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REVOLTED WOMAN
[Illustration:
EMANCIPATED!]
REVOLTED WOMAN
PAST, PRESENT, AND TO COME
BY
CHARLES G. HARPER
AUTHOR OF ‘THE BRIGHTON ROAD,’ ‘DRAWING FOR REPRODUCTION,’
‘THE MARCHES OF WALES,’ &C., &C.
[Illustration]
London:
ELKIN MATHEWS
VIGO STREET
1894
_LONDON:
Printed by_ STRANGEWAYS AND SONS,
_Tower St., Cambridge Circus, W.C._
I am ashamed, that women are so simple
To offer war, where they should kneel for peace;
Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.
_Taming of the Shrew._
[Illustration: PREFACE]
_It might have been supposed, having in mind her first and most
stupendous_ faux pas, _that Woman would be content to sit, for all
time, humbly under correction, satisfied with her lot until the crack
of doom, when man and woman shall be no more; when heaven and earth
shall pass away, and pale humanity come to judgment._
_But it is essentially feminine, and womanlike (and therefore of
necessity illogical) that she should be forgetful of the primeval
curse which Mother Eve brought upon the race, and that she should,
instead of going in sackcloth and ashes for her ancestor’s
disobedience, seek instead, not only to be the equal of man, but,
in her foremost advocates--the strenuous and ungenerous females who
periodically crucify the male sex in sexual novels written under manly
pseudonyms--aspire to rule him, while as yet she has no efficient
control over her own hysterical being._
_Humanity is condemned by the First Woman’s disobedience to earn a
precarious livelihood by the sweat of its brow. All the toil and
trouble of this work-a-day world proceed from her sex; and yet the
cant of ‘Woman’s Mission’ fills the air, and the New Woman is promised
us as some sort of a pedagogue who shall teach the ‘Child-Man’ how
to toddle in the paths of virtue and content. How absurd it all is,
when the women who write these things pander to the depraved palate
which gained Holywell Street a living and an unenviable notoriety
years ago; when they obtain three-fourths of their readers from their
fellow-women who read their productions hopeful of indecency, and
conceive themselves cheated if they do not find it. Let us, however,
do these women writers, or ‘Literary Ladies,’ as they have labelled
themselves--margarine masquerading as ‘best fresh’--the justice to
acknowledge that they do not halt half-way on the road to viciousness,
though to reach their goal they wade knee-deep in abominations. Here,
indeed, they are no cheats, and it remains the unlikeliest sequel that
you close their pages and yet do not find Holywell Street outdone._
_Consider: If morals are to be called into question, can it be
disputed that, as compared with Woman, Man is the moral creature, and
has ever been, from the time of Potiphar’s wife, up to the present?_
_Woman is the irresponsible creature who cannot reason nor follow an
argument to its just conclusion--who cannot control her own emotions,
nor rid herself of superstition. What question more pertinent, then, to
ask than this: If mankind is to be led by the New Woman, is she, first
of all, sure of the path?_
_CHARLES G. HARPER._
[Illustration]
CONTENTS.
I.
PAGE
WOMAN UP TO DATE 1
II.
THE DRESS REFORMERS 28
III.
WOMAN IN ART, LITERATURE, POLITICS, AND
SOCIAL POLITY 45
IV.
SOME OLD-TIME TERMAGANTS AND ILL-MADE
MATCHES OF CELEBRATED MEN 61
V.
DOMESTIC STRIFE 107
VI.
WOMEN IN MEN’S EMPLOYMENTS 130
[Illustration]
ILLUSTRATIONS.
EMANCIPATED! _Frontispiece._
PAGE
THE BLOOMER COSTUME 33
THE RATIONAL DRESS 41
ELIZABETH, COUNTESS OF SHREWSBURY 67
ANN CLIFFORD, COUNTESS OF DORSET, PEMBROKE, AND MONTGOMERY,
AGED 18 71
ANN CLIFFORD, COUNTESS OF DORSET, PEMBROKE, AND MONTGOMERY,
AGED 81 75
SARAH, DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH 79
LADY HESTER STANHOPE 91
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BREECHES 109
MAN MASTERED 118
A JUDICIAL DUEL 119
[Illustration: REVOLTED WOMAN]
I.--WOMAN UP TO DATE.
‘Certain Women also made us astonished.’--_Luke_, xxiv. 22.
She is upon us, the Emancipated Woman. Privileges once the exclusive
rights of Man are now accorded her without question, and, clad in
Rational Dress, she is preparing to leap the few remaining barriers
of convention. Her last advances have been swift and undisguised,
and she feels her position at length strong enough to warrant the
proclamation that she does not merely claim equal rights with man, but
intends to rule him. Such symbols of independence as latch-keys and
loose language are already hers; she may smoke--and does; and if she
does not presently begin to wear trousers upon the streets--what some
decently ambiguous writer calls bifurcated continuations!--we shall
assume that the only reason for the abstention will be that womankind
are, generally speaking, knock-kneed, and are unwilling to discover the
fact to a censorious world which has a singular prejudice in favour of
symmetrical legs.
