Chapter V

Beauty vs. Sex Distinction

IN LONDON, a few years since, 'Arry referred descriptively to his "Arriet as “a Hat 'n Feathers." In New York the slang of the same class refers to a woman as “a skoit," sometimes even “a rag." Women do not habitually refer to a man as “trousers," or “a stovepipe."

Better proof could hardly be asked of the main purpose of the dress of women—sex distinction. Kipling, in that scornful poem of his called The Vampire (strange, how men object to the logical results of prostitution, yet maintain that business on the ground that they must have it!) describes the offending female as “a rag, a bone, and a hank of hair." Now the bones she surely cannot help—he would have done better to have mentioned her adipose rather than osseous tissue; but the “rag" and the “hank of hair” are fairly enough rung in as distinctive attributes.

The long hair of women is one of the essential sex distinctions we insist on at present, though there was a long historic period when men, too, gloried in their flowing locks, and short hair was for slaves. Long curls are precisely as pretty, and precisely as uncomfortable and troublesome, on little boys as on little girls, but the boy resents them as early as he can, because they make him “look like a girl." We, with our exaggerated ideas of sex, hasten to differentiate the smallest children, and to keep up the distinction we make it a penal offense for one sex to wear the clothes of the other.

Yet under economic pressure or from motives of self-defense, women have repeatedly been known to wear men's clothes and so to pass for men, successfully, for long periods of time. We endeavor to increase and intensify what natural distinction there is, from ulterior motives.

In this connection the skirt is the chief item of distinction. It is the most conspicuous, and can be distinguished at the longest distance—I have read that on our wide western plains a mile is roughly measured by this: “As far as you can tell a man from a woman," meaning, of course, as far as you can tell a skirt from trousers.

More than one influence combined to evolve our trailing robes, which, as we have seen, still hold their place for kings and priests and judges. Those long flowing lines do indeed add dignity to the figure, as modern sculpture admits when it tries to make a statue in trousers; and that sense of dignity and grace does linger in our minds in connection with the once dominant sex. But there is no reason that this idea should obtain in the dress of children, or during the free coltish years of growing girlhood. Among grown women, or men either, there is no objection to these long lines being used when the symbolic purpose governs the costume.

So with long hair; there is a modicum of true aesthetic feeling in our admiration of the sleek, close-lying lines of coiled or braided hair, or of crisp curls and loose waves, yet, so far as this is genuine beauty, it is as beautiful on a man's head as on a woman's. Long hair is not a natural distinction. The mane, in so far as it is differentiated by sex, is a male characteristic, as in the bison or the lion; even tomcats have thicker hair about the neck than the female, for the same reason— protection in sex combat. But the mane of horses, used for defense against flies, is common to both sexes. It is equally common to both sexes with us; equally beautiful, equally troublesome, and equally unsanitary.

How amusing it is to hear solemn scientific men dilate on the danger of germ-carrying whiskers, even if washed daily; yet never once mention the unwashed masses of the average woman's hair. If it is well cleaned once a week, that is the exception, for most women work, and to wash their hair is an added exertion they can seldom face cheerfully.

Long hair checks activity—lest it be disarranged. I have known women, hot, dusty, cindery, on a long railway journey, refuse the luxury of an offered swim, en route, otherwise perfectly convenient, because it would “wet their hair."

Our assumption that long hair is beautiful is very largely an assumption. Use your own eyes, your own fresh judgment, and look carefully at the hair of all the women in the street car, or the theatre, or anywhere that you can study it

In more than one country the women have to bear not only the burden of long hair, but—crowning absurdity—a cap to cover it, as for instance in Holland or Brittany. If they must needs decorate their heads with coif or cap, why must there be the heat and weight of long hair underneath, and the added labor of caring for it? The cap would sit lightly on short cropped hair, the woman look the same and feel far more comfortable. But neither in this regard nor any other do women reason about their costumes and customs; they merely submit to the conditions in which they find themselves.

