Ladies, possessed of riches,
Strutting up and down
In Wellingtons and breeches.
Bloomers are funny folks,
No ladies can be faster:
They say ‘tis almost time
That petticoats were master.
They will not governed be
By peelers, snobs, or proctors,
But take up their degree
As councillors and doctors.
No bustles will they wear,
Nor stocks, depend upon it;
But jerry hats and caps
Instead of dandy bonnet.
Trousers to their knees,
And whiskers round their faces;
A watch-chain in their fob,
And a pair of leather braces.
The tailors must be sharp
In making noble stitches,
And clap their burning goose
Upon the ladies‘ breeches.
Their pretty fingers will
Be just as sore as mutton
Till they have found the way
Their trousers to unbutton.
The Bloomers all declare
That men are sad deceivers;
They’ll take a turn, and be
Prigs, dustmen, and coalheavers--
Members of Parliament,
And make such jolly fusses;
Cobble up old ladies’ shoes;
Drive cabs and omnibuses.
Their husbands they will wop,
And squander all their riches;
Make them nurse the kids
And wash their shirts and breeches.
If men should say a word,
There’d be a jolly row, sirs!
Their wives would make them sweat
And beat them with their trousers.
The world’s turned upside down;
The ladies will be tailors,
And serve Old England’s Queen
As soldiers and as sailors.
Won’t they look funny when
The seas are getting lumpy,
Or when they ride astride
Upon an Irish donkey?
The ladies will be right;
Their husbands will be undone,
Since Bloomers have arrived
To teach the folks of London--
The females all I mean--
How to lay out their riches
In Yankee-Doodle-doos
And a stunning pair of breeches.
Female apparel now
Is gone to pot, I vow, sirs,
And ladies will be fined
Who _don’t_ wear coats and trousers;
Blucher boots and hats,
And shirts with handsome stitches,--
Oh, dear! what shall we do
When women wear the breeches?
Now some will wear smock-frocks
And hobnail shoes, I vow, sirs;
Jenny, Bet, and Sal,
Cock’d hat and woollen trousers.
Yankee-Doodle-doo,
Rolling in the ditches;
Married men prepare
To buy the women breeches!
_Punch_ had, among other Bloomer skits, the following rather good
example:--
MRS. GRUNDY ON BLOOMERISM.
Hoity-toity!--don’t tell me about the nasty stupid fashion!
Stuff and nonsense!--the idea’s enough to put one in a passion.
I’d allow no such high jinkses, if I was the creatures’ parent.
‘Bloomers’ are they--forward minxes? I soon Bloomer ’em, I warrant.
I’ve no patience nor forbearance with ‘em--scornin’ them as bore ’em;
What! they can’t dress like their mothers was content to dress
before ’em,--
Wearing what-d’ye-call-’ems--Gracious! brass itself ain’t half so
brazen;
Why, they must look more audacious than that what!s-a-name--Amàzon!
Ha! they’ll smoke tobacco next, and take their thimblefuls of brandy,
Bringing shame upon their sex, by aping of the jack-a-dandy.
Yes; and then you’ll have them shortly showing off their bold bare
faces,
Prancing all so pert and portly at their Derbys and their races.
Oh! when once they have begun, there’s none can say where they’ll be
stopping--
Out they’ll go with dog and gun; perhaps a-shooting and a-popping.
Aye! and like as not, you’ll see, if you’ve a Bloomer for your
daughter,
Her ladyship, so fine and free, a-pulling matches on the water;
Sitting in a pottus tap, a-talking politics and jawing;
Or else a-reading _Punch_, mayhap, and hee-heeing and haw-hawing.
I can’t a-bear such flighty ways--I can’t abide such flaunty tast_es_.
And so they must leave off their stays, to show their dainty shapes
and waist_ses_!
I’d not have my feet filagreed, for ever so, like these young women.
No; you won’t see _me_, I’ll be bound, dressed half-and-half, as a
young feller;
I’ll stick to my old shawl and gownd, my pattens, and my umbereller.
