Modern Women and What is Said of Them Part 1

Modern Women and What is Said of Them.

by Anonymous.

INTRODUCTION.

The "Woman Question" will not be put to silence. It demands an answer of Western legislators. It besets college faculties. It pursues veteran politicians to the fastnesses of so-called National Conventions. Under the sacred sounding-boards of New England pulpits has its voice been heard, and its unexpected ally, the London SAt.u.r.dAY REVIEW, introduces it to the good society of English drawing-rooms. That this introduction comes in the form of diatribe and denunciation is a matter of the least moment. Judgment will finally rest, not on the conclusions of the special pleader, but on the strength of the case of the accused.

Something, clearly, is wrong with fashionable women. They accept the thinnest gilt, the poorest pinchbeck, for gold. They care more for a dreary social pre-eminence than for home and children. They find in extravagance of living and a vulgar costliness of dress their only expression of a vague desire for the beauty and elegance of life. Is it, therefore, to be inferred that the race of n.o.ble women is dying out?

St. Paul was hardly less severe than the London SAt.u.r.dAY, if less explicit, in his condemnation of the fashionable women of his day, yet we look upon that day as heroic. Certainly neither London nor New York can rival the luxury of a rich Roman matron, yet it was not the luxury of her women which destroyed the empire, and Brutus's Portia was quite as truly a representative woman as the superb Messalina. John Knox thought that things were as bad as they could possibly be when he thundered at vice in high places; and if there had been a John Knox in the court of Charles the Second, he would have sighed for a return of the innocent days of his great-grandfather.

On the whole, that hope which springs eternal suggests that the fashionable women of the reign of Victoria, and of our seventeenth President, are not essentially more discouraging than all the generations of the thoughtless fair who danced idly down forgotten pasts. Nay, we may even hope that they are better. If they will not actually think, yet the fatal contagion of the newspaper and the modern novel communicates to them an intellectual irritation which might almost stand for a mental process. If they have not ideas, they have notions of things, and however inexact and absurd these may be, they are better than emptiness.

"Worse, decidedly worse," says our implacable critic; "when women were content with looking pretty before marriage, and with good housekeeping after, they were uninteresting certainly, but they were respectable. Now they dabble in all things; are weakly aesthetic, weakly scientific, weakly controversial, and wholly prosy, and contemptible." Dabbling is pitiful, certainly, and weakness has few allies, but let us do justice even to the weak dabblers. aesthetic, or scientific, or controversial training has but recently been made possible to women. Their previous range of study had been very narrow. It is not strange that the least attainments should seem to them very profound and satisfactory, and the most manifest deductions pa.s.s for original conclusions. It is natural that their undisciplined faculties should grapple feebly with difficulties, and be quite unequal to argument. This is no reason for flinging the baffling volumes at their heads; better so educate their heads that the volumes shall no longer baffle.

Scolded because they have not an idea beyond dress, laughed at when they try to think of something better, a word may certainly be said for the good temper and the patience even of the fashionable women, who would be wiser if they could.

The fault is, we are a.s.sured, that these women take up books only to enhance their matrimonial value, and with no thought of the worth of study. Let us be just. What business or the professions are to most men, marriage is to most women. Men qualify themselves, if they can, for that compet.i.tive examination which is always going on, and which insures clients to the best lawyers, and business to the best merchant, and parishes to the best preacher. Women, compelled to wait at home for the wooing which changes their destiny, qualify themselves with attractions for that compet.i.tive examination which all marriageable young women feel that they undergo from every marriageable young man. Each has an eye to business. One does not feel that the motive in the one case is any higher than in the other.

It is very bad, of course, that marriage should be a matter of business.

It is, perhaps, the most tragic of all perversions. But, evidently, the evil is not to be abated by jeremiads, nor by lectures to young women, no, nor even by brilliant editorials. So long as women believe that inglorious ease is better than work, so long as they are taught that they are born to be the gentle dependents of a stronger being, so long as courage and capacity are held to be "strong-minded," so long as the range of employments for women is narrow, and the standard of wages lower than men's, so long they will seek in marriage a home, a larger liberty of action, an establishment, a servant who shall supply them with money and insure them ease without effort of their own.