Society has been ringing lately with the writings and doings of
the pioneers of the New Woman, who forget that Woman’s Mission is
Submission; but although the present complexion of affairs seems to
have come about so suddenly, the fact should not be blinked that in
reality it is but the inevitable outcome, in this age of toleration
and _laissez faire_, of the Bloomerite agitation, the Women’s Rights
frenzy, the Girl of the Period furore, and the Divided Skirt craze,
which have attracted public attention at different times, ranging from
over forty years ago to the present day.
Several apparently praiseworthy or harmless movements that have
attracted the fickle enthusiasm of women during this same period have
really been byways of this movement of emancipation. Thus, we have had
the almost wholly admirable enthusiasm for the Hospital Nurse’s career;
the (already much-abused) profession of Lady Journalist; the Woman
Doctor; the Female Detective; the Lady Members of the School Board;
and the (it must be allowed) most gracious and becoming office of Lady
Guardian of the Poor.
Side by side, again, with these, are the altogether minor and trivial
affectations of Lady Cricketers, the absurd propositions for New
Amazons, or Women Warriors, who apparently are not sufficiently
well read in classic lore to know what the strict following of the
Amazons’ practice implied; nor can they reck aught of the origin of the
Caryatides.
Again, the Political Woman is coming to the front, and though she may
not yet vote, she takes the part of the busybody in Parliamentary
Elections, and already sits on Electioneering Committees.
In this connexion, it should not readily be forgotten that Mrs. Brand
earned her husband the somewhat humiliating reputation of having been
sung into Parliament by his wife at the last election for Wisbech,
and thus gave the coming profession of Women Politicians another
push forward. The dull agricultural labourers of that constituency
gave votes for vocal exercises on improvised platforms in village
school-rooms, nor thought of aught but pleasing the lady who could sing
them either into tears with the cheap sentimentality of _Auld Robin
Grey_, melt them with the poignant pathos of _‘Way down the Swanee
River’_, or excite their laughter over the equally ready humour of
the latest _soi-disant_ ‘comic’ song from the London Halls. Think
upon the most musical, most melancholy prospect thus opened out before
our prophetic gaze! What matter whether you be Whig or Tory, Liberal
or Conservative, Rotten-Tim-Healeyite, or a member of Mr. Justin
MacCarthy’s tea-party, so long as your wife can win the rustics’
applause by her singing of such provocations to tears or laughter as
_The Banks of Allan Water_ or _Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay_, or whatever may be
the current successor of that vulgar chant?
But the so-called ‘New Purity’ movement, and novel evangels of that
description, most do occupy the attention of the modern woman who is in
want of an occupation.
We smile when we read of the proceedings of Mrs. Josephine Butler and
her following of barren women who are the protagonists of the New
Purity; for woman has ever been the immoral sex, from the time of
Potiphar’s wife to these days when the Divorce Courts are at once the
hardest worked in the Royal Courts of Justice, and the scenes of the
most frantic struggles on the part of indelicate women, who, armed with
opera-glasses and seated in the most favourable positions on Bench or
among counsel, gloat over what should be the most repellent details in
this constant public washing of dirty private linen, and survey the
co-respondents with delighted satisfaction. The intensity of the joy
shown by those who are fortunate enough to obtain a seat in court on
a more than usually loathsome occasion is only equalled at the other
extreme by the poignancy of regret exhibited by those unhappy ladies
who have been unsuccessful in their scheming to secure places.
And, again, the reclamation of corrupt women, if not impossible, is
rarely successful, for ‘woman is at heart a rake,’ and, as Ouida
says, who has, one might surmise, unique opportunities of knowing,
she is generally ‘corrupt because she likes it.’ Thus, throughout the
whole range of history, Pagan or Christian, courtesans have never
been to seek. They have, these _filles de joie_, always succeeded in
attracting to themselves wealth and genius, luxury and intellect;
and through their paramount influence, Society at the present day is
corrupt to extremity. The Evangelists of the New Purity, who hold
that the innate viciousness of man is the cause of woman’s subjection
and inferiority, can have no reading nor any knowledge of the world’s
history while they continue to proclaim their views; or else they know
themselves, even as they preach, for hypocrites. For woman has ever
been the active cause of sin, from the Fall to the present time, and
doubtless will so continue until the end. It is not always, as they
would have you believe, from necessity that the virtuous woman turns
her back upon virtue, but very frequently from choice and a delight in
sin and wrong-doing. How then shall the New Purity arise from the Old
Corruption?
‘Who can find a virtuous woman?’ asks Solomon (Prov. xxxi. 10), and
goes on to say that her price is far above rubies: doubtless for the
same reason that rubies are so highly valued--because they are so
scarce.
The trade of courtesan has always been numerous and powerful, and has
been constantly recruited from every class. Vanity, of course, is the
great inducement; love of dress and power, and greed of notoriety,
are other compelling forces; and a joy in outraging all decency and
propriety, of defying conventions of respectability and religion, is
answerable for the rest.
This kind of woman makes all mankind her prey, and has no generous
instincts whatever. Everything ministers to her vanity and lavish
waste. It is a matter of notoriety that men of light and leading are
drawn after her all-conquering chariot, and that in three out of every
four plays she is the heroine.
She is cruel as the grave, heartless as a stone, and extravagant beyond
measure. Her kind have utterly wasted the patrimony of thousands of
dupes, and having reduced them to beggary the most abject and forlorn,
have sought fresh victims of their insatiable greed.