The Bloomer agitation was but the beginning of a series of crazes for
the reform of women’s dress, and the ‘Girl of the Period’ _furore_
succeeded it, after an interval of several years. True, the Girl of the
Period was scarcely a dress-reformer, but her dress and manners were
sufficiently pronounced, and certainly her vulgarity could not have
been surpassed by the most fat and blowzy Bloomer that ever held forth
upon a public platform.
To Mrs. Lynn Linton belongs the honour of having discovered the Girl,
and she communicated her discovery to the _Saturday Review_ in 1868.
This it was that gave some point to the saying that the Girl of the
Period was but the Girl of a Periodical.
And certainly the vulgarity of the Girl of the Period was extremely
pronounced. It was a vulgarity that showed itself in bustles and
paniers; the ‘Grecian Bend;’ skirts frilled and flounced and hung about
with ridiculous festoons, and short enough to display her intolerable
Balmoral boots. An absurdly inadequate ‘Rink’ hat rendered her chignon
all the more obvious, and ----. But enough! The Man of the Period
was her equal in absurdity. He cultivated a hateful affectation of
lassitude and indifference; he affected a peculiarly odious drawl, and
he taxed his mind with an effort to sustain a constantly _nil admirari_
attitude toward things the most admirable and happenings the most
startling. He wore the most ridiculous fashion of whiskers, compared
with which the perennial ‘mutton-chop’ and the bearded chin and
clean-shaven upper lip of the Dissenter or typical grocer are things of
beauty and a satisfaction to the æsthetic sense.
This fashion was the ‘Piccadilly-weeper’ variety of adornment, known at
this day--chiefly owing to Sothern’s impersonation of a contemporary
lisping fop--as the ‘Dundreary.’ This creature was a fitting mate to
the Girl of the Period. He married her, and the most obvious results
are the ‘Gaiety-Johnnies,’ the ‘mashers,’ and the ‘chappies’ of to-day,
whose retreating chins and foreheads afford subjects for the sad
contemplation of philosophers--to whom we will leave them.
As for their female offspring, they are, doubtless, the ‘Lotties and
Totties’ of Mrs. Lynn Linton’s loathing, who smoke cigarettes and ape
the dress and deportment of the ladies of the Alhambra or the Empire
promenades.
It is at once singular and amusing to notice how surely all women’s
dress-reform agitations move in the same groove--that of a more or
less close imitation of man’s attire. Even fashions which are not
ostensible ‘reforms’ have a decided tendency to make for masculinity.
The girls who, some few years since, cut their hair short--like the
boys; who wore bowler hats, shirt-fronts, men’s collars and neckties;
who carried walking-sticks, or that extraordinary combination of
walking-stick and sunshade known facetiously as a ‘husband-beater;’
who affected tailor-made frocks, donned man-like jackets, and adopted
a masculine gait, were not accredited reformers with a Mission, but
they showed, excellently well, the spirit of the age, and if they
were wanting in thoroughness, why, Lady Harberton, with her ‘divided
skirts,’ was a very Strafford for thoroughness in her particular line.
Divided skirts were introduced to the notice of the public some ten
years ago by Viscountess Harberton and a Society of Dress Reformers,
calling themselves, possibly on _lucus a non lucendo_ principles,
first a ‘National’ Society, and at a later period arrogating the
title of ‘Rational.’ It may seem matter for ridicule that an obscure
coterie of grandams should adopt such a grandiose title as the first,
or that they should, by using the ‘Rational’ epithet, be convicted of
allowing the inference that they considered every woman irrational
who did not adhere to their principles; but, like all ‘reformers,’
they were without humour and consumed with a deadly earnestness. They
(unlike the rest of the world) saw nothing for laughter in the public
discussions which they initiated, by which they sought to show that
corsets were not only useless but harmful, and that the petticoat might
advantageously be discarded for trousers worn underneath an ordinary
skirt, somewhat after the fashion that obtains in riding costumes.
[Illustration:
THE RATIONAL
DRESS.
