Chapter XIII

Humanitarian and Economic Considerations

THE USE of fur and feathers for women's clothing and decoration brings sharply to mind the question of suffering, and of economic loss.

The writer is no ultra-sentimentalist about pain, nor about the taking of life. For the Eskimo to kill animals is necessary if he is to live at all; there is nothing else to eat. Also it is necessary for him to clothe himself in the skins of the animals; there is nothing else to wear. But for a plump woman in New York, who lives in a temperate climate, and who never has to walk more than a few blocks; choosing her own weather at that, if she is well-to-do—for her to wear fur is purely a matter of personal vanity, and of fashion.

That this should be done by coarse-natured, ignorant women; by those too shallow to appreciate any suffering they cannot see; or too hard-hearted to mind it, is not surprising. What is surprising is to see sensitive, refined, intelligent women willing to be accessories to the most prolonged and cruel tortures of harmless animals.

Have they no imagination? Do they deliberately refuse to visualize even once the tragedy that takes place to provide one garment to feed their vanity? Tragedy! It is a dozen, a score, a hundred, if the beasts are small. For an animal to be killed, promptly, by a well-aimed shot, is no great evil. He has no period of terror or of pain. But an animal caught in a steel trap suffers the extremity of physical agony and of blind, limitless terror, for as long as his life can hold out. That this should be done at all can only be defended when human life is at stake, and there is no other way to save it. It is done, for the most part, to provide women with furs.

In climates where furs are needed, men wear them too. In our climate women show their indifference to cold by wearing far thinner clothes than men, and then supplement their inner deficiency by covering their naked shoulders with outer garments of seal and ermine. The woman wears the thin dress, exposes neck and arms, from vanity and fashion. That she bares her own skin, hurts no one; that she demands so many skins of beasts to cover it, hurts terribly; costs a countless yearly toll of agony and death.

The fashion pressure we have not yet discussed; the cruelty and the waste involved come first.

There is hardly a woman who would be indifferent if she walked the northern woods and found a trapped mink staring at her with mad, frightened eyes, jerking his bleeding paw at the end of a taut chain; or a rabbit, hanging in the air by one foot, limp, dislocated, freezing, starving, aching, till he died; or, perhaps worst of all, the thrashed and trampled snow, the grim set trap, and in it the bloody stump of a small paw—gnawed off by the frantic prisoner. Yet these things are going on, in all northern lands, constantly; armies of men tramp the arctic wastes, and snare and trap and kill, kill, kill—in order that women may wear unnecessary furs.

We hear more as to suffering about feathers than about furs; perhaps because the feathers are even more unnecessary. A woman may persuade herself that she “needs" the furs; she can hardly claim necessity for feathers.

There is agony enough in both cases. With the birds there is not the same amount of prolonged torture in traps; but there may be a somewhat greater number of them wounded and escaping to die alone. As to the starving of orphaned young, that happens both to small blind kittens and cubs, and to fledgling birds. It is all bad enough.

The worst pity of it is that it should be done by our women; tender mothers, emotional young girls, sensitive souls that are so grieved to see a horse beaten, a cat stoned, even a poor, staring-eyed mouse caught in one of those merciless wire-spring traps. It is for her that this agony is caused, and not for her need—only for her pleasure.

The savage who wears a necklace of human teeth is not revolted by any thought of the owner's living face, the smiling mouth, from which these teeth were taken. They are glittering white objects—he likes their looks—why go further? There is some serious defect in our education, or "blind spot" in our minds, that we can wear the skins of beasts and never think at all of the little bodies they were torn from.

Would it not be reasonable for every woman of intelligence to determine once and for all, "I will not decorate my body with death trophies. If absolute necessity compel, I will use fur; but not for ornament." Yet, it would be reasonable, but that does not make it probable

Beyond the appeal to what we call “humane” motives, because human beings are supposed to feel them; comes the economic motive; equally “humane," because only human beings are wise enough to grasp it—and very few of them.