They have ruined kingdoms, like the mistresses of Louis XIV. and XV.
of France; they have brought shame and dishonour upon nations, like
the dissolute women of Charles the Second’s court, who toyed with
his wantons at Whitehall while the Dutch guns thundered off Tilbury;
they have risen, like Madame de Pompadour, to a height from which
they looked down upon diplomatists of the Great Powers of Europe--and
scorned them; and the blood shed during many sanguinary wars has been
shed at their behest. Courtesans have married into the peerage of
England, and, indeed, some of the oldest titles--not to say the bluest
blood--of the three kingdoms derive from the king’s women: Nell Gwynne,
whose offspring became Duke of Saint Albans; Louise de Querouaille,
created Duchess of Portsmouth; Barbara Palmer, made Duchess of
Cleveland; and others. Lais and Phryne belong not to one period, but to
all eras alike; Aspasias and Fredegondas are of all countries and of
every class.
But ‘pretty Fanny’s ways’ are many and diverse. It may be that she
is incapacitated or restrained from living as full and as free a
life as she could wish. Very well: then she becomes a New Puritan,
whose self-appointed functions are to those privy cupboards in which
repellent skeletons are concealed; to the social sewers; and, in fine,
to all those places where she can gratify the morbid curiosity which
actuates the New Puritanical mind, rather than the hope of, or belief
in, achieving anything for the benefit of the race.
If she has no wish to become a New Puritan, there be many other modern
fads in which she may fulfil a part. She may, as a New Traveller, show
us the glory of the New Travel, in the manner of that greatly daring
lady, the intrepid Mrs. French-Sheldon, who, travelling at the heels
of the masculine explorers of African wilds (carried luxuriously in
a litter, accompanied with cases of champagne and a large escort of
Zanzibari porters), went forth to study the untutored savage in his
native wilds. But when the untutored presented themselves before
this up-to-date traveller _unclothed_ as well as unread, that very
properly-tutored lady screamed, and distributed loin-cloths to these
happy and yet unabashed primitives. She delivered an address before
the British Association on her return from that unnecessary and futile
expedition, in which she tickled the sensibilities of the assembled
_savants_ by describing how she kept her hundred and thirty Zanzibari
coolies in order with a whip. She told the members of the Association
that ‘she went into Africa with all delicacy and womanliness.’
Possibly; but judging her out of her own mouth, she must have left a
goodly portion of those qualities behind her in the Dark Continent.
Other women travellers--of the type of Miss Dowie, for instance--are
more unconventional, if less adventurous. She, a true exemplar of the
women who would forget their sex--and make others forget it--if they
could, climbed the Karpathian mountains in search of a little cheap
notoriety, clad in knickerbockers, jacket, and waistcoat, and redolent
of tobacco from the smoking of cigarettes. Her adventures added nothing
to the gaiety of readers, nor to the world’s store of science; but we
were the richer by one more spectacular extravaganza.
This is that somewhat repellent type, the mannish woman, who is not
content to charm man by the grace and sweetness of her femininity,
but must aspire to be a poor copy of himself. The type is common
nowadays, and the individuals of it have gone through several phases
of their singular craze. These are they who walk with the guns of a
shooting party; who tramp the stubble and arouse the ill-humours of
that creature of wrath and impatience, the sportsman who is eager for
a drive at the birds. These women, not dismayed by the butchery of
the _battue_, look on, and even carry a gun themselves; but they are
the nuisances of the party, and flush covey after covey by showing
themselves to the wary birds when they should be crouching down beside
some windy hedge, in a moist and clammy October ditch.
‘Let us be unconventional, or we die!’ is the unspoken, yet very
evident, aspiration of the Modern Woman; and, really, the efforts made
in the direction of the unconventional are so uniformly extravagant
that we almost, from sheer weariness and disgust, begin to wish she had
gone some way toward adopting the alternative.
The New Woman will know naught of convention, nor submission. Her
advocates do not hail from Altruria; they are aggressive, and devoured
with a zeal for domination, in revolt from the ‘centuries of slavery’
to which, according to themselves, they have been compelled by Man.
‘Man,’ shrieks one, ‘is always in mischief or in bed.’ But she will
have this changed; not, indeed, in the present generation of vipers,
which is stubborn and stiff-necked in its wicked ways; but she will
see, and urges her fellow-women to see also, that proper principles are
spanked into the coming generations. Considering, however, that the
nursery has ever been the woman’s peculiar province, surely the blame,
if blame there be, must rest with her for the past and present faulty
upbringing of the race. If ‘proper principles’ have not already had
their part in the education of man, surely that must be owing solely to
woman’s flagrant dereliction of duty.
Instances, neither few nor far between, may be urged of wives and
mothers, possibly also sisters and maiden aunts, who have raised men
to action and dragged them from a disgraceful sloth to an honourable
industry. True, indeed, it were an altogether unjustifiable heresy to
deny their influence and its beneficent effects; but to use it as an
argument for placing women on an equality with men would be a _non
sequitur_ of the most absurd description. The influence wielded by
those good women was so powerful for good because they were true to
themselves and their sex; because they were, in a word, so womanly.
The influence of the New Woman upon the man is, and shall be, _nil_,
because the spirit of antagonism between the sexes is being aroused by
her pretensions, and comradeship becomes impossible when woman and man
fight for supremacy.
