new bonnet in the spring, and another in the fall;—that was the extent
of her purchases in this line. A second-best bonnet, left of last year,
did duty to relieve and preserve the best one. My father was accounted
well-to-do, but I had no more, and wanted no more. I also bought myself,
every spring, two pair of gloves, a dark and a light pair, and wore them
through the summer, and another two through the winter; one or two pair
of white kids, carefully cleaned, carried me through all my parties.
Hats had not been heard of, and the great necessity which requires two
or three new ones every spring and fall had not arisen. Yet I was
reckoned a well-appearing girl, who dressed liberally. Now, a young lady
who has a waterfall-hat, an oriole-hat, and a jockey, must still be
troubled with anxious cares for her spring and fall and summer and
winter bonnets,—all the variety will not take the place of them. Gloves
are bought by the dozen; and as to dresses, there seems to be no limit
to the quantity of material and trimming that may be expended upon them.
When I was a young lady, seventy-five dollars a year was considered by
careful parents a liberal allowance for a daughter’s wardrobe. I had a
hundred, and was reckoned rich; and I sometimes used a part to make up
the deficiencies in the allowance of Sarah Evans, my particular friend,
whose father gave her only fifty. We all thought that a very scant
allowance; yet she generally made a very pretty and genteel appearance,
with the help of occasional presents from friends.”
“How could a girl dress for fifty dollars?” said Marianne.
“She could get a white muslin and a white cambric, which, with different
sortings of ribbons, served her for all dress-occasions. A silk, in
those days, took only ten yards in the making, and one dark silk was
considered a reasonable allowance to a lady’s wardrobe. Once made, it
stood for something,—always worn carefully, it lasted for years. One or
two calico morning-dresses, and a merino for winter wear, completed the
list. Then, as to collars, capes, cuffs, etc., we all did our own
embroidering, and very pretty things we wore, too. Girls looked as
prettily then as they do now, when four or five hundred dollars a year
is insufficient to clothe them.”
“But, mamma, you know our allowance isn’t anything like that,—it is
quite a slender one, though not so small as yours was,” said Marianne.
“Don’t you think the customs of society make a difference? Do you think,
as things are, we could go back and dress for the sum you did?”
“You cannot,” said my wife, “without a greater sacrifice of feeling than
I wish to impose on you. Still, though I don’t see how to help it, I
cannot but think that the requirements of fashion are becoming
needlessly extravagant, particularly in regard to the dress of women. It
seems to me, it is making the support of families so burdensome that
young men are discouraged from marriage. A young man, in a moderately
good business, might cheerfully undertake the world with a wife who
could make herself pretty and attractive for seventy-five dollars a
year, when he might sigh in vain for one who positively could not get
through, and be decent, on four hundred. Women, too, are getting to be
so attached to the trappings and accessories of life, that they cannot
think of marriage without an amount of fortune which few young men
possess.”
“You are talking in very low numbers about the dress of women,” said
Miss Featherstone. “I do assure you that it is the easiest thing in the
world for a girl to make away with a thousand dollars a year, and not
have so much to show for it either as Marianne and Jenny.”
“To be sure,” said I. “Only establish certain formulas of expectation,
and it is the easiest thing in the world. For instance, in your mother’s
day girls talked of a pair of gloves,—now they talk of a pack; then it
was a bonnet summer and winter,—now it is a bonnet spring, summer,
autumn, and winter, and hats like monthly roses,—a new blossom every few
weeks.”
“And then,” said my wife, “every device of the toilet is immediately
taken up and varied and improved on, so as to impose an almost monthly
necessity for novelty. The jackets of May are outshone by the jackets of
June; the buttons of June are antiquated in July; the trimmings of July
are _passées_ by September; side-combs, back-combs, puffs, rats, and all
sorts of such matters, are in a distracted race of improvement; every
article of feminine toilet is on the move towards perfection. It seems
to me that an infinity of money must be spent in these trifles, by those
who make the least pretension to keep in the fashion.”
“Well, papa,” said Jenny, “after all, it’s just the way things always
have been since the world began. You know the Bible says, ‘Can a maid
forget her ornaments?’ It’s clear she can’t. You see, it’s a law of
Nature; and you remember all that long chapter in the Bible that we had
read in church last Sunday, about the curls and veils and tinkling
ornaments and crimping-pins, and all that of those wicked daughters of
Zion in old times. Women always have been too much given to dress, and
they always will be.”