In regard to the fur-bearing animals, there are some of them whose activities are inimical to human interest, that we have to kill in selfdefence. In Australia the greatest enemy to mankind is the rabbit. Be it said in his defence that he did not begin it. Some man brought him there; even as some man brought the terrible gypsy moth to this country. But the rabbit in Australia has so multiplied as absolutely to threaten human life by destroying every green thing within his reach. If all trappers would concentrate on Australia for a while and exterminate the rabbit, that would be doing real service to humanity; and our women might dress in rabbit skins without blame. They are warm, they are soft; but quite probably not as “becoming" as seal or otter: certainly not as fashionable.

Veblen's famous law of “conspicuous waste" makes the beast that is rare and hard to get more valuable in our eves than one near and plentiful; and, as before, we do not reason about it. If Russian sable was as common as rabbit, it would not be considered beautiful.

But after we have killed all the creatures we have to kill, and quite probably utilized their skins to clothe those who need them, every other man who spends his time killing, unnecessarily, is a man wasted.

Human labor is valuable because of its service to humanity. Any human labor which is diverted from that service and spent on what has no value—either in use or beauty—is wasted; and here the dress of women has a large responsibility for economic waste.

At this point we refer onlv to such parts of the waste as pertain to unnecessary fur and feathers; and proceed now to a very great additional waste, in regard to the latter. As I briefly put it in an earlier article: “The greatest enemies of mankind today are insects. The greatest enemies of insects are birds. The greatest eneimies of birds are women. Yet women love birds and hate insects."

Without regard to loving or hating; without regard to pain and fear and slaughter; the point here most seriously urged is the grave economic injury to human prosperity involved in bird destruction.

Agriculture is and must always be the mainstay of our life on earth. As we grow more numerous we shall live more and more by it, for we shall no longer be able to afford great areas of land to turn grass into meat for us, but must support larger numbers from that land by vegetable food.

Besides drouth, which we are learning to counteract by irrigation and dry-farming, agriculture and horticulture suffer most from insects. These tiny forms of life are more dangerous to us today than lions, wolves or tigers. They destroy our food supply, our chief wealth.

In our “struggle for existence" this enemy is today the greatest of all; and to assist us, our chief allies are birds. In a truly intelligent community the fertile fields would be interspersed with trees; not only for food-bearing, shade and beauty, but to provide shelter for birds; for enough birds to keep the fields and orchards free of insect pests.

The farmer's children should grow up to understand and appreciate their “services"; to befriend them, and behind plow, harrow, cultivator and hoe, would hop the grub-destroyer. This is not sentiment; it is sense, good hard economic sense. To save labor, to improve crops, and to make the country more beautiful with shade and musical with song—that is certainly intelligent.

And what do we do?

We kill, kill, kill the birds by millions and millions.

For what?

To put on women's hats. And to make things like gigantic caterpillars for them to wear around their necks.

And why do they do this—the women?

Ah! Why?

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Because in the matter of dress women have not yet used their intelligence. They are ignorant of true beauty; ignorant of the suffering caused by their demands; ignorant of the waste involved in supplying them; and indifferent to all these considerations.

It is impossible to give figures in definite proof of this contention. The Audubon Society supplies much as to the economic value of birds, and the number destroyed.: Counting the birds and beasts together, with the time and labor value of the men involved, and the losses to crops as well, it would reach annual millions

But without any definite lump sum, or any effort to apportion it among women, is not the subject clear enough?

To kill birds in order to wear their feathers is (a) unnecessary; (b) cruel; (c) a waste of time and labor, and (d) an injury to agriculture. No woman able to reason can deny that. Then why take any part in it?

Surely a woman does not have to know that her individual hat trimming cost one hunter's whole day's work, and the labor of all who handled it since, besides the loss of fifty cents' worth of cabbages or corn. She does not need to follow back the five dollars she paid for that flat feathered corpse, to its dwindling returns along the line of those who procured it for her, the farmer standing his loss with no return.

All that is necessary for a human intelligence is to see that the custom of using feathers for hat trimming is an injury to society; that ought to be enough.