Women’s advocates come and go like summer flies, provoking to wrath by
their insistent buzzing, but, when caught and examined, proving to be
insignificant enough. They have their little day, and cease to be. Who,
for instance, now remembers Mrs. Mona Caird, that unconventional person
who floated into publicity on the ‘Marriage a Failure’ correspondence
of the _Daily Telegraph_, some few years ago, and, in the heyday of
her notoriety, wrote and published that weak and ineffectual novel,
_The Wing of Azrael_? Other women, more advanced in shamelessness, have
taken her place, and capped the freedom of her views with outlooks of
greater licence.
And so the game proceeds: each woman daring a little further than her
fellow-adventurer into the muddy depths of free selection; of freedom
in contracting marriages and licence in dissolving them; each newcomer
shocking the sensibilities of women readers with delightful thrills
from the impropriety, expressed or implied, that runs through her pages
as inevitably as the watermark runs through ‘laid’ paper.
It is amusing to note that, following the lead of the late lamented
George Eliot, the greater number of these women writers of sexual
novels scribble under manly pseudonyms. What, then! doth divinity
after all hedge a man so nearly that to masquerade as a ‘John Oliver
Hobbes,’ or a ‘George Egerton,’ is to draw an admiring crowd of women
worshippers where, as plain Miss or Mrs., your immortal writings would
fall flat? What a deplorable _cacoëthes imprimendi_ this is, to be
sure, that seizes upon the palpitating authoresses of _Yellow Asters_,
_Dancing Fawns_, _or Heavenly Twins_; and how depraved the taste for
indelicate innuendo and theories of licence that renders these books
popular!
This manner of thing destroys all the respect for home life upon
which English society was, until late years, so broadly based, and
domesticity in consequence is become an old-fashioned virtue among
women. They are only the older generation of matrons who practise it
now, and when their race is run, and the New Woman shall have become
sole mistress, the sweet domesticity of the Englishman’s home will have
vanished.
For the New Woman is not womanly, except in the physiological sense,
and there she cannot help herself. She will inevitably be the mother
of the coming generation, but beyond that function imposed upon her by
Nature, she is not feminine. She is rather what Mr. Frederic Harrison
describes as the ‘advanced woman who wants to be abortive man,’ and
she holds the fallacy that what man may do woman may do also--and more!
Directly a woman marries, she considers that she has full licence;
although, goodness knows! the unmarried girls of to-day are
latitudinarian enough, and do, unreproved, things that thirty years ago
would have branded them with an ineffaceable mark of shame.
The pretty girl of to-day, who has earned her right to wear a
wedding-ring, has no sooner returned from her honeymoon than she sets
out upon a campaign of conquests. Smart men, who hate to be bored with
the unmarried girl, before whom they must be either silent or discreet,
hang around the young matron at garden parties and dances, or flirt
shamefully in the semi-rusticity of the country house or shooting-box,
and discuss with her the latest veiled obscenity of Mr. Oscar Wilde’s,
or enlarge upon the ethics of a second Mrs. Tanqueray with an
unblushing frankness that argues long acquaintance with and study of
these putrescent topics. The young matron has full licence at this day,
and the divorce courts afford some faint inkling of how she uses it.
She aspires to be the boon companion of the men; she plays billiards
with the manly cue, and not infrequently she can give the average male
billiard-player points, and then beat him.
It seems but a few years since when women who smoked cigarettes were
voted fast: to-day, the smoking-room of the country house is not sacred
to the male sex, and the ‘good stories’ of that sometime exclusively
masculine retreat are now not alone the property of the men. She has
not annexed the cigar and the pipe yet--not because she lacks the
will, but her physique is not yet equal to them; but she can roll
a cigarette, can take or offer a light with the most practised and
inveterate smoker who ever bought a packet of Bird’s Eye or Honey Dew,
and she wears--think of it, O Mrs. Grundy, if, indeed, you are not
dead!--a smoking-jacket.
At the more ‘advanced’ houses, amongst the ‘smartest’ sets, the women
do not retire to the drawing-room at the conclusion of dinner--they sit
with the men, not infrequently; and if the usual not over-Puritanical
talk that was wont to follow upon the ladies’ withdrawal is not
indulged in so openly, at least the conversation is sufficiently
unconventional.
Slang and swearing are the commonest--in two senses--accompaniments and
underlinings of the smart woman’s speech: any little disappointment
that would have been ‘annoying’ to her mother is to the modern and
up-to-date woman a ‘condemned nuisance,’ if not more than that; and
‘damns’ fall as readily from her lips as the mild ‘dear me!’ of a
generation ago. For the first cause of this unlovely change we must
look to the theatre and music-hall stages, whose women have in some
few instances married the eldest sons of peers, and have succeeded to
titles upon their husbands’ heirship being fulfilled. Their husbands’
titles have given them rank and precedence, whose mothers toiled at
the wash-tub in some public laundry, or disputed not unsuccessfully
with the most foul-mouthed of Irish viragoes on the filthy stairs of
some rotten tenement in the purlieus of Saint Giles’s. The symmetry
of their legs and the voluptuousness of their persons captivated
the callow youths who night by night occupied the front rows of the
stalls at the Gaiety Theatre, and who--under the well-known nickname
of ‘Johnnies’--fed the Sacred Lamp of Burlesque with a stream of
half-guineas. These heirs to wealth and hereditary honours kept the
chorus-girls and skipping-rope dancers in broughams and villas _ornées_
in the classic Cyprian suburb of St. John’s Wood, and, when they were
more than usually foolish, married them.