The predominant attitude of sex distinction governs not only the shape, size, and color of women's garments, but the nature of the fabric. It would surprise us much if we found animals in which one sex had an entirely different “coat" from the other; one covered with thick fur, for instance, and the other with thin sparse hair; one having smooth, close-fitting, watertight feathers, and the other only down. Yet in this way do we delight to pile up our mountain of distinction between the sexes. till the woman in the novel is supposed to delight in laying her cheek against his “rough tweed," and the man experiences a mild ecstasy in “the frou-frou of her silken skirts." When she, for utilitarian purposes appears in tweed, she is called “mannish," or her costume is; and if he should “frou-frou"—but that can hardly be thought of! His equivalent is in the clank of steel, when weapons are worn; but without that the only noise he can make with his clothes is the creak of a starched shirt-bosom, a sound not especially alluring. If women are to be so loaded up with frou-frou that he may be pleased and attracted, why should not he carry a rattle, or wear a bell, or make some sort of noise to please and attract women?

In the human species alone the female assumes the main burden of sex-attraction, on the simple and all-too-evident ground that in the human species alone the female depends on the male for her living. To him this attraction of the other sex is naturally desirable; indeed, by nature, a far more pressing necessity than with her; but he has one all-sufficing bait which supersedes all others—the coin of the realm. He does not have to be beautiful, or even healthy; he does not have to excel in mind or morals; he has simply to show that he can "support a wife."

We all know the other side of it, base of much comedy, as when Mr. Gilbert's legal aspirant “fell in love with a rich attorney's elderly ugly daughter." It was very amusing. The delighted father tells him: "She may very well pass for forty-three in the dusk with the light behind her." Very funny, quite absurd, clearly a contemptible thing to do; but, when the sexes are reverse, not in the least unusual.

The man has in his gift all the necessaries of life, the comforts and luxuries, the honors, too—and she, to secure these things, must first secure him. Hence that desperate efflorescence, so foreign to the real nature of women.

There is some dispute, among those who think but a little way, as to this being the cause of such feminine decoration. It is advanced, seriously enough, that women dress as they do from a disinterested aesthetic sense, and to imitate—or to outshine, other women.

As to the claim of an aesthetic sense, there is scant evidence of it. As our last chapter showed, the true beauty of the body is utterly lost sight of, ignored, and sinned against; and in choice of fabrics, in line and color, in applied decoration, the governing force is fashion, not beauty. Some fashions are beautiful, some ugly; the women show no perception of the difference.

As to imitation, it is quite true that women are imitative in dress, but not to the ultra-submissiveness of men, whose main ambition seems to be to look exactly alike, and to whom the least eccentricity in dress is anathema. A woman may wear her hair short, if she chooses, with criticism of course, and even some avoidance; but fancy a man wearing his à la chignon! His mates would pick at him as a flock of birds do at a stranger. It takes more strength and more courage for a man to be “peculiar" in his dress than for a woman, speaking generally.

But when it comes to the statement that women decorate themselves out of rivalry with other women, that merely admits the true cause. Rivalry—for what? For the favor of man, of course. A very obvious instance of this is in the costumes and behavior of a number of women at one of our “summer resorts" during the almost wholly feminine week, and that upon Saturday night, when the men come. Another is in the exhortation of pious advisers to married women to keep up the pretty tricks of their courtship days—to wear a rose in the hair, and so on—as they did then. To which the obvious answer is that of the man who, when similarly exhorted to maintain the gifts and “attentions" of his courting period, replied: "Why should I run after the street car when I've caught it?" Why, indeed.

But of all final and satisfying proofs on this question, the best is to study the costume effects of the class of women who most openly and helplessly live by the favor of men—who never catch the street car, but must needs continuously run after it. They make no secret of what they dress for; their rivalry is open.

Any competent inquiry must make clear the simple facts of, first, the essentially masculine nature of sex decoration; and, second, that our women have become in this sense “unsexed," having adopted a male distinction. At the same time we must recognize, under that strange disguise, the love of beauty which belongs to our race—not to either sex alone; and see further how the domestic, economic, and other limitations of women's lives have distorted that beauty sense.

