Chapter II

Some Modifying Forces

ONCE recognizing that human clothing in material and structure is part of our social life; that cloth is a living tissue evolved by us for social use as much as fur or feathers are evolved for individual use; then we are prepared to recognize also the action of evolutionary forces on this tissue, in all its forms and uses.

That archaic fig-leaf story, which puts the whole burden on sex modesty as the origin of dress, we must lay aside among other folk myths, and study the origin, development, and variation of clothes as we would study the same processes in the vegetable or animal world.

Even under the guidance of those five main lines of influence, outlined in the previous chapter, we have still many minor forces to analyze, many other influences to take into account.

Those five were but primary motives; there are many other, secondary, tertiary and so on in endless attenuation; as when for instance, a girl begs for a certain article of dress with no relation whatever to any personal feeling, but “on account of my friend's feeling."

That a human creature should have developed so subtle a social sense as this is of course proof of a high degree of socialization; but whether the reason given is absolutely honest, whether the friend's feelings are as supposed, or, further, whether these feelings, in the girl or in the friends, have any sound basis, remains to be seen.

As the modifying processes in nature are many, are complex and often contradictory in action, so we find, acting upon our clothing this same confusion and contradiction, with the inevitable results.

As for instance our general use of white for little children. This is due partly to ease in washing, but largely to symbolism. White is associated with purity, with innocence. One who had purchased a white rabbit for his little girls to play with, remarked, to a friend of mine, “Do you not think, Miss, that next to the lamb, the rabbit is the most innocent of beasts?"

Now a rabbit is no more “innocent" than a mole or a frog—and no less. But the whiteness and softness of its clothing gives, by symbolism, the idea of innocence. A Young polar bear is also white and furry; and the ermine—the last word in snowy fur—is as destructive a weasel as the great snowy owl is a destructive bird. Most polar animals are white and ferocious. Color is not innocence, nor guilt, but we have it firmly fixed in our minds that our sins, though “scarlet,” shall be “white as snow"—that sin is red, or black, and virtue white.

We must admit to high place in our study of clothing the influence of economic forces; yet when this supposedly all-powerful pressure is brought to bear on clothing, it frequently fails to override any one of those more primary motives.

There was a time when the economic distinctions in dress were backed up by sumptuary laws. So sure were we that such and such garments were “suitable to the station” of such and such classes, that penalties were added for any evasions of such law.

But such psychic influences as the force of imitation and the desire to appear better than one is, as well the aesthetic sense and the necessity of sex attraction, proved stronger than economic and legal pressure.

Carlyle has long since shown in his Sartor Resartus how frequently lacking in distinction are these “forked radishes" of human beings unclothed; and that where physical distinction does exist, it often fails to coincide with the social distinction so necessary to emphasize.'

Therefore, we have spent ourselves in labels and trade marks, and in the effort to keep free from imitation.

Let us take one instance of a given costume, and study the various forces which have evolved it, then combination and contradiction.

As a simple and familiar illustration, we will take the dress of an ordinary working housewife in our country, being the costume of the fifteen sixteenths of American women who “do their own work"; namely, the work of feeding and cleaning the entire family.

What is this work? In what individual activities does it consist? In what surroundings? Under what difficulties?

The work of the ordinary household consists: (a) in cooking and serving food; (b) in washing dishes, clothing and floors; (c) in dusting, sweeping and general care of the house and its furniture; (d) in sewing and mending: (e) in nursing the sick, and (f) in caring for children.

In such a melange of duties it is naturally difficult to evolve a composite costume that will be suitable to them all; especially as the economic influence, which would call for such and such an article of dress is often contradicted by other economic influences under which this wageless worker is restricted in purchase.

The fact that she is engaged in this labor proves the limitation of the family income in most cases, and beyond that immovable restriction comes the difficulty of securing a just portion of said income for her own personal expenses. If this is surmounted, comes the further difficulty that she, as a mother, finds it hard to spend on herself what is always needed for her children.

The result of this is that the predominant modifying influences governing the nature of woman's working clothes, is cheapness.

Now cheapness is merely a limitation. It has nothing to do with fitness.

The cotton print which forms the almost invariable uniform of the working housewife is, indeed, cheap, but is it, in form or substance, suitable to her occupation?

Her major business—cooking—keeps her in constant association with the stove, with fire; and not only with fire, but with food, including more or less constantly, grease.

Cotton, especially when greasy, is highly inflammable; and when such a material is presented in several layers in a loose vertical form, meets fire, the instant result is an upsweeping sheet of flame which sometimes carries death by inhalation before the victim has time to lie down, even if she thinks to do so.