Men take the business opening which seems most congenial and most profitable. Women do the same thing, and their choice naturally falls upon marriage as altogether the most promising speculation of their very small list. The remedy seems to be to give women as thorough mental training as men receive, to make their training tend as directly to the business of earning their bread and their pretty feminine adornments, and for the same work to pay them the same wages. If it be objected that fashionable women will not work, let it be answered that work itself would be fashionable if it were held to be a dignity, and not a drudgery, and that the really fine and thoughtful leaders of society could easily establish the new order of things. In an aristocratic country, where labor is the badge of caste, it would be difficult to make it honorable. In a democracy like our own, it is the most contemptible sn.o.bbishness which frowns on the honest earning of money.

The accusation of prodigal and senseless expenditure in dress must stand unrefuted. Sums which would adorn our cities with pleasure-gardens, with libraries, with galleries of art, are spent on perishable gauds that have not even beauty to commend them. Charities might be founded, lives be enriched with travel, all lands laid under contribution with the money that every year flows into Stewart's drawers, and the strong-boxes of fashionable dress-makers. But the jewelled prodigals who spend it are not more selfish, perhaps, than we plain folks who carp.

Again, it is a mistake. They have the money. They mean to secure all the pleasure that money can buy. They have that feminine sensuousness which delights in color, and odor, and richness of fabric. Their sense of beauty is untaught. A little lower in the scale of civilization they would pierce their noses, and dye their finger-nails, and wear strings of gla.s.s beads. A little higher, they would sacrifice the splendid shawl to a rare marble, banish the chromo-lithograph, and turn the solitaire ear-drops into a lovely picture, and build a conservatory with the price of lace flounces. A little higher still, and we might have model lodging-houses, and foundling hospitals, and music in the squares given us by kindly women who had saved the money from milliner, and jeweller, and silk-mercer.

But standing just where they are, clothes seem to these same undeveloped women the best things money can buy; and a lack of culture confuses them as to the attributes of clothes. Just now our fashionable women are bitterly reprehended for copying the dress of the "Anonymas," who establish the very p.r.o.nounced fashions of Paris. Half of them do not know what model they have taken. The other half accept the various and tasteless costumes, not because they are devised by "Anonyma," but because they are striking. There is something in the commonplaceness of fashionable life which smothers all originality of thought, of action, even of device in costume; and the women who give most time and money to dress, to whom one would look for perfection in that mixed art, are almost invariably the women who are exact reproductions of their neighbors in this regard, as in their house-furnishing, their equipages, and their manners.

Upon these splendidly monotonous fine ladies flashes the vision of "Anonyma," with her meretricious beauty, and her daring toilettes.

Amenable to no social Mrs. Grundy, her love of dress develops itself in bold contrasts of color, in bizarre and showy ornaments, in picturesque, and often in grotesque and tawdry effects. But whatever the details, the whole is always striking. Our women longing for the new, accept the absurd; desiring the picturesque, take the bizarre, and eager for the elegant, content themselves with the costly.

Nor does the fact that our present fashionable evening costume is immodest, of necessity impugn the modesty of the women who wear it. That they are wanting in fineness of perception must be admitted. But women of fashion accept without question the dictum of their modistes. La Belle Hamilton, the famous beauty of the reign of Charles the Second, so delicately modest and pure that she pa.s.sed unbreathed upon by scandal through that most dissolute court, is painted in a costume that the fastest of New York belles would not venture to wear at the most fashionable of receptions. The gracious and self-sacrificing and womanly women of our revolution, wore dresses cut lower than those of their great-grand-daughters, as any portrait-gallery will show. The dress is indefensible, but let us not be too ready to condemn the wearer for worse sins than thoughtlessness and vanity.

One doubts if there is a single Becky Sharp the less, (poor Becky!) since Thackeray gave such terrible immortality to their great prototype.