The beauty of fabrics lies in color and texture, in pattern, in softness both to eve and hand, in fold and line. Both men and women feel this. As we love the ripple of long wheat in the wind, the wave motion of water, the lift and sway of leafy boughs, the soft bloom of flowers and fruit, so do we love silk and lace and velvet, soft linen and rich brocade. But where we see women, following blindly the necessity of their position, pursue it to ultimate absurdity till they carry for a handkerchief a bit of cambric and lace that no adult human being could comfortably blow his—or her—nose in once; or till they put on for underclothes mere cobwebs of flimsy lace and ribbon—things no stretch of imagination can call garments—then we see true beauty sacrificed to sex.

Men's clothes, with all their limitations and absurdities, have one main advantage—they are standardized. Let no one imagine that this criticizing of the dress of women involves any claim of perfection for the dress of men. The stiff ugly trousers that bind the knee in sitting and are liable to split when the wearer suddenly squats; the coat, which must be taken off in order to do any active work; the hard, stiff, heavy hat, with its “sweat band," and its concomitant of baldness; or—to consider other races—the Oriental custom of shaving the head and then wearing a turban (a thing quite as absurd as the heavy hair of women with a cap to cover it all) the dress of men, in general, is by no means an ideal. But such as it is, it is standardized. It is practically uniform, and The Man is noted rather than the clothes.

Because of this standardization the burden of choice is very greatly lightened. A man, of similar class and character, does not have to give a tenth part of the time and thought to his dress that is required of a woman. Neither is he judged by his dress as is a woman. Many a great man is described by his admiring biographer as “careless, even slovenly, in his dress," and though there is room for criticism on the ground of neatness—all preferring to see clean clothes on man or woman—we do not superciliously criticize a man because he “does not know how to dress," as we do a woman.

The woman's dress, her sex-specialized, highly decorative dress, has been identified with her womanhood, and she is condemned for falling short in this supposedly “womanly" attribute; whereas in fact this extra decorative effort is essentially masculine. Our women, in their "war-paint, beads and feathers," have become so far male; and our men, in their contented serviceable obscurity, have become so far female.

If the feeling of women was for beauty, real beauty, applied to the human form in combined fabrics, we should present a very different spectacle. Again and again, in the history of costume we have seen beauty; types of dress which blessed that age or race and have remained to us in picture and statue. But they never stayed. There was no true perception, no joyful recognition of and insistence on the principles of beauty. Many races have evolved a permanent costume, especially among peasants; but with some beautiful features they also preserve grotesque, ugly, uncomfortable, or unhygienic ones, with equal pride.

No costume for women has been evolved which is more convenient, decent, comfortable, and, in its own way, beautiful, than the Chinese. Yet that very nation, on those very women, also evolved that unforgivable monstrosity, the “Golden Lily.”

There will be much to say in the course of this work, on Fashion, and in this chapter belongs the treatment of the contributing influence of sex-distinction to that Undisputed Power. Its economic and psychic aspects will be discussed later.

If the arbitrary changes of Fashion were common to the race we should find them followed by men as conspicuously as by women; but when we see as marked a difference as exists between the sexes in this regard, we must look for the cause either in some essential distinction between the two, or in a variation based on special conditions affecting one of them.

It is clearly to be seen, in our time and country, as in most of the more advanced races of the world, that the “fashions" in women's clothes are (a) more numerous and varied—see the tremendous sale of "patterns" and of magazines which live largely on the sale of said patterns; (b) more rapid in change; and (c) are studied and followed by a far larger proportion of the wearers.

Men are not averse to studying their own fashions, especially when young and “in love." but in a given number of men and women not young and not in love, a much greater proportion of the latter will be found studying the “fashion page."

This our easy androcentric view has casually set down as "woman's weakness"; whereas we need to learn how this bit of man's weakness has been so completely transferred to the other sex. If we study it for the moment, in him, as among the unblushing gorgeousness of savage "bucks" and the discriminating splendor of a Beau Brummel, or a "Sir Piercie Shafton," we may begin to trace the line of evolution.

The primitive male exhibits his natural sex tendency in decoration as innocently as any peacock; and so do more sophisticated males under conditions which allow it. Blazing masculine splendor, with velvet, embroidery, jewels and lace, was found among men who did not “have to work"—knights and nobles and “gentlemen." The gradual development of our present economic era, where work and manhood are almost coterminous; and where, as with us, it is a point of masculine pride to maintain women in idleness, or at least in domestic industry without pay, shows us the original characteristics completely changed. The man now, instead of laboriously developing crest and wattle, mane and tail-feathers on himself, or their equivalent in gorgeous raiment, now exhibits them on his woman.