“The thing is,” said Marianne, “how can any woman, I, for example, know
what is too much or too little? In mamma’s day, it seems, a girl could
keep her place in society, by hard economy, and spend only fifty dollars
a year on her dress. Mamma found a hundred dollars ample. I have more
than that, and find myself quite straitened to keep myself looking well.
I don’t want to live for dress, to give all my time and thoughts to it;
I don’t wish to be extravagant; and yet I wish to be lady-like; it
annoys and makes me unhappy not to be fresh and neat and nice;
shabbiness and seediness are my aversion. I don’t see where the fault
is. Can one individual resist the whole current of society? It certainly
is not strictly necessary for us girls to have half the things we do. We
might, I suppose, live without many of them, and, as mamma says, look
just as well, because girls did so before these things were invented.
Now, I confess, I flatter myself, generally, that I am a pattern of good
management and economy, because I get so much less than other girls I
associate with. I wish you could see Miss Thorne’s fall dresses that she
showed me last year when she was visiting here. She had six gowns, and
no one of them could have cost less than seventy or eighty dollars, and
some of them must have been even more expensive; and yet I don’t doubt
that this fall she will feel that she must have just as many more. She
runs through and wears out these expensive things, with all their velvet
and thread lace, just as I wear my commonest ones; and at the end of the
season they are really gone,—spotted, stained, frayed, the lace all
pulled to pieces,—nothing left to save or make over. I feel as if Jenny
and I were patterns of economy, when I see such things. I really don’t
know what economy is. What is it?”
“There is the same difficulty in my housekeeping,” said my wife. “I
think I am an economist. I mean to be one. All our expenses are on a
modest scale, and yet I can see much that really is not strictly
necessary; but if I compare myself with some of my neighbors, I feel as
if I were hardly respectable. There is no subject on which all the world
are censuring one another so much as this. Hardly any one but thinks her
neighbors extravagant in some one or more particulars, and takes for
granted that she herself is an economist.”
“I’ll venture to say,” said I, “that there isn’t a woman of my
acquaintance that does not think she is an economist.”
“Papa is turned against us women, like all the rest of them,” said
Jenny. “I wonder if it isn’t just so with the men?”
“Yes,” said Marianne, “it’s the fashion to talk as if all the
extravagance of the country was perpetrated by women. For my part, I
think young men are just as extravagant. Look at the sums they spend for
cigars and meerschaums,—an expense which hasn’t even the pretence of
usefulness in any way; it’s a purely selfish, nonsensical indulgence.
When a girl spends money in making herself look pretty, she contributes
something to the agreeableness of society; but a man’s cigars and pipes
are neither ornamental nor useful.”
“Then look at their dress,” said Jenny; “they are to the full as fussy
and particular about it as girls; they have as many fine, invisible
points of fashion, and their fashions change quite as often; and they
have just as many knick-knacks, with their studs and their
sleeve-buttons and waistcoat-buttons, their scarfs and scarf-pins, their
watch-chains and seals and seal-rings, and nobody knows what. Then they
often waste and throw away more than women, because they are not good
judges of material, nor saving in what they buy, and have no knowledge
of how things should be cared for, altered, or mended. If their cap is a
little too tight, they cut the lining with a pen-knife, or slit holes in
a new shirt-collar, because it does not exactly fit to their mind. For
my part, I think men are naturally twice as wasteful as women. A pretty
thing, to be sure, to have all the waste of the country laid to us!”
“You are right, child,” said I; “women are by nature, as compared with
men, the care-taking and saving part of creation,—the authors and
conservators of economy. As a general rule, man earns and woman saves
and applies. The wastefulness of woman is commonly the fault of man.”
“I don’t see into that,” said Bob Stephens.
“In this way. Economy is the science of proportion. Whether a particular
purchase is extravagant depends mainly on the income it is taken from.