]
But, for all the pother anent divided skirts, they did not catch on;
and a newer rival, another variety of ‘Rational Dress,’ now rules
the field, the camp, the grove, but more especially the road. For
the popular and widespread pastime of cycling has given this newest
craze a very much better chance than ever the Bloomer heresy or the
original Divided Skirt frenzy obtained; and it is not too much to
say that, if the cycle had not been so democratic a plaything, this
latest experiment in dress reform would have been but little heard of.
Rational Dress, as seen on the flying females who pedal down the roads
to-day, is only Bloomerism with a difference. That is to say, the legs
are clothed in roomy knickerbockers down to the knees, and encased in
cloth gaiters for the rest, buttoned down to the ankles. These in place
of the Turk-like trousers, tied round the ankles and finished off with
frills, of over forty years ago. As for the attenuated skirts of the
Prophet Bloomer, Rational Dress replaces them with a species of frantic
frock-coat, spreading as to its ample skirts, but tightened round the
waist. A ‘Robin Hood’ hat, even as in the bygone years, crowns this
confection; and, really, the parallels between old-time schismatics
and the modern revolting daughters are wonderfully close. Everything
recurs in this world in cycles of longer or shorter duration. The
whirligig of time may be uncertain in its revolutions, but it performs
the allotted round at last; and so surely as yesterday’s sun will
reappear to-morrow, as certainly will the crinolines, the chignons, and
the Bloomer vagaries of yester-year recur. You may call the recurrent
fashions by newer names, but, by any name they take, they remain
practically the same. The farthingale of Queen Bess’s time is the
crinoline of the Middle Victorian period, and ‘came in’ once more as
the ‘full skirt’ of some seasons since. The chignon is resurrected as
the ‘Brighton Bun,’ and is as objectionable in its reincarnation as it
was in its previous existence; and we have already seen that Rational
Dress, Divided Skirts, and the Bloomer costume are but different titles
for one fad. The very latest development is not pretty: but there!
’tis ‘pretty Fanny’s way,’ and so an end to all discussion.
III.--WOMAN IN ART, LITERATURE, POLITICS, AND SOCIAL POLITY.
In these days, when women begin to talk of their Work with all the zeal
and religious fervour that characterises the attitude of the savage
towards his fetish, it behoves us to inquire what that Work may be
which arouses so much enthusiasm and is the cause of the cool insolence
which is becoming more and more the note of the New Woman. A very
little inquiry soon convinces the seeker after the true inwardness of
modern fads and fancies that Woman’s Work--so to spell it in capitals,
in the manner dear to the hearts of the unsexed men and women who
reckon Adam a humbug and Eve the most despitefully-entreated of her
adorable sex--has nothing to do with the up-bringing of children or the
management of the home. Those traditional duties are nothing less, if
you please, than the slavery which man’s tyranny has imposed upon the
physically weaker sex, and are not worthy of sharing the aristocratic
prominence of capital letters which the desultory following of arts
and sciences has arrogated. Modern _doctrinaires_ preach heresies which
would make miserable that very strong man, St. Paul, who constantly
enjoined woman to silence and submission. _Place aux dames_ is the
century-end watchword, in a sense very different from the distinguished
consideration which the dames of years bygone received. _Place aux
dames_ is all very well, as some one has somewhere said--but then,
dames in their place, which, with all possible deference to the
femininely-influenced philosophers of to-day, is not in politics, nor
in any arts or sciences whatever.
Those who so blithely advocate the throwing open of the professions
to woman, and invite her to work with them, side by side, in works of
practical philanthropy, base their arguments on false premises. They
assume, at starting, that womankind has been throughout the centuries
in an arrested condition. Her mental and bodily growth has, they say,
been retarded by cunningly-devised restrictions; she has not been
permitted to develop or to reach maturity--she is, in short, according
to these views, undeveloped man, rather than a separate and fully
developed sex. Those views are, of course, merely fallacies of the most
unstable kind. Woman’s place and functions have been definitely fixed
for her by nature, and those functions and that place are to be the
handmaid of man (or the handmatron if you like it better), and to be
the mother of his children; and her place is the home. Her physical
and mental limitations are subtly contrived by nature to keep woman
in the home and engrossed in domestic matters; and, really, if abuse
is needed at all, man does not deserve it, but to nature belongs
the epithet of tyrant, if an owner must be found for the unenviable
distinction.
