Chapter III
The Principles Involved
WE CANNOT competently judge any human product without knowledge of the principles involved in its construction.
Some achievement of cookery may be offered which is beautiful to the eye, soft to the hand, agreeable in odor, and even savory to the palate, yet none of these are sufficient grounds for judgment in an article of food. It must be to some degree nutritious, or it is absolutely without value; ease of digestion and assimilation adds to that value, and it must furthermore be devoid of injurious qualities.
Again, a bridge, crossing a great river, is submitted for approval. The artist may approve of its beauty as part of the landscape; and the traveling public find it broad and easy, but unless it is sound in principles of mechanics, able to stand the pressure of the water even in times of flood; to stand the friction, the weight, the jar, of the traffic, it is not a good bridge.
Human clothing must be judged on many grounds. Its relation to life is far from simple. It must be true to the obvious requirements of immediate use, and not be false to the laws of either our physiology or our psychology.
Clothing is not only a social necessity; not only for the most part a physical advantage, and often a mechanical assistance, but it has a high esthetic value, and the closest relation to psychologic expression.
In forming definite judgments on human clothing we should be competent to measure it from many standpoints, with full knowledge of the principles involved.
Such judgment would be able to show the uselessness, the harmfulness, the ugliness, the wrongness, of many articles of dress now widely esteemed, and to lay down certain standards of measurement by which, hereafter, we may learn wisely to accept or to condemn.
Our present universal inability to form such judgment is due to general ignorance of some or all of the basic principles of right clothing. Our most common criticism rests on nothing deeper than a personal taste, itself without basis or training; and upon the quality called "style" or “fashion," a modifying influence of such importance as to call for extended treatment later.
In the disconnected efforts of “dress reformers," mainly directed toward the clothing of women, the principal issue has been the hygienic effect of given articles of costume; then the esthetic quality; and, to a very small degree, the principle of personal expression.
But no sound and thorough change can be upheld without a clear knowledge of basic laws; of the intimate relation of our clothing to spirit as well as body; of its extreme social importance, and of the real, necessity of right clothing in every relation of life.
To undertake this study we must of course have some definite understanding of the nature and purpose of human life; we cannot criticize the rigging of a ship unless we know what a ship is for.
Briefly then, for the purpose of this discussion, we will premise that:
- Life is Growth and Action;
- Human Life is twofold, consisting of both the Personal and the Social;
- Personal Life demands free Growth and full Action in Personal Relation;
- Social Life demands the free Growth of Right Social Relation, and the fullness of Social Action.
Now, to descend promptly to a visible instance of the relation between clothing, and this outline of a definition of human Life; suppose a boy wears shoes, that, like those of "Uncle Arley," are far too tight.
These will, (a) hinder his personal growth; (b) interfere with his personal relationships, as in his hobbling walk displeasing the lady of his choice; (c) retard his growth in Social Relation; (d) and lower his value in Social Action by keeping him out of the association and the employment he would otherwise have attained.
This one concrete instance of the relation of a man's shoes to a man's life, is sufficient to illustrate the principles involved.
Mechanically the shoe should be durable, able to withstand moisture, cold, and friction.
Physiologically the shoe should fit the foot, leaving it room for growth while young, and for free action always.
Beyond these obvious needs we may see the effect of the man's shoes on his associates, on his own state of mind, on his employer's attitude, on his fulfillment of duty, on his social usefulness. Then, since all human conduct is to be measured ethically, and since the shoe is so necessary a condition of conduct, we may say of this kind of shoe that it is Right (for the given individual, and in given conditions) and of that kind of shoe that it is Wrong.
Returning to the above definition of human life, it is easy to see that our judgment of a given article of clothing, even when we are measuring it by personal growth and action, and by social growth and action, must still be open to wide modification in regard to the relative values involved at a given place and time.
As for instance, in the case of the shoe, a man might be physically uncomfortable in a tight patent leather, yet by wearing it, gain a bride, or advance in social recognition, even in securing right employment; whereas, if he wore moccasins or carpet-slippers, his physical comfort would be utterly counter-balanced by the injury to his prospects in other lines.