Suppose a woman has a hundred and fifty a year for her dress, and gives
fifty dollars for a bonnet; she gives a third of her income;—it is a
horrible extravagance, while for the woman whose income is ten thousand
it may be no extravagance at all. The poor clergyman’s wife, when she
gives five dollars for a bonnet, may be giving as much, in proportion to
her income, as the woman who gives fifty. Now the difficulty with the
greater part of women is, that the men who make the money and hold it
give them no kind of standard by which to measure their expenses. Most
women and girls are in this matter entirely at sea, without chart or
compass. They don’t know in the least what they have to spend. Husbands
and fathers often pride themselves about not saying a word on
business-matters to their wives and daughters. They don’t wish them to
understand them, or to inquire into them, or to make remarks or
suggestions concerning them. ‘I want you to have everything that is
suitable and proper,’ says Jones to his wife, ‘but don’t be
extravagant.’
“‘But, my dear,’ says Mrs. Jones, ‘what is suitable and proper depends
very much on our means; if you could allow me any specific sum for dress
and housekeeping, I could tell better.’
“‘Nonsense, Susan! I can’t do that,—it’s too much trouble. Get what you
need, and avoid foolish extravagances; that’s all I ask.’
“By and by Mrs. Jones’s bills are sent in, in an evil hour, when Jones
has heavy notes to meet, and then comes a domestic storm.
“‘I shall just be ruined, Madam, if that’s the way you are going on. I
can’t afford to dress you and the girls in the style you have set
up;—look at this milliner’s bill!’
“‘I assure you,’ says Mrs. Jones, ‘we haven’t got any more than the
Stebbinses,—nor so much.’
“‘Don’t you know that the Stebbinses are worth five times as much as
ever I was?’
“No, Mrs. Jones did not know it;—how should she, when her husband makes
it a rule never to speak of his business to her, and she has not the
remotest idea of his income?
“Thus multitudes of good conscientious women and girls are extravagant
from pure ignorance. The male provider allows bills to be run up in his
name, and they have no earthly means of judging whether they are
spending too much or too little, except the semi-annual hurricane which
attends the coming in of these bills.
“The first essential in the practice of economy is a knowledge of one’s
income, and the man who refuses to accord to his wife and children this
information has never any right to accuse them of extravagance, because
he himself deprives them of that standard of comparison which is an
indispensable requisite in economy. As early as possible in the
education of children they should pass from that state of irresponsible
waiting to be provided for by parents, and be trusted with the spending
of some fixed allowance, that they may learn prices and values, and have
some notion of what money is actually worth and what it will bring. The
simple fact of the possession of a fixed and definite income often
suddenly transforms a giddy, extravagant girl into a care-taking,
prudent little woman. Her allowance is her own; she begins to plan upon
it,—to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and do numberless sums in her
little head. She no longer buys everything she fancies; she deliberates,
weighs, compares. And now there is room for self-denial and generosity
to come in. She can do without this article; she can furbish up some
older possession to do duty a little longer, and give this money to some
friend poorer than she; and ten to one the girl whose bills last year
were four or five hundred finds herself bringing through this year
creditably on a hundred and fifty. To be sure, she goes without numerous
things which she used to have. From the stand-point of a fixed income
she sees that these are impossible, and no more wants them than the
green cheese of the moon. She learns to make her own taste and skill
take the place of expensive purchases. She refits her hats and bonnets,
retrims her dresses, and in a thousand busy, earnest, happy little ways,
sets herself to make the most of her small income.
“So the woman who has her definite allowance for housekeeping finds at
once a hundred questions set at rest. Before, it was not clear to her
why she should not ‘go and do likewise’ in relation to every purchase
made by her next neighbor. Now, there is a clear logic of proportion.
Certain things are evidently not to be thought of, though next neighbors
do have them; and we must resign ourselves to find some other way of
living.”
“My dear,” said my wife, “I think there is a peculiar temptation in a
life organized as ours is in America. There are here no settled classes,
with similar ratios of income. Mixed together in the same society, going
to the same parties, and blended in daily neighborly intercourse, are
families of the most opposite extremes in point of fortune. In England
there is a very well-understood expression, that people should not dress
or live above their station; in America none will admit that they have
any particular station, or that they can live above it. The principle of
democratic equality unites in society people of the most diverse
positions and means.
“Here, for instance, is a family like Dr. Selden’s, an old and highly
respected one, with an income of only two or three thousand,—yet they
are people universally sought for in society, and mingle in all the
intercourse of life with merchant-millionnaires whose incomes are from
ten to thirty thousand. Their sons and daughters go to the same schools,
the same parties, and are thus constantly meeting upon terms of social
equality.
