The Intelligence of Woman Part 5

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 st.u.r.dy 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 sc.r.a.pped their gowns only when they were worn out; now they sc.r.a.p 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts; 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt adds that these are the "latest novelties" for "the coming season", and that all this is "for the spring." And then there is an advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 Marche_ 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 cla.s.ses 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 m.u.f.f 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 n.o.body, 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 s.e.x-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.

4

It might be thought that this ghastly picture speaks for itself, but evidently it does not, as hardly anybody takes any notice of the question. I will venture to draw attention to the results of what is happening, ignoring the abnormal figures, because I wish to reason from what happens all the time rather than from what happens now and then, to figure the position in which the world finds itself because women do not hesitate to spend upon their clothes a full ten per cent of the household income. This figure is correct: such inquiries as I have been able to make among women of my acquaintance prove it. Out of a joint income of $12,500 a year one woman spends $1350 a year on clothes; another, out of $5750 a year, last year $655; a third, out of $8000 a year $700, but she is a "dowdy."

In households of moderate means, where a certain social status is kept up, where, for instance, a woman takes $500 a year out of $5000, while her husband dresses well on $200, when all expenses have been paid, there is money for little else; fixed charges, children, service, taxes, swallow up the rest. There is hardly anything left for books, barely for a circulating library; there is very little for the theater and for games; holidays are taken in hideous lodgings at the seaside because a comfortable bungalow costs too much. The money that should have provided the most important thing in human life, namely pleasure, is on the woman's back.

In the lower cla.s.ses the case is, in a way, still worse. I do not mean workmen's wives, for any old rag will serve the slaves,--but their daughters! Recently a coroner's inquest in Soho showed that a girl had practically starved herself to death to buy fine clothes, and it is not an isolated case. For the last eight years I have been investigating the condition of workwomen, and, so far as typists, manicurists, and tea-shop girls are concerned, I a.s.sert that their main object in leaving the homes where they are kept is to have money for smart clothes; they flood the labor market at blackleg prices, to buy finery and for no other reason. They go further: while making the necessary inquiries for my novel, _A Bed of Roses_, I scheduled the cases of about forty London prost.i.tutes. In about twenty-five per cent of the cases the original cause, direct or contributory, was a desire for luxury which took the form of fine clothes. Now these women tell one what they think one would like to hear, and, where they scent sympathy, as much as possible attribute their fall to man's deceit. But ac.u.men develops in the investigator; the figure of twenty-five per cent is correct or may even be an underestimate.

The conclusion is that from fifteen thousand to twenty-five thousand women now on the streets of London have been brought there by a desire for self-adornment. Meanwhile there is no labor available for the poor consumer, because the energy of the dressmaker is diverted toward the rich; while Miss So-and-So is paid $4000 a year to design hats, the workwoman wears a man's cap rescued from the refuse heap.

I shall be told that the rich are not responsible for the luxurious desires of the poor; but that is evidently nonsense: the rich themselves are not innocent of prost.i.tution. I have had reported the case of a well-paid Russian dancer whose dress bills are paid by two financiers; that of a French actress who calmly states that she needs three lovers, one for her hats, one for her lingerie, and one for her gowns; and a close inquiry into the "bridge losses" which occasionally provoke the fall of rich men's daughters will show that these are dressmakers'

bills. All this is not without its effect upon the poor. The girl of the lower cla.s.ses, hypnotized by fashion plates, compelled to witness at the doors of fashionable churches, in the street, at the music halls, and even at the picture palaces, the continuous streaming past of the fashion pageant, develops an intolerable desire for finery. You may say that she is wrong, that she should practice self-denial, but this is not an age of self-denial; luxury is in the air, we despair of happiness and take to pleasure, we feel the future life too far ahead, we want to enjoy. It is natural enough, especially for girls who are young and who feel unfairly outcla.s.sed by richer women who are neither as young nor as beautiful; but still it is base. If baseness is to go, the lesson must come from the top; if there is to be self-denial, then _que messieurs les a.s.sa.s.sins commencent!_ Until the rich woman realizes that her example is her responsibility it will be fair to say that the Albemarle Street $500 gown has its consequence in a prost.i.tute on the Tottenham Court Road.

