Ladies of “health culture” clubs are sharply concerned about the length
of the skirts they wear. The purpose of their organizations, indeed,
is to protect them against their habit of wearing the skirts too
long. It has apparently not occurred to them that here, too, nobody
is compelling them to continue a disagreeable practice, and that with
a pair of scissors any woman can accomplish for herself all that she
wants the clubs to do for her. If the long skirt no longer please,
why not drop it? Nothing is easier. No concert of action definitely
agreed on was required to bring it in; none is required to oust it.
The enterprising gentleman who, having laid hold of the tail of a
bear, called lustily for somebody to help him let go, acted from an
intelligible motive, but I submit that if a woman stop following a
disagreeable fashion it will not turn and rend her.
No more hideous garment than the skirt is knowable or thinkable. In its
every aspect it discloses an inherent and irremediable impulchritude.
It is devoid of even the imaginary beauty of utility, for it is not
only needless but obstruent, impeditive, oppugnant. Promoting the sense
of restraint, it enslaves the character. Had one been asked to invent
a garment that should make its wearer servile in spirit one would have
consulted the foremost living oppressor and designed the skirt. That
reasonless habiliment ought long ago to have been flung into Nature’s
vacant lot and found everlasting peace along with gone-before cats,
late-lamented dogs, unsouled tin cans and other appurtenances and
proofs of mortality. There is not a valid reason in the world why a
skirt of any length, shape or material should ever have been worn;
and one of the strongest evidences of women’s unfitness for a part in
the larger affairs of the race is their obstinacy in clinging to the
skirt—or rather in permitting it to cling to them. So long as women
garb their bodies and their legs foolwise they may profitably save that
part of their breath now wasted in becoloneling themselves and reducing
Tyrant Man to the ranks.
Doubtless the skirt figures as one count in the long indictment against
the Oppressor Sex, as once bracelets and bangles did—it being pointed
out with acerbity that these are vestigial remnants of chains and
shackles. The same “claim” has been made for the eviscerating corset—I
forget upon what grounds. Of course men have had nothing to do with the
corset, excepting, in season and out of season, to implore women not to
wear it. The skirt we have merely tolerated, or from lack of thought
assented to. But if we were the sons of darkness which in deference to
the lady colonels we feel that we ought to confess ourselves, and if
we had been minded to enslave our bitter halves, we could hardly have
done better than to have “invented and gone round advising” the skirt.
Any constant restraint of the body reacts upon the mind. To hamper the
limbs is to subdue the spirit. Other things equal—which they could
not be—a naked nation would be harder to conquer than one accustomed
to clothing. The costume of the modern “civilized” man is bad enough
in this way, but that of his female is a standing challenge to the
fool-killer. Considering the use and purpose of the human leg, it seems
almost incredible that this hampering garment could have been imposed
upon women by anything less imperative than a divine commandment.
One reads a deal about the “immodesty” of the skirtless costume, not, I
think, because any one believes it immodest, but because its opponents
find in that theme an assured immunity from prosecution in making an
indecent exposure of their minds. This talk of immodesty is simply one
manifestation of public immorality—the immorality of an age in which
it is considered right and reputable for women and girls, in company
with men, to witness the capering of actresses and dancers who in the
name of art strip themselves to the ultimate inch—whose every motion
in their saltatory rites is nicely calculated to display as much of
the person as the law allows! Why else do they whirl and spin till
their make-believe skirts are horizontal? Why else do they spring into
the air and come down like a collapsed parachute? These motions have
nothing of grace; in point of art they are distinctly disagreeable.
Their sole purpose is indelicate suggestion. Every male spectator
knows this; every female as well; yet we lie to ourselves and to one
another in justification—lie knowing that no one is thereby deceived
as to the nature of the performance and our motives in attending it.
We call it art, and if that flimsy fiction were insufficient would
doubtless call it duty. The only person that affects no illusion in the
matter is the exhibiting hussy herself. She at least is free of the sin
of hypocrisy—save when condemning “bloomers” in the public press.