“Now it seems to me that our danger does not lie in the great and
evident expenses of our richer friends. We do not expect to have
pineries, graperies, equipages, horses, diamonds,—we say openly and of
course that we do not. Still, our expenses are constantly increased by
the proximity of these things, unless we understand ourselves better
than most people do. We don’t of course, expect to get a
fifteen-hundred-dollar Cashmere, like Mrs. So-and-so, but we begin to
look at hundred-dollar shawls and nibble about the hook. We don’t expect
sets of diamonds, but a diamond ring, a pair of solitaire diamond
earrings, begins to be speculated about among the young people as among
possibilities. We don’t expect to carpet our house with Axminster and
hang our windows with damask, but at least we must have Brussels and
brocatelle,—it _would not do_ not to. And so we go on getting hundreds
of things that we don’t need, that have no real value except that they
soothe our self-love,—and for these inferior articles we pay a higher
proportion of our income than our rich neighbor does for his better
ones. Nothing is uglier than low-priced Cashmere shawls; and yet a young
man just entering business will spend an eighth of a year’s income to
put one on his wife, and when he has put it there it only serves as a
constant source of disquiet,—for now that the door is opened, and
Cashmere shawls are possible, she is consumed with envy at the superior
ones constantly sported around her. So also with point-lace, velvet
dresses, and hundreds of things of that sort, which belong to a certain
rate of income, and are absurd below it.”
“And yet, mamma, I heard Aunt Easygo say that velvet, point-lace, and
Cashmere were the cheapest finery that could be bought, because they
lasted a lifetime.”
“Aunt Easygo speaks from an income of ten thousand a year; they may be
cheap for her rate of living,—but for us, for example, by no magic of
numbers can it be made to appear that it is cheaper to have the greatest
bargain in the world in Cashmere, lace, and diamonds, than not to have
them at all. I never had a diamond, never wore a piece of point-lace,
never had a velvet dress, and have been perfectly happy, and just as
much respected as if I had. Who ever thought of objecting to me for not
having them? Nobody, as I ever heard.”
“Certainly not, mamma,” said Marianne.
“The thing I have always said to you girls is, that you were not to
expect to live like richer people, not to begin to try, not to think or
inquire about certain rates of expenditure, or take the first step in
certain directions. We have moved on all our life after a very
antiquated and old-fashioned mode. We have had our little old-fashioned
house, our little old-fashioned ways.”
“Except the parlor-carpet, and what came of it, my dear,” said I,
mischievously.
“Yes, except the parlor-carpet,” said my wife, with a conscious twinkle,
“and the things that came of it; there was a concession there, but one
can’t be wise always.”
“_We_ talked mamma into that,” said Jenny.
“But one thing is certain,” said my wife,—“that, though I have had an
antiquated, plain house, and plain furniture, and plain dress, and not
the beginning of a thing such as many of my neighbors have possessed, I
have spent more money than many of them for real comforts. While I had
young children, I kept more and better servants than many women who wore
Cashmeres and diamonds. I thought it better to pay extra wages to a
really good, trusty woman who lived with me from year to year, and
relieved me of some of my heaviest family-cares, than to have ever so
much lace locked away in my drawers. We always were able to go into the
country to spend our summers, and to keep a good family-horse and
carriage for daily driving,—by which means we afforded, as a family,
very poor patronage to the medical profession. Then we built our house,
and while we left out a great many expensive common-places that other
people think they must have, we put in a profusion of bathing
accommodations such as very few people think of having. There never was
a time when we did not feel able to afford to do what was necessary to
preserve or to restore health; and for this I always drew on the surplus
fund laid up by my very unfashionable housekeeping and dressing.”
“Your mother has had,” said I, “what is the great want in America,
perfect independence of mind to go her own way without regard to the way
others go. I think there is, for some reason, more false shame among
Americans about economy than among Europeans. ‘I cannot afford it’ is
more seldom heard among us. A young man beginning life, whose income may
be from five to eight hundred a year, thinks it elegant and gallant to
affect a careless air about money, especially among ladies,—to hand it
out freely, and put back his change without counting it,—to wear a
watch-chain and studs and shirt-fronts like those of some young
millionnaire. None but the most expensive tailors, shoemakers, and
hatters will do for him; and then he grumbles at the dearness of living,
and declares that he cannot get along on his salary. The same is true of
young girls, and of married men and women too,—the whole of them are
ashamed of economy. The cares that wear out life and health in many
households are of a nature that cannot be cast on God, or met by any
promise from the Bible,—it is not care for ‘food convenient,’ or for
comfortable raiment, but care to keep up false appearances, and to
stretch a narrow income over the space that can be covered only by a
wider one.