What right have we to persist in doing what wastes human labor, and increases poverty? If a given act is clearly shown to be socially injurious, those who persist in it should be clearly pointed out as, to that degree, enemies of society. The excuse of ignorance is no longer valid,—these facts are commonly known to-day.

But the social conscience of women is not yet as keen as it will be when they realize their citizenship more fully. It is hard to waken a sense of co-responsibility in a subject class; a class not only held in tutelage, but isolated.

We do not yet realize how the individual isolation of women, their close confinement in separate homes, their stringent responsibility to one man, to one family, and complete lack of civic relationships, has weakened the conscience of the world.

The man, in his wide range of duties, has had to be responsible in varied relations; the woman, if she fulfilled her duties to him, and to the children, might ignore all others. But the man is the child of the woman and reared by her. Her limitations invariably limit him.

It is only bv understanding these essential restrictions in the whole previous history of women that we may in any way appreciate the paradox of woman's wastefulness and callous cruelty in this matter of personal decoration.

Utterly untrained in the consideration of large social interests;

never taught to think in large numbers, to recognize groupresponsibilities; praised first for beauty and then for docility; she has measured her life by the necessity of pleasing those who took care of her. From parents' home to husband's home she moved, never standing free on her own feet, nor dependent on her own resources; and her time, for the most part, was too overfilled with personal duties to her family to leave any room even to speculate as to her duties to the world at large.

The girl child, of course, carries on the decorative tradition of her mother, she is in no position to choose and dictate what she will wear. The young girl has one overmastering necessity upon her, to please, to attract, to command admiration. The married woman is generally either a hard-worked housewife or one of these ornamental domestic pets to whom personal decoration is a life work.

It is rare indeed to find a woman of any age who has ever deliberately considered the question of right dressing and decided for herself what she would or would not wear.

Yet once her conscience, her intelligence, is aroused, she cannot avoid responsibility. Even if she does not pay for the things she wears, she does chose them. Even if she does not design them, does not manufacture them, does not sell them, she does buy them. She is the ultimate consumer; and no blaming of ancestors, no pressure of previous conditions, exonerate the woman of today.

One quick-witted woman, countered, when blamed for wearing feathers on her hat, by saying that she didn't mind killing birds any more than killing the little children who make paper flowers. We are responsible for them, too. Human life is so inextricably inter-knit that none of us can escape our share in the common good or ill. The men who use tobacco are responsible for all that waste of labor, waste of land, waste of life; and, further, for the uncounted loss by fire, caused by their millions of chance-dropped matches.

We are reasoning beings.

We are, to a considerable extent, free agents.

There is no law, natural, civil, or moral, to compel women to bring about this pain and slaughter of other living creatures, this grave injury to humanity. There are for these great wastes and losses “a hundred explanations, but not a single excuse.”

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Before approaching the larger economic questions raised by the study of women's dress, more careful attention should be given to points already touched on above; the mistaken theory that there is economic advantage in “furnishing employment," regardless of the use of the work done.

In this matter of unneeded furs, for women, the hundreds, the thousands of men, whose time and labor is spent in killing and skinning animals and in dressing and sewing their skins and in storing and selling those skins—for unnecessary wear—are withdrawn from productive industry. They might as well be making paper flowers— to kindle fires with. The fact that they are paid for doing it, does not make what they do valuable.

We might pay a thousand men to run around in circies, and say that we “furnished employment" to them. That is a fallacy; we furnish exertion—not employment. W'e give them money, it is true, but they give nothing. Their energy is wasted. This deep-seated and universal delusion about “furnishing employment" blinds us to much cruel waste of time.

The value of a thing in reality is in itself; in its use. If a thing has no real use and no real beauty, is of no service to humanity, then it is not valuable, no matter what may be charged or paid for it.?

If all the people on earth spent their time making paper flowers—out of black paper—all our work would be wasted. If half the people on earth did, then half our work would be wasted. If only a million people did it, then the work of a million people would be wasted—no matter what perverted idiots paid them for their black flowers.

