tact which enables women to adapt themselves at once to their
surroundings, and they enjoy their splendors with an awkwardness which
they seek to hide beneath an air of worldly wisdom. They patronize the
drama liberally, but their preference is for what Olive Logan calls "the
leg business." In person they are coarse-looking. Without taste of
their own, they are totally dependent upon their tailors for their
"style," and are nearly all gotten up on the same model. They are
capital hands at staring ladies out of countenance, and are masters of
all the arts of insolence. Society cannot make gentlemen out of them do
what it will. As John Hibbs would say, "they were not brought up to it
young." They learn to love excitement, and finding even the reckless
whirl of fashion too stale for them, seek gratification out of their own
homes. They become constant visitors at the great gaming-houses, and are
the best customers of the bagnios of the city.
If men have their dissipations, the women have theirs also. Your
fashionable woman generally displays more tact than her husband. She has
greater opportunities for display, and makes better use of them. If the
ball, or party, or sociable at her residence is a success, the credit is
hers exclusively, for the husband does little more than pay the bills.
Many of these women are "from the ranks." They have risen with their
husbands, and are coarse and vulgar in appearance, and without
refinement. But the women of fashion are not all vulgar or unrefined.
Few of them are well educated, but the New York woman of fashion, as a
rule, is not only very attractive in appearance, but capable of creating
a decided impression upon the society in which she moves. She is
thoroughly mistress of all its arts, she knows just when and where to
exercise them to the best advantage, she dresses in a style the
magnificence of which is indescribable, and she has tact enough to carry
her through any situation. Yet, in judging her, one must view her as a
butterfly, as a mere creature of magnificence and frivolity. Don't seek
to analyze her character as a wife or mother. You may find that the
marriage vow is broken on her part as well as on her husband's; and you
will most probably find that she has sacrificed her soul to the demands
of fashion, and "prevented the increase of her family" by staining her
hands in the blood of her unborn children. Or, if she be guiltless of
this crime, she is a mother in but one sense--that of bearing children.
Fashion does not allow her to nurse them. She cannot give to her own
flesh and blood the time demanded of her by her "duties in society;" so
from their very birth the little innocents are committed to the care of
hirelings, and they grow up without her care, removed from the ennobling
effect of a mother's constant watchful presence, and they add to the
number of idle, dissolute men and women of fashion, who are a curse to
the city.
Your fashionable woman is all art. She is indeed "fearfully and
wonderfully made." She is a compound frequently of false hair, false
teeth, padding of various kinds, paint, powder and enamel. Her face is
"touched up," or painted and lined by a professional adorner of women,
and she utterly destroys the health of her skin by her foolish use of
cosmetics. A prominent Broadway dealer in such articles sells thirteen
varieties of powder for the skin, eight kinds of paste, and twenty-three
different washes. Every physical defect is skilfully remedied by
"artists;" each of whom has his specialty. So common has the habit of
resorting to these things become, that it is hard to say whether the
average woman of fashion is a work of nature or a work of art. Men marry
such women with a kind of "taking the chances" feeling, and if they get a
natural woman think themselves lucky.