Kitabı oku: «The Intelligence of Woman», sayfa 5

4

The last of the transitory measures is the lien on wages. In the present state of things, women who work in the home depend for money on husbands or fathers. The fact of having to ask is, in the Feminists' view, a degradation. They suggest that the housekeeper should be entitled to a proportion of the man's income or salary, and one of them, Mrs. M. H. Wood, picturesquely illustrates her case by saying that she hopes to do away with "pocket-searching" while the man is asleep. Mrs. Wood's ideas certainly deserve sympathy; though many men pay their wives a great deal more than they are worth and are shamefully exploited – a common modern position – it is also quite true that many others expect their wives to run their household on inadequate allowances, and to come to them for clothes or pleasure in a manner which establishes the man as a pasha. When women have grown economically independent, no lien on wages will be required, but meanwhile it is interesting to observe that there has recently been formed in England a society called "The Home-makers' Trade Union", one of whose specific objects is, "To insist as a right on a proper proportion of men's earnings being paid to wives for the support of the home."

Generally speaking, then, it is clear that women are greatly concerned with the race, for all these demands – support of the mother, support of the child, rights of the household – are definitely directed toward the benevolent control by the woman of her home and her child. I have alluded above to these Feminist intentions: they affect the immediate conditions as well as the ultimate.

Among the ultimates is a logical consequence of the right of woman to be represented by women. So long as Parliamentary Government endures, or any form of authority endures, the Feminists will demand a share in this authority. It has been the custom during the Suffrage campaign to pretend that women demand merely the vote. The object of this is to avoid frightening the men, and it may well be that a number of Suffragists honestly believe that they are asking for no more than the vote, while a few, who confess that they want more, add that it is not advisable to say so; they are afraid to "let the cat out of the bag", but they will not rest until all Parliaments, all Cabinets, all Boards are open to women, until the Presidential chair is as accessible to them as is the English throne. Already in Norway women have entered the National Assembly: they propose to do so everywhere. They will not hesitate to claim women's votes for women candidates until they have secured the representation which they think is their right, that is, one half.

These are the bases, roughly outlined, on which can be established a lasting peace.

I do not want to exaggerate the difficulties and perils which are bound up in this revolutionary movement, but it is abundantly clear that it presupposes profound changes in the nature of women and of men. While man will be asked for more liberalism and be expected to develop his sense of justice (which has too long lain at the mercy of his erratic and sentimental generosity), woman will have to modify her outlook. She is now too often vain, untruthful, disloyal, avaricious, vampiric; briefly she has the characteristics of the slave. She will have to slough off these characteristics while she is becoming free, she will have to justify by her mental ascent the increase in her power. Feminists are not blind to this, and that is why they lay such stress upon education and propaganda.

One of the most profound changes will, I think, appear in sex relations. The "New Woman", as we know her to-day, a woman who is not so new as the woman who will be born of her, is a very unpleasant product; armed with a little knowledge, she tends to be dogmatic in her views and offensive in argument. She tends to hate men, and to look upon Feminism as a revenge; she adopts mannish ways, tends to shout, to contradict, to flout principles because they are principles; also she affects a contempt for marriage which is the natural result of her hatred of man. The New Woman has not the support of the saner Feminists. Says Ellen Key, in The Woman Movement, "These cerebral, amaternal women must obviously be accorded the freedom of finding the domestic life, with its limited but intensive exercise of power, meagre beside the feeling of power which they enjoy as public personalities, as consummate women of the world, as talented professionals. But they have not the right to falsify life values in their own favor so that they themselves shall represent the highest form of life, the 'human personality', in comparison with which the 'instinctive feminine' signifies a lower stage of development, a poorer type of life." If this were the ultimate type, very few men would be found in the Feminist camp, for the coming of the New Woman would mean the death of love. If the death of love had to be the price of woman's emancipation, I, for one, would support the institution of the zenana and the repression of woman by brute force; but I do not think we need be anxious.

If the New Woman is so aggressive, it is because she must be aggressive if she is to win her battle. We cannot expect people who are laboring under a sense of intolerable injury to set politely about the righting of that injury: when woman has entered her kingdom she will no longer have to resort to political nagging; her true nature will affirm itself for the first time, for it is difficult to believe that it has been able to affirm itself under the entirely artificial conditions of androcracy. Already some women to whom a profession or mental eminence has given exceptional freedom show us in society that women can be free and yet be sweet. Indeed they almost demonstrate the Feminist contention that women must be free before they are sweet, for are not these women – of whom all of us can name a few – the noblest and most desirable of their kind? The New Woman is like a freshly painted railing: whoever touches it will stain his hands, but the railing will dry in time.