Society is become, through them, quite _demimondaine_, and it is not
uncommon to have pointed out to you in the Row titled women who have
notoriously been under the protection of more than one man before they,
by some lucky or unlucky chance, caught their coronets. Nearly all
Society is free to-day to these whited sepulchres; only the Queen’s
Court--that last bulwark of virtue and decency--holds out against them.
Elsewhere they are more than tolerated; it is scarcely too much to say
that they are admired by _fin-de-siècle_ womanhood, who are notoriously
and obviously Jesuitical. If the adaptation of their _outrés_ manners
is proof enough of admiration, then you shall find sufficient
warranty for this statement, for the slangy girl or young married
woman is rather the rule than the exception in this year of grace, and
their manners are arrived at that complexion which would make their
grandmothers turn in their graves, could that cold clay become sentient
again for the smallest space of time.
This decay of decency began with the advent of that loathsome
amalgam of vanity and reckless extravagance in dress and speech, the
Professional Beauty, whose profession first became recognised about the
year 1879. You will not find that ‘profession’ entered under ‘Trades’
in the _Post-Office Directory_; but if logic ruled the world, then the
shameless women whose photographs for years filled the shop-windows of
town would find their trade recognised on the same commercial standing
with any one of the thousand and one ways of getting a living shown
in that volume. They would be on precisely the same moral level with
the _quasi_ milliners of London, had necessity brought about their
flaunting pervasion of Society, but, seeing that merely the love of
admiration and notoriety induced their careers, it is difficult to find
a depth sufficiently deep for them.
But indignation is apt to melt into a scornful pity when we see the
Professional Beauty of sixteen years ago, who left her husband for the
questionable admiration of great Personages and the envy of London
Society, a faded and struggling woman of the world, who, without a
shred of histrionic ability, has taken to the stage, relying upon the
magnificence of her diamonds and the _abandon_ of her dress for an
applause which had never been hers for her acting or her elocution. A
just resentment fades into melancholy commiseration for a woman like
this, who has sunk so low that scandal can no longer harm her; who
essays the _rôle_ of ‘beauty’ when her years are rapidly totting up to
fifty.
These are the tawdry careers which, appealing to woman’s innate love
of admiration, bid her go and do likewise. The contempt with which all
right-thinking men regard the spotted and fly-blown records of the
Professional Beauties is hidden from them by the glare of publicity,
and vanity still bids them adventure out from the home before the eye
of the world.
One does not find the New Women justified of their sex, for cosmetics
have no commerce with common sense, and high heels are not conducive to
lofty thinking; rouge, violet powder, tight-lacing, or an inordinate
love of jewellery, are not earnest of brain-power; and yet these are
the commonest adjuncts to, or characteristics of, a woman’s life.
The sight of many diamonds at Kimberley impressed Lord Randolph
Churchill mightily awhile ago, and the contemplation of those
glittering objects of feminine adornment led to the historic
pronouncement that ‘whatever may have been the origin of man,’ he is
‘coldly convinced that womankind are descended from monkeys.’ However
that may be, certain it is that imitation is, equally with the simians,
her _forte_. Men originate almost everything; even the fashions are set
and controlled by M. Worth, and women follow his lead, both dressmakers
and clients.
And Woman is a consistent and inveterate _poseur_, from the time of her
leaving the cradle, through girlhood, young-womanhood, and matron-hood,
to her last gasp. That tale of the old lady, dying from extreme age and
decay of nature, who had her face rouged over against the arrival of
her doctor, so that she should receive him to the best effect as she
lay on her death-bed, is characteristic of her sex. Vanity, thy name is
woman!
Could we but see her without her ‘side’! But we cannot. All the world’s
a stage to her, and all the time she plays a part with an ineffable
artistry of diplomacy beyond the understanding of a Richelieu or a
Machiavelli. A statesman can frequently anticipate the ruses of a
rival diplomat and thus check his schemes--because, being men, they
both reason from a given point and can understand very accurately the
workings of each other’s minds; but how shall one understand woman
or predicate her actions when she does not understand herself or her
fellow-feminines, and acts on the moment upon unreasoned impulse and
pure caprice?
You may point to this and that feminine figure which has made an
equable and logical course throughout her career, and exclaim
triumphantly, ‘Here is the natural woman, without guile or
self-consciousness: a logical and close-reasoning creature.’ Well, you
are welcome to your opinion, pious, or derived from what shall seem to
you as evidence sufficient for your contention. Hold it, nor inquire
more narrowly, nor seek proselytes to your faith. The natural woman? My
dear sir, how should your matter-of-fact and obvious nature distinguish
the excellently-fashioned and well-assumed mask from the natural face?
_Summum ars_---- you know the rest. Ponder it, nor prate glibly of
natures, good sir!
Conceive of the dreadfully unreal puppets the novelists have created
and labelled with feminine names. How the machinery creaks and rattles
when the puppets move! With what unreal stagger they pace the stage,
and how deep below contempt is the unlikeness to womankind of their
ways and words.