As censors of morals the ladies of the ballet are perhaps half-a-trifle
insincere; I like better the simple good faith of the austere society
dame who to a large and admiring audience of semi-nude men displays her
daughter’s charms of person at the bathing beach, with an occasional
undress parade of her own ample endowments. She is in deadly earnest,
the good old girl—she is entirely persuaded of the wickedness of the
“bloomers.” Why, it would hardly be more indelicate (she says) to
wear her bathing habit in the street or drawing-room! If she were
not altogether destitute of reason she would deprive herself of that
illustration, for a costume is no more indelicate in one public place
than in another. One of the congenital ear-marks of the Philistine
understanding is inability to distinguish inappropriateness from
immodesty—bad taste from faulty morals. The blush that would crimson
the cheek of a woman shopping in evening dress (and women who wear
evening dress sometimes retain the blush-habit; such are the wonders
of heredity!) would indubitably have its origin in a keen sense of
exposure. It would make a cat laugh, but it would be an honest blush
and eminently natural. The phenomenon requiring an explanation is the
no-blush when she is caught in the same costume at a ball or a dinner.
In nations that cover the body for another purpose than decoration and
protection from the weather, disputes as to how much of it, and in what
circumstances, should be covered are inevitable and uncomposable. Alike
in nature and in art, the question of the nude will be always demanding
adjustment and be never adjusted. This wrangle we have always with us
as a penalty for the prudery of concealment, creating and suggesting
the prurience of exposure.
Offended Nature hides her lash
In the purple-black of a dyed mustache,
and the lash lurks in every fold of the clothing of her choice. In
ancient Greece the disgraceful squabble was unknown; it did not occur
to the great-hearted, broad-brained and wholesome people of that
blessed land that any of the handiwork of the gods was ignoble. Nor are
the modern Japanese vexed with “the question of the nude”; save where
their admirable civilization has suffered the polluting touch of ours
they have not learned the infamy of sex. Among the blessings in store
for them are their conversion to decorous lubricity and instruction in
the nice conduct of a clouded mind.
I am not myself prepared to utter judgment in all these matters. I
do not know the precise degree of propriety in a lady’s “full dress”
at dinner, nor exactly how suggestive it is at breakfast. I can not
say with accuracy when and where and why a costume is immodest that
is modest in a mixed crowd at the sea beach. But this I know, despite
all the ingenious fictions, subtleties and sophistries wherewith
naked Nonsense is accustomed to drape herself as with a skeletonized
fig-leaf: that no man nor any woman addicted to play-going, society
entertainments and surf-bathing has the right to censure any costume
that is tolerated by the police. As to the “bloomers,” they have not a
suggestion of indelicacy, and of the person who professes to see it in
them I, for one, am fatigued and indisposed; and I confidently affirm
the advantage to the commonwealth of binding him to his own back and
removing the organ that he is an idiot with.
I have the vanity to think it already known to me why our women wear
the skirt—just as it is known to me why the women of certain African
tribes load themselves with enormous metal neck-rings and the male of
their variety attaches a cow-tail to his barren rear. But what these
impedimental adornments are for, the wearers can no more explain than
the Caucasian female (assisted by her “man of equal mind”) can expound
the purpose of her skirt, nor even be made to understand that its
utility is actually challenged. But what would one have? Wisdom comes
of mental freedom; are we to look for that in victims and advocates of
physical restraint? Can we reasonably expect large intellectual strides
in those who voluntarily hamper their legs? Is it to be believed
that an unremittent sense of hindrance will not affect the mind and
character? With woman’s inconsiderable reasoning power the skirt,
the corset and the finery have had as much to do as anything. If she
wants emancipation from the imaginary tyranny of Man the Monster, let
her show herself worthy of it by overthrowing the actual despotism
maintained by herself. Let her unbind her body and liberate her legs;
then we shall know if she has a mind that can be taught to stand alone
and march without the suasion of a bayonet.
1895.