The enormous number of accidents of this sort move us to transient pity, but not to thought. How seldom do we hear of men dying because their clothing is on fire. Even when it is, from the carrying of loose matches in the pocket, or the dropping of sparks from their tobacco, the smouldering blaze is easily beaten out. Close-fitting woolen or semi-woolen dress does not offer the same possibility to flame as the loose, flowing skirts and aprons of the women whose business it is to “stand over the fire” three times a day.

In the matter of fire (her constant companion) women's dress has been no farther modified than by the “tied-back apron" more common in open-grate England than here, where the iron stove is a safer cooking convenience.

Besides fire, the working housewife deals continually with water; principally dirty water. In her tri-daily dish-washing, in her weekly laundry work, in the scrubbing of floors and cleaning of windows, she is always handling water. Her cotton dress presents no obstacle at all to water. She has no oilskin coat to resist water, any more than she has a leather apron to resist fire. She simply gets wet. This experience is more frequent but less dangerous than getting burned. One direct modification to this use is shown in other lands by the "Dutch sleeve," the frank cutting off above the elbow of the arm covering of the housemaid, of the housewife who does the same work; with us the rolling up of the sleeve is the only concession.

No one who has ever observed a wash-woman with an additional layer of wet cotton apron on her wet cotton skirt, getting wetter and wetter with warm water, and then going directly out with soaked clothing and parboiled fingers to hang up the stiffening clothes in a Winter wind, can hold that women's clothes are suitably modified to their economic activities.

In the matter of dust there is less to be said, the principal objection here being in the vertical layers of skirts inviting and holding clouds of dust. Though we may not have noticed this in the woman sweeping, most of us have in the woman walking; plowing along the thick, soft dust of Summer, in a moving eddy, not a water spout, but a dust spout, raised by her feet and circulating continually among her petticoats—unable to get out. As she sweeps and dusts in the house the same result obtains, in less degree.

One excuse that may be given for this unsuitable cotton fabric in women's clothes, is that it is “easier to clean." Men's clothes would be “easier to keep clean” also if they were cotton. As a matter of fact this quality merely adds to the labor of women—in washing and ironing the everlastingly soiled, and in remaking the continually worn out.

Another especial demand upon woman, in housework is the standing and walking, with frequent going up and down stairs.

It would be a notable scientific experiment to equip a number of men servants with the costume of women, and let them realize the additional encumbrance of these long sweeping skirts as they go about their duties.

In going up stairs the skirt has to be held up. In coming down stairs it trails along, accumulating dust. When the woman, as is so frequently the case, has the care of babies added to her household duties, this stepping about—ascending and descending—is made far more diffcult by the extra burden of a child to be carried.

If the influence of economic modification were truly registered in women's clothing, whatever they might wear in the street, or for occasions of rest and pleasure (if any), they would surely wear some form of trousers in the house. The women of the harem—with nothing to do—do wear them.

Study the same economic influence on the costume of men.

No matter how rich in fabric, how voluminous and long, were the robes of the mighty, the workmen tucked up their tunics, or shortened their jerkins, and met their task in suitable apparel. The one great reason for the slow extinction of gorgeousness in men's clothing, is this modification to economic demands. Little by little the clothing of men has shrunk and dwindled to its present close casing of the limbs and body; has faded and darkened in color to meet the needs of our “coal era;" has become stiffly thick, that it might wear longer; forms now a vast standardized, dingy compromise, the visible result of economic pressure.

This is the real economic influence. It would be cheaper for a man to wear calico trousers, but not so economical; much less so.

The man's costume has its vestigal rudiments of former glories— its sword-buttons, its hint of cuffs, its furtive bits of braid or other dim adornment—but for the most part it is a rigorous and successful attempt to meet the economic activities of his life.

Not so with woman's—more primitive motives rule supreme with her. The deep root idea of sex-distinction in dress is more potent than the most glaring economic necessity.

In our own times we are beginning to see this give way—in spots.

Twenty-five years ago I dressed my little girl in knickerbockers to natch her dress—no petticoat at all. A decent, pretty, useful costume.

This was greeted, then, by the contemptuous and bitter disapproval of the mothers whose little girls were, as some writer has happily put it. “like white carnations" in their many frilled skirts. Now the little girls of the wealthiest and most fashionable wear “rompers" till they are half grown up.

That baseless, brainless, useless, deadly idiocy, the long riding skirt and side saddle for women, is well on the road to extinction. To acknowledge the fact that women have two legs is no longer considered an indecency, and as they are set wider on the pelvis it is recognized that they are even better adapted for riding cross-saddle than are the narrower hipped other sex.

