Women have a comfortable way of personifying their folly under the name
“Fashion,” and laying their sins upon it. The “tyranny of Fashion” is
of a more iron-handed quality than that of anything else excepting Man.
I do steadfastly believe that many women have a distinct and definitive
conception of this monster as a gigantic biped (male, of course) ever
in session upon an iron throne, promulgating and enforcing brutal
decrees for their enslavement. Against this cruel being they feel that
rebellion would be perilous and remonstrance vain. The person who
complains of “the tyranny of fashion” is a self-confessed fool. There
is no such thing as fashion; it is as purely an abstraction as, for
example, indolence in a cat, or speed in a horse. Fancy a wild mare
complaining that she is a slave to celerity! Moralizers, literarians
and divers sorts of homilizers have been cracking this meatless nut
on our heads and comforting the stomachs of their understandings with
the imaginary kernel for lo! these many generations, and have even
persuaded the rest of us that there is something in it—as much, at
least as there was in the pocket of Lady Locket. It has not even so
much in it as that; not the half of it: the phrase “women’s slavery
to fashion” has absolutely _no_ meaning, and one about to use it
might as profitably use, instead, John Stuart Mill’s faultless example
of jargon: “Humpty Dumpty is an abracadabra.” Woman can not be called
submissive to fashion, for the submission and the thing submitted to
are the same thing. Even a woman can not be called a slave to slavery;
and it is the slavery that _is_ the fashion. What else can we
possibly mean by “fashion,” when using the word with reference to
women’s bondage, than women’s habit of dressing alike and badly? It
can not mean, in this connection, the style of their clothing; that
cannot “enslave”; and we do not speak of slavery to anything good
and desirable. Habit and addiction to habit are not two things, but
one. In short, women, having chosen to make fools of themselves, have
personified their folly and persuaded men to see in it a tyrant with a
chain and whip.
The word fashion is used as a convenient generic term for a multitude
of related stupidities and cowardices in character and conduct, and
for the results of them. To say that one must “follow the fashions” is
to say that one is compelled to be stupid and cowardly. What compels?
Under what stress of compulsion are women in making themselves hideous
in one way or another all the time—each year a different kind of
hideousness? Who commands them to get their shoulders above their
heads, blow up their sleeves and elongate their lapels to suggest the
collar-points of a negro minstrel? When have not men tried to prevent
them from doing these things and remain content with a tideless
impulchritude—an ugliness having slight and slow vicissitudes, such as
themselves are satisfied withal? Doubtless women’s quarrel with their
outward and visible appearance is a natural and reasonable sentiment, a
noble discontent; for they do look scarecrows, and no mistake; but the
effect which they have at any given time achieved, and at which they
afterward are aghast, is not to be bettered by eternal tinkering with
the same tools. In new brains and a new taste lies their only hope of
repair; lacking which, they would do well to let Time the healer touch
our wounded eyes, and inurement bring toleration.
“The iron hand of custom and tradition,” wails one of the female
disputants, “makes a pitiable race of us.” What a way to put it! Could
it not occur to this gentle creature that if we were not a pitiable
race—pitiable for our brute stupidity—custom and tradition would not be
iron-handed? We are savages in the same sense that the N’gamwanee is a
savage, who will not appear at any festival without his belly painted
a joyous sky-blue. But among us none is so amusing a savage as she who
squeals like a pig in a gate at “the tyranny of custom,” when nothing
is pinching her.