It is pathetically amusing to see the struggle between a man's human common sense, expressed in his opinions about women's clothes, and his masculine instinct, expressed in his actions. His critical human judgment loudly complains of the vanity of women, the extravagance of women, the women's silly submission to fashion, but his male instinct leads him straight to the most vain, extravagant and fashionable of them all.

Women are not fools, nor are they so vain as is supposed. Vanity, from prancing stag to strutting cock is inherently male. Never a female creature do you find that can be called “vain” till you come to woman, and her so-called “feminine vanity" is by no means inherent, but acquired under the pressure of economic necessity.

Let a man try to put himself in the place of a young woman, with every chance of “fun," all his good times, all his opportunities to go anywhere, to see anything, to dance, to ride, to walk even—in some cases, depending on some girl's asking him!' Suppose the girl was the one who “had the price." He would have then to please the girl—naturally. He would have not only his natural impulse in that direction, but this new and heavy necessity. This is what has happened to women for thousands of years. There was no liberty for woman. It was a man's world, and not safe for her to go about in. She was liable to be attacked at any time, by one of her “natural protectors." Except under his escort she was housebound, a prisoner.

All this is as a mere aside from that still more vital necessity of securing a permanent livelihood by marrying, and the natural desire to please the one you love.

The way to a man's heart, we are told, is through his stomach, and we sagely add: “Every woman should know how to cook." But the shortest route to a man's heart is through his eyes. We have no record of the culinary skill of Cleopatra, or Ninon de I'Enclos, or Madame Recamier. There have been millions of assiduous female cooks—but the record heart-breakers, from Aphrodite down, did it by good looks.

We are not all born beautiful; neither do we all have by nature that capricious charm which holds the vacillating fancy of the male. One of our amiable androcentric proverbs is that women are eternally changeable—"varium et mutabile." Yes? Are other females? In other races the male, the naturally variable factor, changes and fluctuates as he may, so offering choice to the female; she, the natural selector, thus by discrimination, improving the race. But with us we find him doing the choosing, and we find the woman, depending on his favor not only for mating, but for bread, caters to his taste by this admired capriciousness.

Let it be clearly understood that it is not a pleasure to all women to spend their lives in an endless and hopeless pursuit of new fashions—like a cat chasing her tail. It adds heavily to the care, the labor, the expense, of living. It is a pitiful, senseless, degrading business, and they know it. But let one of them be misled by man's loud contempt for “the folly of women"; let her show originality in design, daring in execution; let her appear in public in a sensible, comfortable, hygienic, beautiful, but unfashionable costume—! Do the admiring men flock to her side? Do they say: "Here is a woman not silly and sheep-like, not extravagant and running after constant change!"? They do not. If they are near enough to feel responsible, they murmur softly: "My dear—I hate to have you so conspicuous. A woman must never be conspicuous." If very honest, they may add: “It reflects on me. It looks as if I couldn't afford to dress my wife properly." As for the others—they simply stay away. With lip-service they praise the "common-sense" costume, but with full dance cards and crowding invitations they pursue the highest-heeled, scantest-skirted, biggest-hatted, “very latest" lady. (At this date, April, 1915, "skirts are fuller." hats very small, and we hear “the small waist is coming in again"!)

Women are foolish, beyond doubt, but they are not nearly so foolish as they look. Those “looks" of theirs, especially in the matter of ever-changing dress, are most valuable assets. Now let no woman take this as a charge of deliberate calculation. It is nothing of the sort. It is an “acquired characteristic" of the female of genus homo, quite unconscious. But it is by no means a “feminine distinction." When women have freed themselves from their false and ignominious position of economic dependence on men, then they can develop in themselves and their clothing, true beauty. They will then recognize that since the human body does not change in its proportions and activities from day to day, neither should its clothing; that if the eye of the observer craves variety, or the mood of the wearer, this may be found legitimately in color and decoration, without the silly variations which make of that noble instrument, the body, a mere dummy, for exhibition purposes.