Woman is essentially narrow-minded and individualistic. Her time has
ever been fleeted in working for the individual, and the community
would be badly off at this day had not the State been thoroughly
masculine for a time that goes back beyond the historians into the
regions of myths and fairy tales. Small brains cannot engender great
thoughts; which is but another way of saying that woman’s brain is less
than man’s. It is only recently that woman has organized her forces at
all, and she would not have done so, even now, had she not a plentiful
lack of anything to occupy her thoughts withal in these days of the
subdivision of labour and of extended luxury. And so, with plenty of
time to spare, she begins to ask if there is nothing that becomes her
better than the ‘suckling of fools and the chronicling of small beer.’
But although Carlyle said in his wrath that men and women were mostly
fools, yet there be children nourished with nature’s food who have
developed a certain force of intellect; and as for the chronicles of
small beer, gossip and scandal-mongering have never been compulsory in
women, but only unwelcome features of their nature. Idleness, luxury,
and the supreme consideration with which even the most foolish feminine
manifestations have been received, have always been fruitful sources of
mischief, and this by-past consideration has favoured the development
of vanity and the growth of the feminine Ego to its present proportions.
Woman never becomes more than an ineffectual amateur in all the careers
she enters. Her practice in art and literature inevitably debases art
and letters, for she is a copyist at most. In literature she never
originates, but appropriates and assimilates men’s thoughts, and
in the transcription of those thoughts seldom rises above the use
of _clichés_. But the Modern Woman desires most ardently to enter
those spheres of mental and technical activity, undeterred by any
disheartening doubts of her fitness for letters or government, of
her capacity for organizing or originating. She points triumphantly
for confirmation of her sex’s endowments to the lives and works of
the George Eliots, the Harriet Martineaus, the Elizabeth Frys, the
Angelica Kauffmanns, or the women of the French political salons; but
she does not stop to consider that those distinguished women succeeded
not because, but in spite of, their sex, and that few of the women who
have made what the world terms successful careers had any of the more
gracious feminine characteristics beyond their merely physiological
attributes. Many of them were unsexed creatures whose womanhood was an
accident of their birth.
The rush of women into the artistic and literary professions has always
had a singularly ill effect upon technique, for the woman’s mind is
normally incapable of rising to an appreciation of the possibilities of
any medium. They have not even a glimmering perception of style, and
would as cheerfully (if not, indeed, with greater readiness) acclaim
Dagonet a poet as they would the Swan of Avon, although the gulf that
divides Shakespeare from Mr. G. R. Sims is not only one formed by
lapse of the centuries: to them the works of Miss Braddon appear as
the ultimate expression of the passions, and they would as readily
label a painting by Velasquez ‘nice’ as they would call the productions
of Mr. Dudley Hardy ‘awfully jolly.’ Subject rather than execution
wins their admiration, and the nerveless handling of a painting whose
subject appeals to their imagination wins their praise while the
highest attainments of technique are disregarded. For them does Mr. W.
P. Frith paint the _Derby Day_ and _So Clean_; for their delight are
the ‘dog and dolly’ pictures of Mr. Burton Barber, the _Can ’oo Talk?_
the ‘peep-bo’ and ‘pussy-cat’ stories in paint contrived; and for their
ultimate satisfaction are they reproduced as coloured supplements in
the summer and Christmas numbers of the illustrated papers.
You may count distinguished women artists upon the fingers of your
hands, with some fingers to spare, and some of these achieved their
fame by reason of their womanhood, rather than the excellence of
their art. Angelica Kauffmann is a notable example. She attained the
unique position of a female Royal Academician through Reynolds’s
infatuation: she painted portraits and classical compositions
innumerable, but the portraits are poor and her classicism the most
futile and emasculate. Literature, too--although more women have made
reputations with the pen than the brush--can show but a very small
proportion of feminine genius; and (although the ultimate verdict of
the critics may yet depose these) Charlotte Brontë, Fanny Burney, and
George Eliot are the most outstanding names in this department. These
few names compare with an intolerable deal of mediocrity, cosseted
and sheltered from the adverse winds of criticism in its little day;
but yet so constitutionally weak that it has withered and died out
of all knowledge. The women who, like George Eliot, and her modern
successor, Mrs. Humphry Ward, adventure into ethical novels, are too
excruciatingly serious and possessed with too solemn a conviction
of their infallibility for much patient endurance; and really, when
one remembers the spectacle of G. H. Lewis truckling to the critics,
intriguing for favourable reviews, and endeavouring to stultify editors
for the sake of his George Eliot, in order that no breath of adverse
criticism and no wholesome wind from the outer world should come to
dispel her colossal conceit, we obtain a curious peep into the methods
by which the feminine Ego is nourished. But the spectacle is no less
pitiful than strange.