The satirist is not the reformer. The satirized do not see themselves in the exaggerated type. They go their way, and thank G.o.d that they are not as these others. The critic of the London SAt.u.r.dAY, beginning, perhaps, with the intention of telling sad and sober truth about a cla.s.s, has ended with a list of the follies and faults of individuals, and these are set down with the keen and unconvincing clearness of the satirist.

It is a good thing indeed, that any aspect of the "woman question"

should claim place, week after week, in a leading English journal. It is a good thing that it has been thought wise to reprint these essays here.

All this talk about the wrong ways of women suggests that there is a right way, as yet very much involved in the dust of discussion and the fogs of speculation. All these accusations against her folly imply a proportionate tribute to her possible wisdom, if once she can get a fair chance to be wise.

What the reviewer urges against the effect of fashionable life on the intellect, cannot be gainsayed. But in America, at least, the injury to the young men is greater apparently than to the young women. At any evening party in New York, at any "Hop" in Newport or Saratoga, the faces of the men are of a lower type, their talk is more inane, their manners are more vulgar. The girls are empty enough, heaven knows! but they seem capable of better things, most of them. And they are not so wholly spoiled in character. I have found very fashionable girls capable of large sacrifices for love, or kindred, or obedience to some divine voice. This proves that they have only to be taught that there is something better than being very fashionable, to take it thankfully. But the men seemed sordid and selfish, and grown worldly-wise before their time.

Yet it might make us both more just and more generous to remember that during our time of peril as a nation, these very ranks of purposeless men furnished us soldiers and money, and a cheerful faith in the cause, just as these very legions of idle women gave us workers and nurses.

There is this cheer for American readers of these pages: What we have been told is our national sin of extravagance, the too p.r.o.nounced character of our social life, the frivolity and ignorance of our women, the lack of a universal and high-toned society, we find not to be inborn defects peculiar to our system of government, and hopeless of change, but vices, also, of an old and cultivated and dignified nation.

A cheerful optimist may well believe that we are in a transition state; that women, impatient of the old life which was without thought and culture and motive, in the blind struggle to something better have fallen for the time on something worse; that with the movement of the age toward mutual helpfulness, man to man, women will move not less steadily, if more slowly, and come gradually into truer relations with each other and with men. It will not hurt woman to be criticised. She has too long been a.s.sured of her angelhood, and denied her womanhood. It will not help her very greatly to be criticised as if she were being tomahawked. If they who come to scoff would but remain to teach! There has been much ungentle judgment of men by women, of women by men.

Th.o.r.eau said, "Man is continually saying to Woman, 'Why are you not more wise?' Woman is continually saying to Man, 'Why are you not more loving?' Unless each is both wise and loving there can be no real growth."

L. G. C.

THE

MODERN WOMEN.

THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD.

Time was when the stereotyped phrase, "a fair young English girl," meant the ideal of womanhood; to us, at least, of home birth and breeding. It meant a creature generous, capable, and modest; something franker than a Frenchwoman, more to be trusted than an Italian, as brave as an American, but more refined, as domestic as a German and more graceful.

It meant a girl who could be trusted alone if need be, because of the innate purity and dignity of her nature, but who was neither bold in bearing nor masculine in mind; a girl who, when she married, would be her husband's friend and companion, but never his rival; one who would consider their interests identical, and not hold him as just so much fair game for spoil; who would make his house his true home and place of rest, not a mere pa.s.sage-place for vanity and ostentation to go through; a tender mother, an industrious house-keeper, a judicious mistress. We prided ourselves as a nation on our women. We thought we had the pick of creation in this fair young English girl of ours, and envied no other men their own.

We admired the languid grace and subtle fire of the South; the docility and affectionateness of the East seemed to us sweet and simple and restful; the vivacious sparkle of the trim and sprightly Parisienne was a pleasant little excitement when we met with it in its own domain; but our allegiance never wandered from our brown-haired girls at home, and our hearts were less vagrant than our fancies. This was in the old time, and when English girls were content to be what G.o.d and nature had made them. Of late years we have changed the pattern, and have given to the world a race of women as utterly unlike the old insular ideal as if we had created another nation altogether. The girl of the period, and the fair young English girl of the past, have nothing in common save ancestry and their mother-tongue: and even of this last the modern version makes almost a new language through the copious additions it has received from the current slang of the day.