Now Central Park and Riverside Drive show happy girls in divided skirt, or the still better knickerbockers and long coat, riding in ease and safety, to the vast relief of the long-suffering horse.

In bathing suits we see, conspicuously, this struggle between the modifying influence of condition and action; and the reluctantly loosening grip of the older forces.

One would think that the activity of swimming, identical in every particular for man and woman, would call for a similar costume. But no—the woman must never forget that she is a female, nor that she must announce that fact.

Since we are not marine animals one would think it might be forgotten while in the water, but this is far from the case. Not only must that hoary Emblem of Sex (the skirt) be in evidence, but the woman must wear shoes and stockings as if going for a walk instead of a swim.

Bathing suits for women are made—sold, worn—in which the governing motives are Sex-Attraction and Display of Purchasing Power; and the essential needs of the occupation are quite overlooked. Ruffled and flounced, trimmed to profusion, made of costly materials— there could be no more glaring proof than this “bathing costume" of the exclusion of the dress of women from normal influences, and its almost complete exploitation for sex display.

On the other hand the man's bathing suit, woolen, for protection, dark and thick enough for modesty, and otherwise reduced to the close fitting minimum called for by the occupation, is a perfect instance of legitimate adaption. When more retired he doffs the vest and bathes in short trunks only. When with men only he bathes in the one perfect covering—his own skin. But his bathing suit does not restrict him.

In the dress of women it is interesting to mark the gradual increase of normal evolution, in spite of the continuous pressure of previous forces. This is well shown in that creation of modern times—the "tailored suit." This, with the blouse or “shirtwaist," is a frank concession to business uses. Before it we only had, for women, dresses for low-grade labor, or for ease and display. The “business suit" is a concession to the business woman. The school teachers gave perhaps the original demand for this kind of dress. Here they were in increasing thousands, in a uniform profession, having to go out of the house every day in all weathers. Later came the shop girls and office girls everywhere, with the same compulsion—to leave home daily, and to work under comparatively similar conditions.

Here the pressure of industrial evolution was strongly felt, and promptly met. The plain dark skirt and coat, the loose and comfort able waist, appeared and stayed. There is not yet such complete standardization as among men; but there is enough of it to prove widely useful.

Standardization is, in fact, one of the highest results of social evolution in dress. It is a distinction we frequently condenn as “monotonous" and “ugly"; as “destructive of individuality" and very seldom rate at its true value.

No one calls swans, greyhounds or swallows monotonous, because they dress alike; nor horses ugly, because they are not pink, blue and scarlet. To come closer, we do not condemn the toga because so many Romans wore it, or doublet and hose because they were universal in their day.

In decorative beauty our modern male costume leaves much to be desired; in mechanical adaptation it is not perfect; in color it is wearily dull—but it has one high quality which separates it by a wide gulf from that of women—its standardization.

From under-vest to overcoat any man can buy an outfit at any clothing store—within certain limits.

The result of this is that when you see a group of men together they stand out from one another by personal distinction mainly. You see the man. You look at his face, at the shape of his head, the character of his hands. If he is handsome, it is he whom you admire; not masses of hair and cloth, feathers, ribbons, jewels and veils.

If he is homely, he is not ashamed of it. He is a man, and not estimated by his beauty. He does not try to look handsomer than he is. He does not try to look vounger than he is—unless in some few extreme cases of “ladykillers," or under direct economic pressure. I was told in England, that the heaviest sale of hair-dye was to workingmen.

The wide unnatural gulf between men and women, not of sexdistinction but an arbitrary distinction of status, is nowhere better shown than in dress.

Where the influences of external condition act freely upon man, they filter but slowly into the sheltered backwaters to which most women are restricted. The visible differences in date are broad enough, man's clothing responding most swiftly to necessary and progressive change; but the overwhelming preponderance of the sex motif in woman's dress is still more conspicuous.

The time-difference above alluded to does not refer to the fretful rush of “fashion," that will be discussed later; but to the fact that women's clothes remain in the farthingale period, long after men's have changed into modern times; that women preserve the muslin delicacy of “the Empire," while men are a hundred swift years onward in the plain serviceable fabrics of today. In so far as women are kept shut in, inhabiting a lesser older world, they are cut off from the health pressure of new forces, and remain, for all their capricious "styles," indubitably archaic.

The other quality, that of a glaring stress upon sex, is the major modifying force in the dress of women. We should dwell with care upon this point, in beginning, as it is so inescapable throughout our study.

