Part 2

Slang and swearing are the commonest--in two senses--accompaniments and underlinings of the smart woman’s speech: any little disappointment that would have been ‘annoying’ to her mother is to the modern and up-to-date woman a ‘condemned nuisance,’ if not more than that; and ‘damns’ fall as readily from her lips as the mild ‘dear me!’ of a generation ago. For the first cause of this unlovely change we must look to the theatre and music-hall stages, whose women have in some few instances married the eldest sons of peers, and have succeeded to titles upon their husbands’ heirship being fulfilled. Their husbands’ titles have given them rank and precedence, whose mothers toiled at the wash-tub in some public laundry, or disputed not unsuccessfully with the most foul-mouthed of Irish viragoes on the filthy stairs of some rotten tenement in the purlieus of Saint Giles’s. The symmetry of their legs and the voluptuousness of their persons captivated the callow youths who night by night occupied the front rows of the stalls at the Gaiety Theatre, and who--under the well-known nickname of ‘Johnnies’--fed the Sacred Lamp of Burlesque with a stream of half-guineas. These heirs to wealth and hereditary honours kept the chorus-girls and skipping-rope dancers in broughams and villas _ornées_ in the classic Cyprian suburb of St. John’s Wood, and, when they were more than usually foolish, married them.

Society is become, through them, quite _demimondaine_, and it is not uncommon to have pointed out to you in the Row titled women who have notoriously been under the protection of more than one man before they, by some lucky or unlucky chance, caught their coronets. Nearly all Society is free to-day to these whited sepulchres; only the Queen’s Court--that last bulwark of virtue and decency--holds out against them. Elsewhere they are more than tolerated; it is scarcely too much to say that they are admired by _fin-de-siècle_ womanhood, who are notoriously and obviously Jesuitical. If the adaptation of their _outrés_ manners is proof enough of admiration, then you shall find sufficient warranty for this statement, for the slangy girl or young married woman is rather the rule than the exception in this year of grace, and their manners are arrived at that complexion which would make their grandmothers turn in their graves, could that cold clay become sentient again for the smallest space of time.

This decay of decency began with the advent of that loathsome amalgam of vanity and reckless extravagance in dress and speech, the Professional Beauty, whose profession first became recognised about the year 1879. You will not find that ‘profession’ entered under ‘Trades’ in the _Post-Office Directory_; but if logic ruled the world, then the shameless women whose photographs for years filled the shop-windows of town would find their trade recognised on the same commercial standing with any one of the thousand and one ways of getting a living shown in that volume. They would be on precisely the same moral level with the _quasi_ milliners of London, had necessity brought about their flaunting pervasion of Society, but, seeing that merely the love of admiration and notoriety induced their careers, it is difficult to find a depth sufficiently deep for them.

But indignation is apt to melt into a scornful pity when we see the Professional Beauty of sixteen years ago, who left her husband for the questionable admiration of great Personages and the envy of London Society, a faded and struggling woman of the world, who, without a shred of histrionic ability, has taken to the stage, relying upon the magnificence of her diamonds and the _abandon_ of her dress for an applause which had never been hers for her acting or her elocution. A just resentment fades into melancholy commiseration for a woman like this, who has sunk so low that scandal can no longer harm her; who essays the _rôle_ of ‘beauty’ when her years are rapidly totting up to fifty.

These are the tawdry careers which, appealing to woman’s innate love of admiration, bid her go and do likewise. The contempt with which all right-thinking men regard the spotted and fly-blown records of the Professional Beauties is hidden from them by the glare of publicity, and vanity still bids them adventure out from the home before the eye of the world.

One does not find the New Women justified of their sex, for cosmetics have no commerce with common sense, and high heels are not conducive to lofty thinking; rouge, violet powder, tight-lacing, or an inordinate love of jewellery, are not earnest of brain-power; and yet these are the commonest adjuncts to, or characteristics of, a woman’s life.

The sight of many diamonds at Kimberley impressed Lord Randolph Churchill mightily awhile ago, and the contemplation of those glittering objects of feminine adornment led to the historic pronouncement that ‘whatever may have been the origin of man,’ he is ‘coldly convinced that womankind are descended from monkeys.’ However that may be, certain it is that imitation is, equally with the simians, her _forte_. Men originate almost everything; even the fashions are set and controlled by M. Worth, and women follow his lead, both dressmakers and clients.

And Woman is a consistent and inveterate _poseur_, from the time of her leaving the cradle, through girlhood, young-womanhood, and matron-hood, to her last gasp. That tale of the old lady, dying from extreme age and decay of nature, who had her face rouged over against the arrival of her doctor, so that she should receive him to the best effect as she lay on her death-bed, is characteristic of her sex. Vanity, thy name is woman!