There is one type of woman, however, whom I venture to call "Old Woman", who is probably a bitterer foe of Feminism than any man, and that is the super-feminine type, the woman for whom nothing exists except her sex, who has no interests except the decking of her body and the quest of men. This woman, who once dominated her own species, still represents the majority of her sex. It is still true that the majority of women are concerned with little save the fashions, novels, plays, and vaudeville turns. These women want to have "a good time" and want nothing more; they are ready to prey upon men by flattering them; they encourage their own weakness, which they call "charm", and generally aim at being pampered slaves, because, from their point of view, it pays better than being working partners. Evidence of this is to be found in women's shops, in the continual change in fashions, each of which is a signal to the male, and in the continual increase in the sums spent on adornment: it is not uncommon for a rich woman to spend five hundred dollars on a frock; two hundred and fifty dollars has been given for a hat; and twenty-five thousand dollars for a set of furs.

As Miss Beatrice Tina very well says, "Woman is woman's worst enemy", though she is not referring to this type. So long as woman maintains this attitude, compels men to forget her soul in the contemplation of her body, so long will she remain a slave, for this preoccupation goes further than clothes.

In a book recently published,⁷ an account is given of the late Empress of Austria, who was evidently one of the lowest of the slave type. It is noteworthy that she had no love for her children because their coming had impaired her beauty. Now I do not suggest that Feminists are arrayed against the care of the body; far from it, for the campaign has many associates among those who support physical culture, the fresh-air movement, ancient costume revival, and the like; but Feminists are well aware that concentration on adornment diverts woman from the development of her brain and her soul, and enhances in her the characteristics of the harem favorite. One tentative suggestion is being made, and that is a uniform for women. The interested parties point out that men practically wear uniform, that there is hardly any change from year to year in their costume, and that any undue adornment of the male is looked upon as bad form. Thus, while few men can with impunity spend more than five hundred dollars a year on their clothes, many women do not consider themselves happy unless they can dispose of anything between five and twenty times that amount. This, while involving the household in difficulties, lowers the status of woman by lowering her mentality.

Feminists do not ask for sumptuary laws, having very little respect for the law, but for a new vision, which is this: Man, intellectually developed, decks himself in no finery, because it is not essential to his success; woman must likewise abandon frippery if she is to have energy enough to reach his plane. They propose to attain their object by the force of their example, and I have received several letters on the subject, which show that the idea of fixing the fashions is not entirely wild, for fashion consists after all in wearing what everybody wears, and if an influential movement is started to maintain the costume of women on a very simple basis, it may very well prevail and kill much of their purely imitative vanity by showing them that undue devotion to self-adornment is very much worse than immoral: in other words, that it is in bad taste.

Incidentally the Feminists believe that the downfall of many women is procured by the offer of fine clothes. They hope, therefore, to derive some side-profits from the simplification of woman's dress.

The question also arises as to whether woman can become intellectually independent, whether she does not naturally depend upon the opinion of man. It is suggested that not even rich women are actually independent, that women place marriage above their art, their work; but I do not think this is a very solid objection, for the vaunted independence of men is not so very common; they currently take many of their opinions from their reading in newspapers and books, and must often subordinate their views and their conduct to the will of their employer. The main answer to this suggestion is that we must not consider woman as she was, but woman "as she is becoming", as a creature of infinite potentialities, as virgin ground.

It may be petitio principii to say that, as woman has produced so much that is fine, she would have produced very much more if she had not been hampered by law and custom, derided by the male, but bad logic is often good sense. This should commend itself to men who are no longer willing to support the idea that women are inherently inferior to them, but who are willing to give them an opportunity to develop in every field of human activity. Thus and thus only, if man will readjust his views, expel vir and enthrone homo, can woman cease to appear before him as a rival and a foe, realize herself in her natural and predestined role, that of partner and mate.⁸

III
UNIFORMS FOR WOMEN

1

The change which has come over politics reflects closely enough the change which has come about in the direction of man's desire. In times of peace, diplomacy and the affairs of kings have given place to wages and the housing of the poor; that which was serious has become pompous; that which was of no account now stands in the foreground. And so it is not absurd to suggest that one of those things which once made jests for the comic paper and the Victorian paterfamilias has, little by little, with the spread of wealth, become a problem of the day, a problem profound and menacing, full of intimations of social decay, not far remote in its reactions from the spread of a disease.