First let it be clearly understood that this charge of over-dominant sex attraction in women's dress does not by any means involve a consciousness of this purpose on the part of the woman. She may and often does choose and wear her garments with no other ground of decision than that she thinks the thing “becoming" or knows it to be "stylish."

But quite unappreciated by her the designer has put into his work a more or less veiled sex appeal. Sometimes this is so conspicuous that one hardly knows whether to regard it as more obscene or ridiculous. A good type of this I once saw on an actress. The dress itself was a good one, gray in color, long and trailing, covered with a closely arranged soft glitter and fitting perfectly; but upon this pleasing ground work appeared the main outcry of the costume. Upon the front appeared three towering stalks of long stemmed flowers; black tulips or some such large and solid shape. The black stems rose from the hem and ran straight up till they stopped short with two flamboyant blossoms covering the breasts—and one just at the pelvic bone.

She might as well have had three exclamation points, three pointing hands, three placards proclaiming in plain print what the beholders were expected to think about. That of course is an extreme instance; a glaring instance, such as almost any woman would repudiate. What she does not repudiate but admires and delights to wear, is a kind of dress which emphasizes in a thousand subtle ways the fact that she is female.

Charles Reade, in his amusing short story, “Propria quae Maribus," showed that skirts were worn by women not because they were comfortable, beautiful, useful or becoming; but because the pregnant woman needed such a covering to conceal or at least to mitigate her appearance.-

Perhaps one does not, at first, see the logical connection, even if one admits the premise. If only the pregnant woman needs to be thus draped why must vigorous girlhood and frail age be similarly hampered?

The answer to that is that the unfortunate or reprehensible to-bemother must not, by adopting a special costume, suited to her needs thus call attention to her condition!

In this connection it is well to refer to the comfortable, decorous and healthful costume of the Chinese woman, the wide full trousers and long coat; and to the statement of a woman doctor long resident in China, that because of this manner of dressing she never could tell by superficial observation whether a woman was pregnant or not. Can we say as much for the skirt?

Women have first that broad demarcation—they must wear skirts; and then, ensuant, a subtle and limitless differentiation between male and female apparel, which tends to make her clothing so much thinner, softer, lighter and richer in color and decoration, that one would think men and women belonged to different species. Such distinction is sometimes seen in the birds, beasts and insects, but it is always the "sterner sex” which is labelled “male” as far as the eye can see. The female remains inconspicuous.

What modifying force is it which has so contradicted the laws of nature, so “unsexed" the human female, so forced upon her this unnatural, unfeminine decorative frenzy?

It is the one main exhibition of economic pressure upon women's dress. Man has responded to the varying demands of his numerous trades, adapting his costume to the farm or shop, to boat or horse or office, or whatever his economic environment might be.

Woman, no matter what form of labor she was expected to follow in the home, found her main line of economic advantage in pleasing man. Through him came wealth and pleasure, as also social station, home and family.

Since the remote period when man became not only prospective mate and co-parent, but prospective food supply and general source of income, women have been forced to resort to every means open to them to secure and hold one of these indispensable maintainers.

The lot of the farmer's wife was hard, but the lot of no man's wife was harder. For the unmarried woman life held no opportunities. Hence, within their iron bound limits, women were modified most by this main economic necessity, pleasing man.

This effort must perforce express itself in such channels as were allowed; and when we pass the stage of direct labor and service, the way to a man's heart through his stomach, she found the second road to a man's heart lay through his eyes.

It is not Beauty that is demanded. It is two things—variety and the visible effort to please. As one honest man explained, the reason men admire paint on a woman is because it shows her ardent wish to attract; and the cruder her performance the more plainly it shows that alone to be her motive.

In the efforts of our modern woman toward “Reform Kleider" long grown so popular in some European countries, we may observe the struggle of the true aesthetic sense, and a keen perception of hygienic and economic needs, against this overmastering pressure of sexeconomic force; the wish and necessity for pleasing men.

Meanwhile we have had within the last few years a period of as foolish and as extreme female costume as the world has suffered from in many years; and we have in our present slight improvement no guarantee whatever of any permanent advance.

In the heavy gorgeousness of her decorations; in her profuse beads and jewels; in rich and sumptuous stuffs and bizarre outlines; in unnecessary furs and more than superfluous feathers, we still see the woman labelling herself with a huge “W"; crying aloud to all “I am a female and I wish to please."

It is a pity she often fails.

The really modern man is already far ahead of these ancient tactics, the woman still in the rear.

(To be continued)