Could we but see her without her ‘side’! But we cannot. All the world’s a stage to her, and all the time she plays a part with an ineffable artistry of diplomacy beyond the understanding of a Richelieu or a Machiavelli. A statesman can frequently anticipate the ruses of a rival diplomat and thus check his schemes--because, being men, they both reason from a given point and can understand very accurately the workings of each other’s minds; but how shall one understand woman or predicate her actions when she does not understand herself or her fellow-feminines, and acts on the moment upon unreasoned impulse and pure caprice?

You may point to this and that feminine figure which has made an equable and logical course throughout her career, and exclaim triumphantly, ‘Here is the natural woman, without guile or self-consciousness: a logical and close-reasoning creature.’ Well, you are welcome to your opinion, pious, or derived from what shall seem to you as evidence sufficient for your contention. Hold it, nor inquire more narrowly, nor seek proselytes to your faith. The natural woman? My dear sir, how should your matter-of-fact and obvious nature distinguish the excellently-fashioned and well-assumed mask from the natural face? _Summum ars_---- you know the rest. Ponder it, nor prate glibly of natures, good sir!

Conceive of the dreadfully unreal puppets the novelists have created and labelled with feminine names. How the machinery creaks and rattles when the puppets move! With what unreal stagger they pace the stage, and how deep below contempt is the unlikeness to womankind of their ways and words.

For the nearest approach to an adequate portrayal of the feminine character, commend me to the women of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s novels, whose mental gyrations are set forth with a touch of inspiration: Bathsheba Everdene, Tess, Viviette, and the uncertain heroine of _The Trumpet Major_. Their speech has the convincing _timbre_ of their sex; their walk is the true gait, not the masculine tramp that echoes through the pages of most men’s novels; and how truly like nature their tongues say ‘No,’ when their hearts throb ‘Yes, yes!’

They live, these women and girls--they breathe and palpitate with the full tide of life, and no other living novelist can so inform his feminine creations with reality.

But turn to the academic heroines of Mr. Besant. If they were not presented with the subtle suavity of his literary style, I do not know how we could endure the paragons of virtue and learning who occupy the foremost place in book after book that owns him author.

Phillis, in _The Golden Butterfly_, came as a novelty, but the type perpetuated in each succeeding novel--now as Armorel Rosevean in _Armorel of Lyonesse_; again, as Angela Messenger in _All Sorts and Conditions of Men_, and so onwards--is both monotonous and earnest of a poverty of imagination. They would seem to be frankly unreal: an acknowledged Besantine convention--analogous to that early Christian art by which representations of saints, with attendant aureoles, and posing in impossible attitudes, were shown, not as portraitures, but as religious abstractions. These maidens are all sweet and severely proper; as learned as professors and as didactic as lecturers, and they have haloes heavy with gilding. ‘I cannot,’ cries the novelist, in effect, ‘show you the living woman. Consider: how unforeseen her contradictory attitudes and consistent inconsistency.’ And this, after all, is wisdom: to portray your ideal of the sweet girl graduate; to sketch woman as she might be, rather than to fashion an inadequate presentment of woman as she is.

She will have to develop very greatly before she becomes the equal of man, either in mind or muscle; and she will have to slough some singular feminine characteristics if her incursions into masculine walks of life are to be continued. At present she carries her purse in her hand along the most crowded streets, at the imminent risk of its being snatched away. Ask her why she does this, and she will tell you that she has no pockets, or that they are difficult to reach, or else that they are too easily reached by pickpockets. It never occurs to her that the devising of new pockets comes within the range of the dressmaker’s craft. Not that it matters much; for the purse-snatcher obtains little result for his pains, and, beyond some postage-stamps, half a dozen visiting-cards, a packet of needles, and a few coppers, his enterprise usually goes unrewarded.

Woman does not date her correspondence. She has no ‘views’ on the subject; she simply forgets. Sometimes, indeed, she will head her letters with the day of the week; but, as the weeks slip by, a letter written on any ‘Wednesday’ becomes rather vague in date.

Also, it is notorious that the gist of a woman’s letter, the real reason of its being written, appears in a postscript.