No aspect of human conduct is simple enough for snap judgment. The higher we advance in social organization the more complex grow our relationships. Therefore it becomes more and more necessary that we clearly recognize and firmly adhere to right Principles.
Let us now see if it be possible to indicate some reliable guides of this sort; in order to establish clear standards of judgments on clothing.
If we approach the subject from its simple side, the personal, we may build with safety on the foundation of physical health.
For the merest rudiments of animal comfort, for the fulfillment of basic physical functions, as well as for all the higher and subtler social relationships; physical health, and efficiency are essential.
We may classify our principles in this order:
- Physical—Mechanical, hygienic.
- Psychical—Esthetic, ethical and social.
So we may judge, from standards of the first two, that any article of clothing which injures health and lowers efficiency is Wrong. Measuring from the last three we may similarly judge an article of clothing which offends legitimate esthetic or ethical standards, or which interferes with right social development, as Wrong.
As it is always easier to judge dispassionately some wholly foreign instance, let us take a well-known one, about which we are already quite decided, and show why it is thus generally condemned. This instance is the “Golden Lily," the crippling deforming shoes so long forced upon the women of a large section of China. With perfect cheerfulness, as the article was never used by us, we agree that this is wrong; and we are perfectly correct. It is wrong by all our abovenamed principles; mechanically, because it grossly limits and cripples the activity of the foot; hygienically because this limitation injuriously affects the health; esthetically because the crippled foot, the shrunken leg, the hobbling gait, violate the conditions of human beauty; ethically because of the initial cruelty and lasting restriction involved; and socially because of the grotesque magnifying and perversion of sex distinction, and the interference with the sufferer's social growth and action.
Yet this custom so long maintained in China, has been thought not wrong but right; and defended, doubtless, on all the above grounds: mechanically, because it prevented the woman from escaping—made her more submissive; hygienically, as tending to maintain the delicacy and feebleness suitable to the female; esthetically, as being distinctly beautiful (?); ethically, as inducing a proper patience and endurance; and socially, as keeping women in their true relation to society—which was, entirely out of it.
It is not hard at all for us to condemn the “Golden Lily," nor to follow the clear lines of reasoning which justify that condemnation, on the above principles; but it is hard for us to put ourselves in the mental attitude of the Chinese upholders of the custom, and to follow the reasoning by which so atrocious a misuse of the human body was defended.
Again, let us take another instance from alien lands, the veiling and muffling of women in various Eastern nations.
This custom we also agree is wrong; only less so than the previous instance because it involves less initial cruelty, and is less completely crippling. It is however condemnable under exactly the same heads; from the mechanical interference with the use of the eves, to the social error of a magnified insistence on sex and exclusion from social relationship. As in the former case, it is defended in the opinion of those nations, as wholly suitable, even necessary, to the nature and place of women.
The whole subject of the dress of women is heavily overweighed by this insistence on sex. It shows, more visibly, more constantly, than any words, how exclusively she is considered as a female; how negligible has been her relation to society as a whole. To her, the very word, Society, has been distorted and belittled. It has grown to mean, to most women, a form of amusement. They really consider the flocking together of idle people, to eat, to drink, to dance, to play cards, as“society."
To satisfy the demand of a human being for human relationship, vet at the same time to exclude the woman completely from true normal association, there has been evolved this false one, this simulacrum, this imitation “world," in which women whose husbands can afford it, find occupation and entertainment.
Other women, whose husbands are unable to afford it, look longingly upward at this game of their “superiors," and in the intermediate grades we see real intelligence and ingenuity, with a high order of persevering effort, spent in endeavoring “to get into society."
As clothing is essentially a social product, a social necessity, and as this kind of “society" is all that most women know, we find, of course, that their clothing is mainly modified to the arbitrary demands of this play-world.