It is not often, however, that women writers present us with
philosophical treatises in the guise of novels. Their high-water
mark of workmanship is the _Family Herald_ type of story-telling,
even as crystoleum-painting and macramé-work exhaust the energies
and imagination of the majority of women ‘art’ workers. What, also,
is to say of the lady-novelists’ heroes, of god-like grace and the
mental attributes of the complete prig? What but that if we collate
the masculine characters of even the better-known, and presumably
less foolish, feminine novels, we shall find woman’s ideal in man
to be the sybaritic Guardsman, the loathly, languorous Apollos who
recline on ‘divans,’ smoke impossibly fragrant cigarettes, gossip about
their _affaires du c[oe]ur_, and wave ‘jewelled fingers’--repellent
combinations of braggart, prig, and knight-errant, with the thews and
sinews of a Samson and the morals of a mudlark.
Philanthropy is a field upon which the modern woman enters with
an enthusiasm that, unfortunately, is very much greater than her
sense. Her care is for the individual, and she it is who encourages
indiscriminate almsgiving, but cannot understand the practical
philanthropy which compels men to work for a wage, or organizes vast
schemes of relief works. Her whole nature is individualistic, and we
would not have it otherwise, for it has, in many instances of womanly
women, made homes happy and comfortable, and nerved men in the larger
philanthropy which succours without pauperising thousands. But she has
no business outside the home.
Philanthropy, of sorts, we have always with us, and the undeserving
need never lack shelter and support in a disgraceful idleness while
the tender-hearted or the hysterical amateur relieving-officers are
permitted to make fools of themselves, and rogues and vagabonds of
the lazy wastrels who will never do an honest day’s work so long as
a subsistence is to be got by begging. The fashionable occupation of
‘slumming’ made many more paupers than it relieved, and the ‘Darkest
England’ cry of Mr. William Booth, whom foolish folk call by the
title of ‘General’ he arrogates, is the most notorious exhibition
of sentimentalism in recent years. That appeal to the charitable
and pitiful folks of England was, like the Salvation Army itself,
engineered by the late Mrs. Catherine Booth, and it captured many
thousands of pounds wherewith to succour the unfit, the criminal,
the unwashed; the very scum and dregs of the race whom merciless
Nature, cruel to be kind, had doomed to early extinction. But mouthing
and tearful sentimentality has interfered with beneficent natural
processes, and the depraved and ineffectual are helped to a longer term
of existence, that they may transmit their bodily and mental diseases
to another generation, and so foul the blood and stunt the growth of
the nation in years to come.
Science, anthropology, and economics have no meaning for the
femininely-influenced founders of Salvation Army doss-houses: the body
politic--society, in the larger sense--national life, are phrases that
convey no meaning to the sobbing philanthropists to whom the welfare of
the dosser is a creed and Darwinian theories rank blasphemy.
The tendency of sentimental philanthropy is to relieve all alike from
the consequences of their misdeeds, and to preserve the worst and the
_un_fittest, and to enable the worst to compete at an advantage with
the best, and to freely propagate its rickety kind. Philanthropy of
this pernicious sort is essentially sentimental and feminine.
But the most disastrous interference, up to the present, of sentimental
fanatics--women and femininely-influenced men--has been their
successful campaign against those beneficent Acts of Parliament, the
Contagious Diseases Acts, framed from time to time for the protection
of Her Majesty’s forces of the Army and Navy.