Again, it surely does not behove the New Woman to throng the streets in front of the establishments of Mr. Peter Robinson or Madame Louise, in admiring ecstasies over novel cuts and colours, bows and bonnets, and all the feminine accoutrements of fashion. Conceive of men crowding the tailors’ and the haberdashers’ in like manner, and taking equal delight in ‘shopping!’ This last occupation, or rather pastime, of women is a certain sign of mental inferiority. A woman will spend a whole day ‘shopping’--that is to say, in the inspection of goods she does not want and has no intention of buying--and will return home when day is done and count her time well and profitably spent. ‘Shopping,’ as apart from any idea of purchasing, is a recognised form of feminine recreation, as tradesfolk know to their cost. Happy the shopkeeper whose trade does not lend itself to ‘shopping,’ but wretched is he where the vice is rampant. For woman is pitiless and exacting, impervious either to criticism, sarcasm, irony, or innuendo, on occasion; and the more logical the man with whom she contends, so much the more baffling is she to him. So, short of plain and possibly offensive speech (for none so readily or more causelessly offended than your ‘shopper’), the unhappy victims of this mania have no redress, but must continue to heap their counters with bales of cloth and rolls of silk for due examination, and must exhibit a Christian patience and forbearance when the ‘shopper’ departs without purchasing or apologising.

No mere man could do this, for such assurance could only proceed from the opposite sex.

A perusal of the advertisement sheets which form the bulk of women’s newspapers and magazines makes for disillusionment and depression; and you would need but little excuse if, after a course of these appeals to feminine love of adornment, you rose from it with a settled conviction that Woman is a Work of Art, padded here, pinched in there, painted, dyed, and carefully made up in every particular. He was, indeed, a philosopher worthy the name (or perhaps it was a more than usually candid woman!) who said that none of the consolations of religion or any pious ecstasies could equal the profound and solemn joy which accompanies a woman’s conviction of her being well dressed and the envy of her fellows.

Here, indeed, is another striking difference between the sexes. A man is happiest when circumstances permit him to don the old clothes which for years have been his only wear in leisure hours: he would wear them while out and about on his business did the _convenances_ permit--so easy and comfortable is the old hat; so well adapted by long use is the old jacket to the form; so easy the bagged and misshapen trousers. But, alas! this may not be, for the world judges a man by his appearance, and it simply does not pay to appear in public otherwise than ‘well dressed.’ For dukes and millionaires ’tis another matter; they can afford to be ‘shabby’ and comfortable, and certainly, whether they manage to attain comfort or not, they generally contrive to appear ill-dressed and dowdy.

Woman is altogether different from and inferior to man: narrow-chested, wide-hipped, ill-proportioned, and endowed with a lesser quantity of brains than the male sex. She will, when sufficiently open to conviction, allow that, mentally, she is not so well equipped as man, but gives herself away altogether in insisting upon the ‘instinct’ that takes the place of reason in her sex; thereby tacitly placing herself on a level with other creatures--like the dog or cat--who act upon ‘instinct’ rather than upon reasoning powers. ‘A woman’s reason’ is a notoriously inadequate mental process; and, having once arrived at a conviction or a determination on any subject, it is of no use attempting to argue her out of it. That is widely acknowledged by the popular saying that ‘it is useless to argue with a woman’

‘If she will, she will, and there’s an end on’t: If she won’t, she won’t, depend on’t.’

These qualifications, limitations, or defects, as you may variously call them, according to your leanings, explain in great measure the reason why the Liberal and Radical parties in politics hesitate to give women the Parliamentary franchise. Party wirepullers are well aware, putting on one side the small but noisy section of unsexed females who clamour to be in the forefront of all political and social revolutions, that the great majority of women are, by nature and tradition, Tories of the most thorough-going type. They know, also, how hopeless it would be to drive new convictions into their heads, and so, being reasoning creatures, they have hitherto declined to extend the franchise to the sex which would at once swamp their parties throughout the country. The Conservative party, on the other hand, have for some time recognised how useful the women would be in furthering their principles and putting a needful skid upon the wheels of Radical ‘movements;’ and they have voted in favour of Woman Suffrage when that question has come up for discussion from time to time. The wonderful success of the Primrose League, due almost entirely to the personal initiative and enthusiasm of the Dames, opened the eyes of the party to the value of woman as a factor in politics, and if ever she obtains her vote the reform will be the work of the Conservatives. Thus do party needs negative convictions on either side of the House; for what, indeed, are convictions when weighed in the balance against self-interest?

It is a notorious fact among artists and physiologists that the Perfect Woman is of more rare occurrence than the Perfect Man; that it is a matter of extreme difficulty to find a woman whose body is symmetrical and well knit in all its parts. A painter of the nude works, of necessity, from several models, selecting one for her shapely arms, another for her neck, and so on; and so the final work of art in sculpture or painting is always eclectic, and never a portraiture of one woman.

And yet man has always been ready to do battle for her, and to dare death and the Devil himself for her favour. She has, too, continually presumed upon her influence, like the fair lady in the days of chivalry, who threw her glove among the lions of an arena and boasted that her knight would retrieve it for her sake. She did not overrate his courage, but she strained his devotion beyond its strength; for, leaping among the wild beasts, the brave man picked up the glove, and, coming back from the jaws of death, flung it in the woman’s face.