“The poor widow in her narrow lodgings, with her monthly rent staring
her hourly in the face, and her bread and meat and candles and meal all
to be paid for on delivery or not obtained at all, may find comfort in
the good old Book, reading of that other widow whose wasting measure of
oil and last failing handful of meal were of such account before her
Father in heaven that a prophet was sent to recruit them; and when
customers do not pay, or wages are cut down, she can enter into her
chamber, and when she hath shut her door, present to her Father in
heaven His sure promise that with the fowls of the air she shall be fed
and with the lilies of the field she shall be clothed: but what promises
are there for her who is racking her brains on the ways and means to
provide as sumptuous an entertainment of oysters and Champagne at her
next party as her richer neighbor, or to compass that great bargain
which shall give her a point-lace set almost as handsome as that of Mrs.
Crœsus, who has ten times her income?”
“But, papa,” said Marianne, with a twinge of that exacting sensitiveness
by which the child is characterized, “I think I am an economist, thanks
to you and mamma, so far as knowing just what my income is, and keeping
within it; but that does not satisfy me, and it seems that isn’t all of
economy;—the question that haunts me is, Might I not make my little all
do more and better than I do?”
“There,” said I, “you have hit the broader and deeper signification of
economy, which is, in fact, the science of _comparative values_. In its
highest sense, economy is a just judgment of the comparative value of
things,—money only the means of enabling one to express that value. This
is the reason why the whole matter is so full of difficulty,—why every
one criticises his neighbor in this regard. Human beings are so various,
the necessities of each are so different, they are made comfortable or
uncomfortable by such opposite means, that the spending of other
people’s incomes must of necessity often look unwise from our
stand-point. For this reason multitudes of people who cannot be accused
of exceeding their incomes often seem to others to be spending them
foolishly and extravagantly.”
“But is there no standard of value?” said Marianne.
“There are certain things upon which there is a pretty general
agreement, verbally, at least, among mankind. For instance, it is
generally agreed that _health_ is an indispensable good,—that money is
well spent that secures it, and worse than ill spent that ruins it.
“With this standard in mind, how much money is wasted even by people who
do not exceed their income! Here a man builds a house, and pays, in the
first place, ten thousand more than he need, for a location in a
fashionable part of the city, though the air will be closer and the
chances of health less; he spends three or four thousand more on a stone
front, on marble mantles imported from Italy, on plate-glass windows,
plated hinges, and a thousand nice points of finish, and has perhaps but
one bath-room for a whole household, and that so connected with his own
apartment that nobody but himself and his wife can use it.
“Another man buys a lot in an open, airy situation, which fashion has
not made expensive, and builds without a stone front, marble mantels, or
plate glass windows, but has a perfect system of ventilation through his
house, and bathing-rooms in every story, so that the children and guests
may all, without inconvenience, enjoy the luxury of abundant water.
“The first spends for fashion and show, the second for health and
comfort.
“Here is a man that will buy his wife a diamond bracelet and a lace
shawl, and take her yearly to Washington to show off her beauty in
ball-dresses, who yet will not let her pay wages which will command any
but the poorest and most inefficient domestic service. The woman is worn
out, her life made a desert by exhaustion consequent on a futile attempt
to keep up a showy establishment with only half the hands needed for the
purpose. Another family will give brilliant parties, have a gay season
every year at the first hotels at Newport, and not be able to afford the
wife a fire in her chamber in midwinter, or the servants enough food to
keep them from constantly deserting. The damp, mouldy, dingy
cellar-kitchen, the cold, windy, desolate attic, devoid of any comfort,
where the domestics are doomed to pass their whole time, are witnesses
to what such families consider economy. Economy in the view of some is
undisguised slipshod slovenliness in the home-circle for the sake of
fine clothes to be shown abroad; it is undisguised hard selfishness to
servants and dependants, counting their every approach to comfort a
needless waste,—grudging the Roman-Catholic cook her cup of tea at
dinner on Friday, when she must not eat meat,—and murmuring that a
cracked, second-hand looking-glass must be got for the servants room:
what business have they to want to know how they look?