As we read in the old ballad:

"When I was aware of a fine young man

Come frisking along the way.

The youngster was clothed in scarlet red.

In scarlet fine and gay."

Then, on the day following, was seen:

“... the same young man

Come drooping along the way.

"The scarlet he wore the day before,

It was clean cast away,

And at every step he fetched a sigh—

'Alack! and ‘Ah-well-a-day!' "

Here we have the legitimate change wherein the costume expresses the mood, a need by no means limited to either sex. That we should always be free to use. In our artificial sex distinction in dress, we have robbed ourselves of the highest beauty in both. We have cut off all the haughty splendor natural to the male, which should rejoice the hearts both of the man in joyous exhibition and of the woman in her glad observance. Nothing is left him but the insignia of office—which he fondly cherishes, and the foolish sashes and aprons of his secret societies. It is a pity, a great pity, to rob mankind of its instinctive glory, and womankind of glad appreciation. The world is starved in beauty because of it.

Then further, by foisting upon woman this unnatural display—display which is governed by the easily jaded fancy of the capricious male, we have left ourselves, instead of beauty, this uneasy flutter of signals, this mad race of ceaseless changes, each crying louder than the last: “Look here! Look here!"

If women had, as some allege, an instinct of beauty, they would never allow themselves to exhibit the gross excesses, the jarring contradictions, the pathetic, thread-bare, hardly veiled appeals, of their man-designed clothing. If sex distinction were working normally, women would demand in men a rich variety, a conspicuous impressive beauty. The world would throb and brighten to the color music of Nature's born exhibitor, the male.

Then further, that same normal distinction would strike the true note of womanhood, and give us another beauty, restful and satisfying. It is woman, the eternal mother, who should express peace and power in her attire, not glitter like a peddlar's tray, to catch the eye. In her flowering girlhood she should be lovely as an unblown bud, with all the delicate shades of mood and fancy, and in that long and splendid period of exclusively human life, after she has outgrown the limitation of sex, then indeed she should make it part of that human life to express the highest beauty.

But now! Now we must bear the sight of women, young and old. degraded from their high estate—the choosing mothers of the world, and instead, in garb and bearing, become themselves the caterers, the exhibitors on approval.

That men want it is too clearly proven by their constant efforts in design. That men like it is clearly proven by their admiration of the "stylish" woman, their neglect and avoidance of the woman who dares dress otherwise. But that in the face of these facts, they should so naively speak of “feminine vanity," “feminine love of change," and the like, and joke serenely, about the “feminine love of shopping," is unworthy of “the logical sex."

Women do spend more time and take more pleasure in the consideration, examination, and purchase of clothes, than do men; but observe men in the act of buying a horse, or a boat, or a gun, or a fishing rod—they will “shop" some time in these processes, and enjoy it.

Our common ideas of sex distinction are both exaggerated and incorrect. There is by no means as much of it as we suppose. Our human qualities which we hold in common are far more numerous and important than our sex qualities, which we hold separately. Further, our generalizations on the subject are quite wide of the mark and sometimes flatly opposite to the truth, as in this idea of "feminine vanity."

And nowhere do our errors on this subject speak more loudly, show more clearly, than in dress. When we shall have reached greater wisdom, when we know the difference between sex qualities and race qualities, between the essentially male and the essentially female, between the force of a natural attraction and the force of an economic necessity, then we can manifest our higher stage of progress in a far more legitimate and also more beautiful costume. Certain essentials will be observed, as of modesty, warmth, suitability to various trades; certain distinctions proper to sex, as in the greater gorgeousness and variability of the male; but the major note will be adaptation to the human body and its activities.

Holding fast to this, our aesthetic sense will work hand in hand with truth and need, as it should; and we may so develop costumes as lovely and as serviceable as the plumage of a swan, the shimmering scales of a fish.

There will be room, too, for the subtlest play of personality, or original fancy, far more so than at present. Free bodies, honestly expressed spirits, needs well met, and all the lovely play of fresh invention, unforced but welcome, will give us a world of beauty in human dress such as we have not yet dreamed of.

(To be continued)