For the nearest approach to an adequate portrayal of the feminine
character, commend me to the women of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s novels, whose
mental gyrations are set forth with a touch of inspiration: Bathsheba
Everdene, Tess, Viviette, and the uncertain heroine of _The Trumpet
Major_. Their speech has the convincing _timbre_ of their sex; their
walk is the true gait, not the masculine tramp that echoes through the
pages of most men’s novels; and how truly like nature their tongues say
‘No,’ when their hearts throb ‘Yes, yes!’
They live, these women and girls--they breathe and palpitate with the
full tide of life, and no other living novelist can so inform his
feminine creations with reality.
But turn to the academic heroines of Mr. Besant. If they were not
presented with the subtle suavity of his literary style, I do not know
how we could endure the paragons of virtue and learning who occupy the
foremost place in book after book that owns him author.
Phillis, in _The Golden Butterfly_, came as a novelty, but the type
perpetuated in each succeeding novel--now as Armorel Rosevean in
_Armorel of Lyonesse_; again, as Angela Messenger in _All Sorts and
Conditions of Men_, and so onwards--is both monotonous and earnest of
a poverty of imagination. They would seem to be frankly unreal: an
acknowledged Besantine convention--analogous to that early Christian
art by which representations of saints, with attendant aureoles, and
posing in impossible attitudes, were shown, not as portraitures, but
as religious abstractions. These maidens are all sweet and severely
proper; as learned as professors and as didactic as lecturers, and
they have haloes heavy with gilding. ‘I cannot,’ cries the novelist,
in effect, ‘show you the living woman. Consider: how unforeseen her
contradictory attitudes and consistent inconsistency.’ And this, after
all, is wisdom: to portray your ideal of the sweet girl graduate; to
sketch woman as she might be, rather than to fashion an inadequate
presentment of woman as she is.
She will have to develop very greatly before she becomes the equal
of man, either in mind or muscle; and she will have to slough some
singular feminine characteristics if her incursions into masculine
walks of life are to be continued. At present she carries her purse
in her hand along the most crowded streets, at the imminent risk of
its being snatched away. Ask her why she does this, and she will tell
you that she has no pockets, or that they are difficult to reach, or
else that they are too easily reached by pickpockets. It never occurs
to her that the devising of new pockets comes within the range of the
dressmaker’s craft. Not that it matters much; for the purse-snatcher
obtains little result for his pains, and, beyond some postage-stamps,
half a dozen visiting-cards, a packet of needles, and a few coppers,
his enterprise usually goes unrewarded.
Woman does not date her correspondence. She has no ‘views’ on the
subject; she simply forgets. Sometimes, indeed, she will head her
letters with the day of the week; but, as the weeks slip by, a letter
written on any ‘Wednesday’ becomes rather vague in date.
Also, it is notorious that the gist of a woman’s letter, the real
reason of its being written, appears in a postscript.
Again, it surely does not behove the New Woman to throng the streets in
front of the establishments of Mr. Peter Robinson or Madame Louise,
in admiring ecstasies over novel cuts and colours, bows and bonnets,
and all the feminine accoutrements of fashion. Conceive of men crowding
the tailors’ and the haberdashers’ in like manner, and taking equal
delight in ‘shopping!’ This last occupation, or rather pastime, of
women is a certain sign of mental inferiority. A woman will spend
a whole day ‘shopping’--that is to say, in the inspection of goods
she does not want and has no intention of buying--and will return
home when day is done and count her time well and profitably spent.
‘Shopping,’ as apart from any idea of purchasing, is a recognised
form of feminine recreation, as tradesfolk know to their cost. Happy
the shopkeeper whose trade does not lend itself to ‘shopping,’ but
wretched is he where the vice is rampant. For woman is pitiless and
exacting, impervious either to criticism, sarcasm, irony, or innuendo,
on occasion; and the more logical the man with whom she contends, so
much the more baffling is she to him. So, short of plain and possibly
offensive speech (for none so readily or more causelessly offended than
your ‘shopper’), the unhappy victims of this mania have no redress,
but must continue to heap their counters with bales of cloth and rolls
of silk for due examination, and must exhibit a Christian patience
and forbearance when the ‘shopper’ departs without purchasing or
apologising.
No mere man could do this, for such assurance could only proceed from
the opposite sex.
A perusal of the advertisement sheets which form the bulk of women’s
newspapers and magazines makes for disillusionment and depression; and
you would need but little excuse if, after a course of these appeals to
feminine love of adornment, you rose from it with a settled conviction
that Woman is a Work of Art, padded here, pinched in there, painted,
dyed, and carefully made up in every particular. He was, indeed, a
philosopher worthy the name (or perhaps it was a more than usually
candid woman!) who said that none of the consolations of religion or
any pious ecstasies could equal the profound and solemn joy which
accompanies a woman’s conviction of her being well dressed and the envy
of her fellows.
Here, indeed, is another striking difference between the sexes. A man
is happiest when circumstances permit him to don the old clothes which
for years have been his only wear in leisure hours: he would wear them
while out and about on his business did the _convenances_ permit--so
easy and comfortable is the old hat; so well adapted by long use is the
old jacket to the form; so easy the bagged and misshapen trousers. But,
alas! this may not be, for the world judges a man by his appearance,
and it simply does not pay to appear in public otherwise than ‘well
dressed.’ For dukes and millionaires ’tis another matter; they can
afford to be ‘shabby’ and comfortable, and certainly, whether they
manage to attain comfort or not, they generally contrive to appear
ill-dressed and dowdy.