The rich woman herself does not escape scot free. It is obvious that the woman chiefly occupied with thoughts of dress develops a peculiar kind of frivolity, that she becomes unfit to think of art, the public interest, perhaps of love. She is the worst social product, a parasite, and she is not even always beautiful. Sometimes she is insane: the investigations of Doctor Bernard Holz and of Doctor Rudolf Foerster connect the mania for fashion with paranoia, and have elicited extraordinary facts, such as the collection of clothes by insane women, and such as cases of pyromania which coincided with a craze for dress.

It is, indeed, quite possible that some women might go mad if they permanently felt themselves less well-dressed than their fellows; and that is the crux of the fashion idea. Woman does not desire to be beautifully dressed: she desires to be more beautifully dressed than her fellows. She wishes to insult and humiliate her sisters, and, as modern clothes are costly, she does not hesitate to give full play to human cruelty, to use all the resources of the rich husband on whom she preys to satisfy her pride and to apply her arrogant ingenuity to the torture of her sisters. And I said, "She wants to be more beautiful." Is that quite right? Partly, though what woman mainly seeks is not to be beautiful but to be fashionable; the words have become synonymous. Yet the fashions are not always beautiful; sometimes they are hideous, break every line of the body, make it awkward, hamper its movements. If women truly wanted to be beautiful they would not follow the fashions: our little dark, sloe-eyed women would dress rather like the j.a.panese, and our big, ox-eyed beauties would appear as Greeks; but no, Juno, Carmen, and Dante's Beatrice, all together and all in turn, don first the crinoline and then the hobble skirt.

Nor do they want to attract men. They think they do but they do not, for they know perfectly well that few men realize what they wear, that all they observe is "something blue" or an effect they call "very doggy"; they know also that men do not wed the dangerous smart, but the modest; that men fear the implication that smart women are unvirtuous, and that they certainly fear their dressmakers' bills. Nor is it even true that women want many new clothes so as to be clean: if that were true, men in their well-worn suits could not be touched with a pitchfork. The truth is that changes in fashion are a habit and a hysteria, an advertis.e.m.e.nt, an insult offered by wealth to poverty, a degradation of women's qualities which carries its own penalty in the form of growing mental baseness.

5

Well, what shall we do? Women must wear a uniform. Strictly, they already do wear a uniform, for what is a fashion but a uniform? Some years ago when musquash coats (and cheaper velveteen) were "in", and hats were very small, there were in London scores of thousands of young women so exactly alike that considerable confusion was caused at tube stations and such other places where lovers meet; this simplifies the problem of choosing the new uniform. Let it not be thought that I wish women to dress in sackcloth, though they will certainly dress in sackcloth if ever sackcloth comes in; I do not care what they wear, provided they do not continually alter its form, and provided it is not too dear. The way in which old and young, tall and short, fat and thin, force themselves into the same color and the same shape is sheer socialism; I merely want to carry the uniform idea a little further, to make it a _permanent_ uniform.

We already have uniforms for women, apart from the fashions, uniforms which never change: those of the nurse, the nun, the parlor-maid, the tea-girl. We have national costumes, Dutch, Swiss, Irish, j.a.panese, Italian; we have drill suits and sports dresses. And they are not ugly.

All these uniformed women have as good a chance of marriage as any others, and her ladyship gains as many proposals on the golf links as at night on the terrace. I would suggest that women should have two or three uniforms of a kind to be decided, which would never change, and, I repeat, they need not be ugly uniforms.

Men's uniforms are not ugly; I would any day exchange my lounge suit for the uniform of a guardsman--if I might wear it. In this "if" is the essence of the whole idea, the whole practicability of it. Men wear uniform, that is to say lounge suits in certain circ.u.mstances, morning coats in others, evening clothes in yet others. They never vary. We are told that they vary. Tailors show new suitings, the papers print articles about men's fashions, and perhaps a b.u.t.ton is added or a lapel is lengthened, and that is all. n.o.body cares. Men follow no fashions so far as the fable of men's fashions is true; they dare not do so, because to do so serves them ill in society. A man who dares to break through the uniform idea of his s.e.x is generally dubbed a "bounder"; if he is one of the very young, fancy-socked, extreme-collared kind, people smile and say, "It'll wear off with time." And women, who tolerate the dandies at tea-time, love the others.

The uniform would have to be brought in by a group of leaders of fashion determined to abolish fashion. I could sketch a dozen uniforms, but women would make a great to-do, forgetting that most fashions are created by men, so I will confine myself to timid suggestions.