In the psvchologv of dress we must make initial allowance for that common phenomenon of the human mind, the power of arbitrarily attaching emotional values to given acts or objects. This power is practically unlimited. Our “feelings," or mental sensations, either in passive or active form, consist of the reception or expression of energy.
Suppose a certain picture, say a “September Morn," is exhibited to a group of animals.' They “see" it as a patch of color, but no emotion is aroused. Now exhibit the picture to a group of men, women and children. The children see it, and understand what it is—"a lady in the water," they would call it, “with no bathing dress." The men and women seeing it would “feel" more than the children; some impressed by the tender warmth and beauty of the soft morning light, by the young grace of the bather; some, according to their previous education, by sentiments of gross pleasure, or of stern disapproval.
Many savages regard an ordinary photograph of themselves with fear and horror, believing that the spirit goes out of them to the possessor of the picture.
Religious people, in various races, regard certain pictures as sacred, and experience the deepest emotion in looking at them. This emotion of reverence is one of the most arbitrarily established and widely experienced by humanity. We consider certain objects as sacred, and experience, in regarding them, intense emotion. The child does not; but the child is taught that he must, and soon he does. We may attach this emotion to a printed book, a carved image, a stone building, a string of beads.
So with other feelings, of glory, of horror, of disgust, of fear. They are all capable of arbitrary attachment to, and withdrawal from, a given object.
In dress, as the most immediately attainable form of expression, the most universally visible, the most open to modification, we have always found a free field for emotional expression. Some of this is direct, sincere, and based on continuously acting laws. In primitive races we find it the most candid, as in the adoption of “sack-cloth and ashes" to show grief, which is only a step above the gashing of one's body for the same purpose.
As was indicated in the summary of motives in the first chapter, Symbolism is one of the strongest of the primary motives in dress, and that Symbolism ranges all the way from the crude poster effects of savagery to the most delicate distinctions between "real" and "imitation," “hand" or machine work, in our modern attire.
In this study of the principles involved in dress, we must establish some clear method for measuring the relative values of a given article or system of clothing.
In order to do this fairly, the fact of our present loose and inconsequent attachment of values must be borne in mind. Because a given people at a given time, holds a certain kind of dress as “noble," as "beautiful," as“dignified."“refined," or“proper," does not in the least make it so—see the “Golden Lilies.”
We must be prepared to study our own clothing without any regard whatever to existing or pre-existing sentiment. Somewhere are to be found facts and laws underlying this great social manifestation; the facts of laws of sociology, within which we must study the action of all these principles.
The dress of women, while in large measure to be studied under the same laws as those modifying the dress of men, has two marked and interdependent distinctions; that open to any observer—the magnification of sex, and that so far less observed but even more important—the limitation of social development.
As our social relationship is the latest and highest field of human development, its demands must outweigh all others, unless they absolutely imperil individual health and development. No costume, however desirable socially, could last if it checked the growth and action of the individual beyond a certain point; but it has so far been possible, in costume as in many other fields of human expression, to maintain something quite compatible with individual advantage, yet not impeding social advantage.
The major objection to the dress of women, speaking here of that of the majority of clothed races, is that it does impede the social development of the wearer. This is its heaviest injury, even beyond the ill effects to health, the interference with comfort and freedom, the continual insistence on sex-distinction.
In facing this question we should again take note of certain peculiarities of our compound life, our individual-social existence.
So long as human beings live long enough to reproduce the species the race is not extinct—see Australian Aborigines. The human race may live, individually, in great comfort, health and happiness, with a very low degree of social organization—see South Sea Islanders.
A high degree of social development may be attained compatible with gross injury to large classes of individuals—see history in general, to date.
A high degree of social development may be attained, compatible with gross injury to women—see Ancient Greece, China, the Orient generally.
The highest degree of social development can never be attained without the full advantages being shared by all the competent individuals—and also, indispensably, without the full duties of that high relationship being participated in by all.
Now we are studving here the influence of one form of social expression, Dress, on one-half of the social constituents—women. As perhaps the least important among our selected principlcs, at least among civilized women today, let us study the mechanical conditions of their dress.