That problem is the problem of women's dress, or rather it is the problem of the fashions in women's dress. Women have never been content merely to clothe themselves, nor, for the matter of that, until very recently, have men; but men have grown a new sanity, while women, if we read aright the signs of the times, have grown naught save a new insanity. We have come to a point where, for a great number of women, the fashions have become the motive power of life, and where, for almost every woman, they have acquired great importance. Women classify each other according to their clothes; they have corrupted the drama into a showroom; they have completely ruined the more expensive parts of the opera house; they have invaded the newspapers in myriad paragraphs, in fashion-pages, and do not spare even the august columns of the most dignified papers. This preoccupation does not exist among men. We have had our dandies and we still have our "nuts" and dudes; but it never served a man very well to be a dandy or a beau, and most of us to-day suspect that if the "nut" were broken, he would be found to contain no kernel.

Men have escaped the fashions and therewith they have spared themselves much loss of energy and money. For it is not only the fashions that matter: it is the cost of women's clothes, the intrinsic cost; it is their continual changes for no reason, changes which sometimes produce, and sometimes destroy, beauty; sometimes promote comfort, and often cause torture. But always by their drafts upon its wealth, women lead humanity nearer to poverty, envy, discontent, frivolity, starvation, prostitution, – to general social degradation. Nothing can mitigate these evils until woman is induced to view clothing as does the modern man, until, namely, she decides to wear a uniform.

2

The costliness of women's clothes would not be so serious if the fashions did not change at so bewildering a speed. We have come to a point where women have not time to wear out their clothes, flimsy though they be; where we ought to welcome the adulteration of silk and wool; where we ought to hope that every material may get shoddier and more worthless, so that the new model may have a chance to justify its short life by the badness of the stuff. To-day women will quite openly say, "I won't buy that. I couldn't wear it out." They actually want to wear out their clothes! The causes of this are obvious enough. We are told that there are "rings" in Paris, London, and Vienna which decree every few months that the clothes of yesterday have become a social stigma; this is true, but much truer is the view that women are in the grasp of a new hysteria; that, lacking the old occupations of brewing, baking, child-rearing, spinning, they are desperately looking for something to do. They have found it: they are undoing the social system.

It was not always so. It is true that all through history, even in biblical times, moralists and preachers inveighed against the gewgaws that woman loves. They cried out before they were hurt; if he were alive to-day, Bossuet might, for the first time, fail to find words.

To the old curse of cost we have added change, as any student of costume will confirm; for in past ages the clothing of women did not change very rapidly. There is hardly any difference between the costume of 1755 and that which Queen Marie Leszczynska wore ten years later; in Greece, between B.C. 500 and 400, the Ionic chiton and himation varied but little; the Doric chiton did not vary at all; the variations in the over-mantle were not considerable. Any examination of early sculpture, of Attic vases, or of terra cottas, will show that this is true. The ladies of Queen Elizabeth's court, together with their royal mistress, wore the same kind of clothes through their adult years. Their clothes were sometimes costly, but when bought they were bought, and until worn out were not discarded. And our grandmothers had that famous black-silk dress, so sturdy that it stood up by itself, very like a Victorian virtue; it lasted a lifetime, sometimes became an heirloom.

There was no question then of fashion following on fashion at a whirling pace. Women were clothed, sometimes beautifully, sometimes hideously, but at any rate they scrapped their gowns only when they were worn out; now they scrap them as soon as they have been worn. The results of this I deal with further on, but here already I can suggest these results by quoting a few facts. Before me lies one of Messrs. Barker's advertisements; it seems that there are reception gowns, restaurant gowns; that there are coats for the races, and coats for the car, wraps for one thing, and wraps for another – and the advertisement adds that these are the "latest novelties" for "the coming season", and that all this is "for the spring." And then there is an advertisement of Messrs. Tudor Brothers, who have gowns for Ascot, and – this is quite true – gowns for Alexandra Day.

I have looked in vain for gowns for July 23, for gowns to be worn between a quarter past eleven and half-past twelve in the morning, and for special mourning gowns for a cousin's stepfather. Some occasions are shamefully disregarded. They are not disregarded by everybody; at least I presume that the lady quoted by Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson in her lecture in March, who possessed one hundred and ten nightdresses, could cope with any eventuality; there is also the lady, mentioned to me by a friend who made some American investigations for me, who possesses one hundred and fifty pairs of slippers. There is, too, the Bon Marché in Paris, where, out of a staff of six thousand to seven thousand, are employed fifteen hundred dressmakers, and where there is a special workroom for the creation of models.