But will men dare the death and slit one another’s weasands for the possession of the New Woman as they have done for the women of the past? I think not. The contempt and incredulity of one sex for the judgment and discrimination of the other, which is chiefly a modern growth induced by woman’s arrogance, is not compatible with suit and service; and, in truth, the enmity between man and woman, shadowed forth in Genesis, is having another lease of life, owing to the fatuous females who cry to-day upon the house-tops.

Mr. Romanes wants us to ‘give her the apple, and let us see what comes of it.’ Heaven forbid: let her pluck it if she has the courage and the power, but let us not earn our own condemnation by inviting her to do so. He is of opinion that ‘the days are past when any enlightened man ought seriously to suppose that, in now again reaching forth her hand to eat of the tree of knowledge, woman is preparing for the human race a second Fall.’ There may be two opinions on this head. Women may occasionally surpass in learning the Senior Wrangler of as good a year as was ever known; they may exercise their brains and their muscles to their utmost tension; but let them not in those cases exercise the natural function of woman and bring children into the world. For nature, which never contemplated the production of a learned or a muscular woman, will be revenged upon her offspring, and the New Woman, if a mother at all, will be the mother of a New Man, as different, indeed, from the present race as possible, but _how_ different the clamorous females of to-day cannot suspect, or surely they would at once renounce the platform and their prospects of the tribune

But it is not to be supposed that even the prospect of peopling the world with stunted and hydrocephalic children will deter the modern woman from her path, even though her modernity lead to the degradation and ultimate extinction of the race. She will raise the old, half-humorous query once more: ‘Why trouble about posterity; what has posterity done for us?’ and thus go her triumphant gait heedless of the second and greater Fall she is preparing for mankind.

II.--THE DRESS REFORMERS.

‘I do not like the fashion of your garments--you will say, they are Persian attire, but let them be changed.’--_King Lear._

Modern dress-reform crusades have ever been allied with womanly revolts against man’s authority. They proceeded originally from that fount of vulgarity, that never-failing source of offence--America. In the United States, that ineffable land of wooden nutmegs and timber hams, of strange religions, of jerrymandering and unscrupulous log-rollery, the Prophet Bloomer first arose, and, discarding the feminine skirt, stood forth, unashamed and blatant, in trousers! The wrath of the Bloomers (as the followers of the Prophet were termed) was calculated to disestablish at once and for ever the skirts and frocks, the gowns and miscellaneous feminine fripperies, that had obtained throughout the centuries; and they conceived that with the abolishment of skirts the long-sustained supremacy of man was also to disappear, even as the walls of Jericho fell before the trumpet-sound of the Lord’s own people. For these enthusiasts were no cooing doves, but rather shrieking cats, and they were both abusive and overweening. No more should ‘tempestuous petticoats’ inspire a Herrick to dainty verse, but the woman of the immediate future should move majestically through the wondering continents of the Old World and the New with mannish strides in place of the feminine mincing gait induced by clinging draperies. Away Erato and your sister Muses--if, indeed, your susceptibilities would have allowed your remaining to behold the spectacle! For really, that must have been a ‘sight for sore eyes’-- to adopt the expression of the period--the too-convincing vision of a middle-aged woman, proof against ridicule, consumed with all seriousness and an ineffable zeal for converting all and sundry to her peculiar views in the matter of a becoming and convenient attire. And never was prophet less justified of his country than the Bloomer seer of hers; for nakedness, even to undraped piano-legs, was then a reproach in the country of the Stars and Stripes, where legs are not legs, an’t please you, but ‘extremities’ or ‘limbs;’ where trousers are neither more than ‘pantaloons’ nor less than ‘continuations.’ In that Land of Freedom, where one would have outraged all modesty by the merest mention of legs or feet--these last indispensable adjuncts being generally known as ‘pedal extremities’--it surely was illogical in the highest degree that women should wear a species of trouser, and thereby proclaim the indelicate(!) fact to all the world of their possession of legs. Truly Pudicitia is as American a goddess as Mammon is a god!

For the Bloomer costume was nothing else but a travesty of male attire. Aggressiveness is inseparable, it would seem, from all new ideas, and the minor prophets of Bloomerism were aggressive enough, in all conscience. They were not content with wearing the breeches in the literal sense: they sought to convert all womankind to their faith by the writing of pamphlets and the making of speeches on public platforms. Mrs. Ann Bloomer was their fount of inspiration. She it was who introduced the craze to America in 1849. Two years later it had crossed the herring-pond, and that _Annus Mirabilis_, the year of the Great Exhibition, witnessed a few of its enthusiasts--beldams in breeches--clad in this hybrid garb, walking in London streets. But women refused to be converted in any large numbers, and only a few more than usually impudent females went so far as to back their views by wearing the badges of the cult in public.