From the point of view of a mechanician, the human body is an engine of great subtlety and power, capable of wide and varied uses.
Primarily, it can stand up; it can walk, run, leap, swim, climb; it can lift, carry, pull, push, and strike; and beyond these crude primal powers lie all the exquisite subtleties of physical skill involved in our myriad crafts and arts.
Those mechanical possibilities are those of the human body, and are not by any means confined to the male body.
The mechanical distinctions of the female body enable her to bear and bring forth children; but do not thereby disable her, save in the most temporary sense, from exercise of the common human powers. It is quite true that a pregnant woman near her time cannot run as fast nor jump as far as in her girlhood, but it is not true that this temporary limitation disables her for life.
Such mechanical disabilities as belong to the female sex, woman shares with many other animals, none of whom are rendered incapable of the necessary activities of their species by the special activities of their sex. The alleged “feebleness" of women, their supposed inherent inability to do certain things, is in large measure due to the mechanical disabilities of their clothing.
We are not speaking here of health. It may be that some of the crippled Chinese women live without disease; that the veiled beauties of the harem reach hale old age; the point here urged is not of illness, but of slowness, awkwardness, weakness, tottering inefficiency.
Among our own women, in what we fondly call civilized countries, the major mechanical injury in clothing is due to three articles, the corset, the skirt, and the shoe,
The corset, in its earliest form of a “stay," or breast girdle, was a mechanical aid, as is the breech-clout to the savage. It did not affect the soft trunk muscles at all, and if not tight enough to restrict breathing or check the development of the chest, was not injurious. That ancient and sensible article we still sometimes see in use among modern dancers and gymnasts.
But the corset, in the more modern form, grew to be quite another article. Its place as a “stay" was transferred to the trunk as a whole. As a woman I knew said to a to-be mother: "If you never wore corsets before you need them now to support your back." The italics are mine.
It was generally supposed that a woman's body lacked the mechanical advantages of a spine, and of the supporting muscles of the trunk, and had to be reinforced by a species of permanent splint; a stiffened bandage, to hold it together or hold it up.
The mechanical effect of this bandage was precisely like that of any other tight and stiff appliance. The bound muscles were weakened, atrophied, almost lost, and the flaccid shapeless mass resultant did indeed need “support" and “form," having lost its own.
Now the muscles of the body are not mere matters of ornament. to be shaped and suppressed at will. They are parts of an intricately adjusted machine, and are all essential to the perfect working of that machine. To stunt and weaken any part of the body injures its mechanical efficiency as a whole. It need not kill, it need not even bring about disease. A bird with clipped wings may thrive and grow fat, but as a flying machine it is seriously injured.
The woman's body, as a machine, was grotesquely impaired by the corset. It could not stand as easily, or as long; it could not bend as easily—all our handkerchief-retrieving gallantry comes from wearing this article, from this idea that “it is hard for a woman to stoop." It is not hard for a woman—it is hard for a corset.
As it happens, within the last few years, those whose high mission it is to decide the size and shape of a woman's body, altering it at their pleasure, have given us first the “straight front" corset, and then that amazing object now seen in our shop windows, which runs from waist to knee, almost; which binds up hip and abdomen with steel, bone and elastic; and seems to serve principally as a supporting framework for a rigorous and complicated system of gartering.
This is purely a question of mechanics, and as such, is precisely as ridiculous and injurious on a woman's body as on a man's. Legs surely are not distinctions of sex, nor are stockings. If any man will solemnly fasten himself into one of these elaborate devices, and then try to pursue his customary avocations, he will feel at once the mechanical disadvantage resultant. If any woman, hitherto unaccustomed to such restrictions, any strong free-limbed, well-muscled normal woman, puts one on for the first time, she feels the same disadvantage.
Without touching on any other principle involved, the mechanical one is enough to show this corset as idiotic as a snug rubber band around a pair of shears.
The skirt, mechanically speaking, is only a hindrance. In its attachment it is more or less in injurious, involving a stricture around the waist muscles; in its weight it has the same effect as any other handicap to the same amount; and in its friction and pressure on the legs in motion, it forms a constant impediment.