Woman is altogether different from and inferior to man: narrow-chested,
wide-hipped, ill-proportioned, and endowed with a lesser quantity
of brains than the male sex. She will, when sufficiently open to
conviction, allow that, mentally, she is not so well equipped as man,
but gives herself away altogether in insisting upon the ‘instinct’
that takes the place of reason in her sex; thereby tacitly placing
herself on a level with other creatures--like the dog or cat--who act
upon ‘instinct’ rather than upon reasoning powers. ‘A woman’s reason’
is a notoriously inadequate mental process; and, having once arrived
at a conviction or a determination on any subject, it is of no use
attempting to argue her out of it. That is widely acknowledged by the
popular saying that ‘it is useless to argue with a woman’
‘If she will, she will, and there’s an end on’t:
If she won’t, she won’t, depend on’t.’
These qualifications, limitations, or defects, as you may variously
call them, according to your leanings, explain in great measure the
reason why the Liberal and Radical parties in politics hesitate to give
women the Parliamentary franchise. Party wirepullers are well aware,
putting on one side the small but noisy section of unsexed females who
clamour to be in the forefront of all political and social revolutions,
that the great majority of women are, by nature and tradition, Tories
of the most thorough-going type. They know, also, how hopeless it would
be to drive new convictions into their heads, and so, being reasoning
creatures, they have hitherto declined to extend the franchise to the
sex which would at once swamp their parties throughout the country. The
Conservative party, on the other hand, have for some time recognised
how useful the women would be in furthering their principles and
putting a needful skid upon the wheels of Radical ‘movements;’ and they
have voted in favour of Woman Suffrage when that question has come up
for discussion from time to time. The wonderful success of the Primrose
League, due almost entirely to the personal initiative and enthusiasm
of the Dames, opened the eyes of the party to the value of woman as a
factor in politics, and if ever she obtains her vote the reform will be
the work of the Conservatives. Thus do party needs negative convictions
on either side of the House; for what, indeed, are convictions when
weighed in the balance against self-interest?
It is a notorious fact among artists and physiologists that the Perfect
Woman is of more rare occurrence than the Perfect Man; that it is a
matter of extreme difficulty to find a woman whose body is symmetrical
and well knit in all its parts. A painter of the nude works, of
necessity, from several models, selecting one for her shapely arms,
another for her neck, and so on; and so the final work of art in
sculpture or painting is always eclectic, and never a portraiture of
one woman.
And yet man has always been ready to do battle for her, and to dare
death and the Devil himself for her favour. She has, too, continually
presumed upon her influence, like the fair lady in the days of
chivalry, who threw her glove among the lions of an arena and boasted
that her knight would retrieve it for her sake. She did not overrate
his courage, but she strained his devotion beyond its strength; for,
leaping among the wild beasts, the brave man picked up the glove, and,
coming back from the jaws of death, flung it in the woman’s face.
But will men dare the death and slit one another’s weasands for the
possession of the New Woman as they have done for the women of the
past? I think not. The contempt and incredulity of one sex for the
judgment and discrimination of the other, which is chiefly a modern
growth induced by woman’s arrogance, is not compatible with suit and
service; and, in truth, the enmity between man and woman, shadowed
forth in Genesis, is having another lease of life, owing to the fatuous
females who cry to-day upon the house-tops.
Mr. Romanes wants us to ‘give her the apple, and let us see what comes
of it.’ Heaven forbid: let her pluck it if she has the courage and the
power, but let us not earn our own condemnation by inviting her to
do so. He is of opinion that ‘the days are past when any enlightened
man ought seriously to suppose that, in now again reaching forth her
hand to eat of the tree of knowledge, woman is preparing for the human
race a second Fall.’ There may be two opinions on this head. Women may
occasionally surpass in learning the Senior Wrangler of as good a year
as was ever known; they may exercise their brains and their muscles
to their utmost tension; but let them not in those cases exercise
the natural function of woman and bring children into the world. For
nature, which never contemplated the production of a learned or a
muscular woman, will be revenged upon her offspring, and the New Woman,
if a mother at all, will be the mother of a New Man, as different,
indeed, from the present race as possible, but _how_ different the
clamorous females of to-day cannot suspect, or surely they would at
once renounce the platform and their prospects of the tribune
But it is not to be supposed that even the prospect of peopling the
world with stunted and hydrocephalic children will deter the modern
woman from her path, even though her modernity lead to the degradation
and ultimate extinction of the race. She will raise the old,
half-humorous query once more: ‘Why trouble about posterity; what has
posterity done for us?’ and thus go her triumphant gait heedless of the
second and greater Fall she is preparing for mankind.
[Illustration]
II.--THE DRESS REFORMERS.