The girl of the period is a creature who dyes her hair and paints her face, as the first articles of her personal religion; whose sole idea of life is plenty of fun and luxury; and whose dress is the object of such thought and intellect as she possesses. Her main endeavor in this is to outvie her neighbors in the extravagance of fashion. No matter whether, as in the time of crinolines, she sacrificed decency, or, as now in the time of trains, she sacrifices cleanliness; no matter either, whether she makes herself a nuisance and an inconvenience to every one she meets.

The girl of the period has done away with such moral m.u.f.fishness as consideration for others, or regard for counsel and rebuke. It was all very well in old-fashioned times, when fathers and mothers had some authority and were treated with respect, to be tutored and made to obey, but she is far too fast and flourishing to be stopped in mid-career by these slow old morals; and as she dresses to please herself, she does not care if she displeases every one else. Nothing is too extraordinary and nothing too exaggerated for her vitiated taste; and things which in themselves would be useful reforms if let alone become monstrosities worse than those which they have displaced so soon as she begins to manipulate and improve. If a sensible fashion lifts the gown out of the mud, she raises hers midway to her knee. If the absurd structure of wire and buckram, once called a bonnet, is modified to something that shall protect the wearer's face without putting out the eyes of her companion, she cuts hers down to four straws and a rosebud, or a tag of lace and a bunch of gla.s.s beads.

If there is a reaction against an excess of Rowland's Maca.s.sar, and hair shiny and sticky with grease is thought less nice than if left clean and healthy crisp, she dries and frizzes and sticks hers out on end like certain savages in Africa, or lets it wander down her back like Madge Wildfire's, and thinks herself all the more beautiful the nearer she approaches in look to a maniac or a negress. With purity of taste she has lost also that far more precious purity and delicacy of perception which sometimes mean more than appears on the surface. What the _demi-monde_ does in its frantic efforts to excite attention, she also does in imitation. If some fashionable _devergondee en evidence_ is reported to have come out with her dress below her shoulder-blades, and a gold strap for all the sleeve thought necessary, the girl of the period follows suit next day; and then wonders that men sometimes mistake her for her prototype, or that mothers of girls not quite so far gone as herself refuse her as a companion for their daughters. She has blunted the fine edges of feeling so much that she cannot understand why she should be condemned for an imitation of form which does not include imitation of fact; she cannot be made to see that modesty of appearance and virtue ought to be inseparable, and that no good girl can afford to appear bad, under penalty of receiving the contempt awarded to the bad.

This imitation of the _demi-monde_ in dress leads to something in manner and feeling, not quite so p.r.o.nounced, perhaps, but far too like to be honorable to herself or satisfactory to her friends. It leads to slang, bold talk, and fastness; to the love of pleasure and indifference to duty; to the desire of money before either love or happiness; to uselessness at home, dissatisfaction with the monotony of ordinary life, and horror of all useful work; in a word, to the worst forms of luxury and selfishness, to the most fatal effects arising from want of high principle and absence of tender feeling.

The girl of the period envies the queens of the _demi-monde_ far more than she abhors them. She sees them gorgeously attired and sumptuously appointed, and she knows them to be flattered, feted, and courted with a certain disdainful admiration of which she catches only the admiration while she ignores the disdain. They have all for which her soul is hungering, and she never stops to reflect at what a price they have bought their gains, and what fearful moral penalties they pay for their sensuous pleasures. She sees only the coa.r.s.e gilding on the base token, and shuts her eyes to the hideous figure in the midst, and the foul legend written around the edge.

It is this envy of the pleasures, and indifference to the sins, of these women of the _demi-monde_ which is doing such infinite mischief to the modern girl. They brush too closely by each other, if not in actual deeds, yet in aims and feelings; for the luxury which is bought by vice with the one is the thing of all in life most pa.s.sionately desired by the other, though she is not yet prepared to pay quite the same price.