I saw lately a moving-picture of a potato race on ice, first among men, then among women. The men, free-limbed, darted back and forth, not only with flashing swiftness, but with the grace of wheeling swallows. The women, poor things, leg-hampered from infancy, scooted awkwardly about, not only with half or less than half the speed, but with a wooden clumsiness that was positively pathetic.
And women are complimented on “grace!" A greyhound is graceful—male or female—but a greyhound in petticoats would not be graceful, nor a stag, nor a swan, nor any other living thing.
Skirted women may, of course, sit about in langorous attitudes, or stand for a while well poised. So long as no action of the legs is required, or if that action is an inch-bound walk, or swaying tassel-like motion in dancing, they may do very well, but in any movement requiring the full activity of the legs, a woman in skirts is mechanically limited, precisely as a man would be. The mincing twittering gait, supposed to be “feminine," is only “skirtine"—it has nothing to do with sex.
In recent years we have had the most conspicuous and laughable instance of this mechanical injury, in what was known as the hobbleskirt, now mercifully remitted by the Powers Who Clothe Us. Grown women cheerfully submitted to be hampered by a sheathing garment more like a trouser leg than a skirt; the extreme result of which was death from accident in many cases, death from utter inability to make a long step or leap when it was necessary; and the immediate general result of which was to make a laughing stock of womanhood. There are many deeper implications to be taken up later, but the immediate one of mechanical restriction is undeniable. It is as if we were given a single bracelet for two hands—a manacle of some six-inch freedom. so that we should have been obliged to feed ourselves with both hands at once. As complete, as contemptible was this manacle.
The other instance of our selected three is still painfully in evidence—the shoe
I say “painfully" with intention, for the thing hurts. It hurts when one first puts it on and essays to “break it in"—as if one's shoes were wild horses! It may become passably comfortable in time, if one does not ask too much of it, but if one takes a really long walk, or if one has to “stand on one's feet," as it is so touchingly phrased, then the shoes of women are found not only mechanically defective, but sometimes instruments of torture.
Here, more simply than in either former instances, we have a perfectly defined mechanical problem.
The foot, as an engine of locomotion, is precisely alike in male and female. It may be larger or smaller, more delicate or clumsier, weaker or stronger, but as a piece of machinery it is identical.
A human foot has certain definite purposes. It is built to support the weight of the body in an upright position; to carry that body about in the process of walking, and further to aid in its more rapid locomotion. That is what a foot is for; to stand on, to walk, run, jump with. Anything put on the foot which interferes with these uses is mechanically wrong.
The shoes of women share certain errors in construction with those of men, but they have two gross errors all their own. One is extreme constriction of the toes, the other that indefensible outrage on human activity—the high in-sloping heel.
There is some mechanical justification for a heel—within limits. Since the stiff leather sole prevents the supple curve of the foot, the action of the real heel; the raised piece of the sole, to check a slip for instance, giving something to “dig in” with, as in descending a steep slope, is a mechanical advantage. But the moment the heel is so high as to throw the arch of the foot out of use, so small as to weaken the supporting base of the whole body, or so misplaced as to throw the weight of the body not over the heel at all, but over the instep, then we have grave mechanical injury.
All these offenses are committed in the heels of women's shoes today. The explanation is to be found under other influences, but the plain facts of this mechanical sin are indisputable.
Western horsemen wear high heels for better stirrup hold, and are frankly incapacitated for much walking.
Women's high heels have no such excuse
They succeed in changing a dignified, strong, erect, steady, swift, capable, enduring instrument—the human body—into a pitiful, weak, bending, unstable, slow, inefficient, easily exhausted thing, a travesty on the high efficiency for which we are built.
Cruel and ignorant children have been known to force a cat's feet into walnut shells for the “fun” of seeing it totter and thump about until able to free itself. Women contentedly crush their own feet into these mechanical monstrosities and totter and thump about therein—for life.
(To be continued.)