‘I do not like the fashion of your garments--you will say, they are
Persian attire, but let them be changed.’--_King Lear._
Modern dress-reform crusades have ever been allied with womanly revolts
against man’s authority. They proceeded originally from that fount
of vulgarity, that never-failing source of offence--America. In the
United States, that ineffable land of wooden nutmegs and timber hams,
of strange religions, of jerrymandering and unscrupulous log-rollery,
the Prophet Bloomer first arose, and, discarding the feminine skirt,
stood forth, unashamed and blatant, in trousers! The wrath of the
Bloomers (as the followers of the Prophet were termed) was calculated
to disestablish at once and for ever the skirts and frocks, the gowns
and miscellaneous feminine fripperies, that had obtained throughout
the centuries; and they conceived that with the abolishment of skirts
the long-sustained supremacy of man was also to disappear, even as
the walls of Jericho fell before the trumpet-sound of the Lord’s
own people. For these enthusiasts were no cooing doves, but rather
shrieking cats, and they were both abusive and overweening. No more
should ‘tempestuous petticoats’ inspire a Herrick to dainty verse, but
the woman of the immediate future should move majestically through the
wondering continents of the Old World and the New with mannish strides
in place of the feminine mincing gait induced by clinging draperies.
Away Erato and your sister Muses--if, indeed, your susceptibilities
would have allowed your remaining to behold the spectacle! For really,
that must have been a ‘sight for sore eyes’-- to adopt the expression
of the period--the too-convincing vision of a middle-aged woman, proof
against ridicule, consumed with all seriousness and an ineffable zeal
for converting all and sundry to her peculiar views in the matter
of a becoming and convenient attire. And never was prophet less
justified of his country than the Bloomer seer of hers; for nakedness,
even to undraped piano-legs, was then a reproach in the country of
the Stars and Stripes, where legs are not legs, an’t please you,
but ‘extremities’ or ‘limbs;’ where trousers are neither more than
‘pantaloons’ nor less than ‘continuations.’ In that Land of Freedom,
where one would have outraged all modesty by the merest mention of
legs or feet--these last indispensable adjuncts being generally known
as ‘pedal extremities’--it surely was illogical in the highest degree
that women should wear a species of trouser, and thereby proclaim the
indelicate(!) fact to all the world of their possession of legs. Truly
Pudicitia is as American a goddess as Mammon is a god!
For the Bloomer costume was nothing else but a travesty of male
attire. Aggressiveness is inseparable, it would seem, from all new
ideas, and the minor prophets of Bloomerism were aggressive enough,
in all conscience. They were not content with wearing the breeches
in the literal sense: they sought to convert all womankind to their
faith by the writing of pamphlets and the making of speeches on public
platforms. Mrs. Ann Bloomer was their fount of inspiration. She it
was who introduced the craze to America in 1849. Two years later it
had crossed the herring-pond, and that _Annus Mirabilis_, the year of
the Great Exhibition, witnessed a few of its enthusiasts--beldams in
breeches--clad in this hybrid garb, walking in London streets. But
women refused to be converted in any large numbers, and only a few more
than usually impudent females went so far as to back their views by
wearing the badges of the cult in public.
But although so few Englishwomen were converted to the new dress, and
though fewer still had the courage to wear it, the Bloomer agitation
was largely noticed in the papers and by the satirists of the time. It
was noticed, indeed, in a manner entirely disproportioned to its real
import, and the humorous papers, the ballad-mongers, and innumerable
private witlings, had their fling at the follies of these early
dress-reformers. The Bloomers--unlovely name!--held meetings in London,
attended, it must be owned, by crowds of ribald unbelievers; and they
even went to the length of holding a ‘Bloomer Ball,’ a grotesque idea
hailed with delight by a roaring crowd which assembled ‘after the
ball,’ and showed its prejudices by hooting the ridiculous women who
had come attired in jackets and trousers like those of the Turk. No
Turk, indeed, so unspeakable as they. But the crowd did not stop at
this point. They had brought dead cats, decayed cabbages, rotten eggs,
and all imaginable articles of offence with which to point their wit,
and they used them freely, not only upon the women, but also upon the
men who accompanied them. For discrimination was not easy between the
sexes in the badly lit streets, when both wore breeches, and at a time
when men went generally clean-shaven; and so the rightfully breeched
were as despitefully used as the usurpers of man’s distinctive dress.
And so Bloomerism languished awhile and presently died out, but not
before a vast amount had been written and printed in its praise or
abuse. The satirical effusions which owe their origin to this mania are
none of them remarkable for reticence or delicacy. Indeed, the subject
did not allow of this last quality, and the broad-sheet verses issued
from the purlieus of Drury Lane by the successors of Catnach are,
some of them, very frank. Perhaps the best and most quotable is the
broad-sheet, _I’ll be a Bloomer_. The writer, not a literary man by any
means, starts off at score, and his first verses, if models neither of
taste, rhyme, nor rhythm, are vigorous. It is when the inspiration runs
dry, and he relies upon a slogging industry with which to eke out his
broad-sheet, that exhaustion becomes evident.
I’LL BE A BLOOMER.
[Illustration:
THE BLOOMER
COSTUME, 1851.
]
Listen, females all,
No matter what your trade is,
Old Nick is in the girls,
The Devil’s in the ladies!
Married men may weep,
And tumble in the ditches,
Since women are resolved
To wear the shirt and breeches.
Ladies do declare
A change should have been sooner,
The women, one and all,
Are going to join the Bloomers.
Prince Albert and the Queen
Had such a jolly row, sirs;
She threw off stays and put
On waistcoat, coat, and trousers.