Unfortunately, she has already paid too much, all, indeed, that once gave her distinctive national character. No one can say of the modern English girl that she is tender, loving, retiring, or domestic. The old fault so often found by keen-sighted Frenchwomen, that, she was so fatally _romanesque_, so p.r.o.ne to sacrifice appearances and social advantages for love, will never be set down to the girl of the period.

Love, indeed, is the last thing she thinks of, and the least of the dangers besetting her. Love in a cottage, that seductive dream which used to vex the heart and disturb the calculations of prudent mothers, is now a myth of past ages. The legal barter of herself for so much money, representing so much dash, so much luxury and pleasure; that is her idea of marriage; the only idea worth entertaining.

For all seriousness of thought respecting the duties or the consequences of marriage, she has not a trace. If children come, they find but a stepmother's cold welcome from her; and if her husband thinks that he has married anything that is to belong to him--a _tacens et placens uxor_ pledged to make him happy--the sooner he wakes from his hallucination and understands that he has simply married some one who will condescend to spend his money on herself, and who will shelter her indiscretions behind the shield of his name, the less severe will be his disappointment. She has married his house, his carriage, his balance at the banker's, his t.i.tle; and he himself is just the inevitable condition clogging the wheels of her fortune; at best an adjunct, to be tolerated with more or less patience as may chance. For it is only the old-fashioned sort, not girls of the period _pur sang_, that marry for love, or put the husband before the banker.

But she does not marry easily. Men are afraid of her; and with reason.

They may amuse themselves with her for an evening, but they do not take her readily for life. Besides, after all her efforts, she is only a poor copy of the real thing; and the real thing is far more amusing than the copy, because it is real. Men can get that whenever they like; and when they go into their mother's drawing-rooms, to see their sisters and their sisters' friends, they want something of quite different flavor.

_Toujours perdrix_ is bad providing all the world over; but a continual weak imitation of _toujours perdrix_ is worse. If we must have only one kind of thing, let us have it genuine; and the queens of St. John's Wood in their unblushing honesty, rather than their imitators and make-believes in Bayswater and Belgravia. For, at whatever cost of shocked self-love or pained modesty it may be, it cannot be too plainly told to the modern English girl that the net result of her present manner of life is to a.s.similate her as nearly as possible to a cla.s.s of women whom we must not call by their proper--or improper--name. And we are willing to believe that she has still some modesty of soul left hidden under all this effrontery of fashion, and that, if she could be made to see herself as she appears to the eyes of men, she would mend her ways before too late.

It is terribly significant of the present state of things when men are free to write as they do of the women of their own nation. Every word of censure flung against them is two-edged, and wounds those who condemn as much as those who are condemned; for surely it need hardly be said that men hold nothing so dear as the honor of their women, and that no one living would willingly lower the repute of his mother or his sisters. It is only when these have placed themselves beyond the pale of masculine respect that such things could be written as are written now; when they become again what they were once they will gather round them the love and homage and chivalrous devotion which were then an Englishwoman's natural inheritance. The marvel, in the present fashion of life among women, is how it holds its ground in spite of the disapprobation of men.

It used to be an old-time notion that the s.e.xes were made for each other, and that it was only natural for them to please each other, and to set themselves out for that end. But the girl of the period does not please men. She pleases them as little as she elevates them; and how little she does that, the cla.s.s of women she has taken as her models of itself testifies.

All men whose opinion is worth having prefer the simple and genuine girl of the past, with her tender little ways and pretty bashful modesties, to this loud and rampant modernization, with her false red hair and painted skin, talking slang as glibly as a man, and by preference leading the conversation to doubtful subjects. She thinks she is piquant and exciting when she thus makes herself the bad copy of a worse original; and she will not see that though men laugh with her they do not respect her, though they flirt with her they do not marry her; she will not believe that she is not the kind of thing they want, and that she is acting against nature and her own interests when she disregards their advice and offends their taste. We do not see how she makes out her account, viewing her life from any side; but all we can do is to wait patiently until the national madness has pa.s.sed, and our women have come back again to the old English ideal, once the most beautiful, the most modest, the most essentially womanly in the world.

FOOLISH VIRGINS.