As all these people must find something to do, they create, unless they merely steal from the dead; but one thing they always do, and that is destroy yesterday. Out of their activities comes a continual stream of new colors and new combinations of colors, of high heels and low heels, gilt heels and jeweled heels; they give us the spat that is to keep out the wet and then the spat that does not keep out the eye. Before me lies a picture of a spat made of lace; another of a skirt slit so high as to reveal a jeweled garter. That is creation, and I suppose I shall be told that that is art. It is art sometimes, and very beautiful, but beauty does not make it live; in fact beauty causes the creation to die more swiftly, because the more appealing it is, the more it is worn: as soon as it is worn by the many, the furious craving for distinction sweeps down upon it and slays it. There are several mad women in the St. Anne asylum in Paris whose peculiar disease is that they cannot retain the same idea for more than a few seconds; they ring the changes on a few hundreds of ideas. Properly governed, their inspirations might be valuable in Grafton Street.

I do not think the end is near; indeed, fashions will be more extreme to-morrow than they are to-day. The continual growth of wealth, and the difficulty of spending it when it clots in a few hands, will make for a greater desire to spend more, more quickly, more continually, and in wilder and wilder forms. The women are to-day having individual orgies; to-morrow will come the saturnalia.

3

There is a clear difference between the cost of women's clothes and of men's. It is absolutely impossible to dress a woman of the comfortable classes for the same amount per annum that will serve her husband well. I must quote a few figures taken from Boston, New York, and London.

Boston.– Persons considered: those having $4500 to $7500 a year.

Average price of a suit (coat and skirt), $40 ready to wear; made by a dressmaker of slight pretensions, $125 to $225.

Afternoon dresses, ready to wear, $125 to $225.

Evening dresses, absolute minimum, $50; fashionable frocks, $200 to $350.

On an income of $7500 a woman's hat will cost $25; variation, $20 to $45; hats easily attain $125.

Veils attain $5. Opera cloaks in stores, $90 to $250. Dressmakers charge $450 to $600.

New York.– Winter street dress, $225.

Skunk muff and stole, $200.

Hats for the year, at least $250 to $300.

Footwear, $250 per annum.

I am informed that a lady in active society can "manage with care" on $2500, but really needs $4500 to $5000.

A "moderate" wardrobe allows for "extremely simple" gowns costing $125 each; the lady in question requires at least six new evening dresses and six remodeled, per annum. She wore an average set of furs, price $1500.

London.– Debenham & Freebody blouse, $10.

Ponting's Leghorn hat, $8. Gorringe straws, $12 to $14.

I am informed that where the household income is $3500 to $7500 a year the ordinary prices are as follows:

Coats and skirts, $50 to $75.

Evening dresses, $75 to $120.

Hats, $7.50 to $20.

Silk stockings are cheap at $1.50, and veils at $1.50.

Now these are all moderate figures and will shock nobody, but if they are compared with the prices paid by men, they are, without any question of fashion, outrageous. I believe they are high because it is men and not women who pay, because the dressmaker trades on man's sex-enslavement. But I am concerned just now less with causes than with facts, and would rather ask how the modest $100 evening gown compares with the man's $63 dress suit (by a good tailor). How does the $63 coat and skirt compare with a man's lounge suit, price $36 by anybody save Poole, and by him only $52.50? No man has, I believe, paid more than $9 for a silk hat, while his wife pays at least $20. The point is not worth laboring, it is obvious; while every man knows that a "good cut" does not account for the discrepancy, as he too pays, but pays moderately, for the art of a good tailor. And, mark you, apart from cost, men's clothes last indefinitely, while women's, if they have the misfortune to last, must be given away.

The prices I have quoted are moderate prices, and I cannot resist the temptation to give some others which are not unusual. I am informed that $400 can easily be charged for an afternoon dress, $1000 for an evening dress, $200 for a coat and skirt; that it is quite easy to spend $5000 a year on underclothes and $250 on an aigrette. I observe a Maison Lewis Ascot hat, price $477. Yantorny will not make a shoe under $60; a pair of his shoes made of feathers is priced by him at $2400.

As for totals: I have private information of an expenditure of $30,000 a year on dress; one of $70,000 is reported to me from America. I have seen a bill for dress and lingerie alone, incurred at one shop, for $35,000 in twelve months.