I have heard that there are women who make fine silk lace, working with half-numb fingers in rooms over cow—stables for a little warmth—as artificial heat would injure the goods. Others wear out their eyes in fine lace work or embroidery. This is economic waste, a waste of women's lives and energies. Such decoration costs too much; and the fact that some one has money enough to purchase a woman's life, or evesight, and wear it as trimming, does not make it a human act, or anything but wasteful.

In any living body the economy of nature works steadily along the line of least resistance; always seeking to obtain the most result for the least expenditure of energv. In social life the effort should be the same, and would be, but for the strange interference of our ideas with natural laws.

In order that we may exhibit our ability to pay (again referring to the enunciation of this tendency in Veblen's Theory of tbe Leisure Class), we prefer a garment which visibly requires many days of elaborate toil by expert persons, to one which might be made in far less time. with far less labor. We like to have our clothes exhibit as much labor as possible.

Men, who give attention to dress, choose carefully in materials, and appreciate the skill of the designer, cutter, and finisher. All that is legitimate. So might women select a suitable fabric, a skilled designer, proficient cutters and finishers—and be satisfied.

But they are not satisfied. They delight to point out the delicate refinements achieved by long and close application, enjoying a garment which required the work of six women for a week, better than one which could be made by two in a day.

And all this they justify on the ground that these workers are paid for doing it; that the purchaser has “furnished employment" to them. Yet those same patrons of dressmakers, if they are also patrons of art; if, that is, they have any knowledge of value in painting, know enough to condemn the niggling assiduity that putters forever over the canvas, and to admire most that firm perfection of technique which knows perfectly what it wishes to do, and does it in one stroke.

These questions of economic value are confusing mainly because they deal with large numbers; and also, of course, because of the various profound misconceptions already in our minds. If one starts freshly, with a simple problen in small numbers and restricted space, it is not so hard.

Suppose, for instance, you have one person on an island for life. His economic advantage surely lies in producing from that island the most wealth with the least labor. Or suppose you have a group of one hundred people confined to one hundred square miles of land, and cut off from all other connection with humanity. The economic advantage of these people, as is visible to a child, lies in producing from that land the most wealth with the least labor—food, clothing, shelter, furnishings, all manner of things of use and beauty.

Suppose one person in some mysterious way, has power over all the others, to make them work; either power by slavery, or power by holding all the supplies on which they lived, or its equivalent—money.

Now suppose this person used this power to promote the activity of the others, so that they should, without injury, make more and better and lovelier things; then that group would be richer. Even if the master kept all the things, except what the workers needed to live on, still the sum of wealth would be increased.

But if this man had a fancy for soap bubbles, and kept half of the workers busy making soap bubbles—in place of food, clothing, etc.— he would reduce the wealth of the group by half. Now see! He might quite fairly and fully pay them for making bubbles, but he would only have to pay them with what the other half made. The real “goods" of the country would be reduced, and, if they had money, it would only buy half as much; the cost of living would go up mightily, on account of the bubbles.

The more people who were hired to blow bubbles, the less would be the wealth of the group; and the more expensive would be every necessity of life.

Yet the master, gratifying a refined, aesthetic taste by this iridescent cloud of bubbles floating in the air, rolling on the grass, twinkling and bounding everywhere; and handing out the pay envelopes every Saturday night, might perfectly well defend his position on the ground that bubbles were beautiful and that he had paid for them—he "furnished employment" to half the population.

Now if the whole world of us were properly clothed, as well as fed, housed, warmed, taught, and so on; if all real human needs were met and there was plenty of leisure time left; if there were people who for the pure pleasure of doing lingerie over a gown and added a fantastic richness of embroidery, that would be no loss. There is room and to spare for the extra beautifying of garments—after one have garments enough. But the present contrast between the woman with a thousand dollars spent upon her clothing alone, and twice that in ornament; and the woman who has not enough to be clean and warm—this contrast indicates a very low state in either humanitarianism or economics or both.

We cannot, in one generation, bridge the gulf which has been centuries in the making. We can neither give our cloaks to the beggars nor eliminate the beggars—in a moment. But we can begin to relate our own problems to the world problem, and to grasp the principles involved.

A human being, man or woman, should seek to wear clothing which caused no needless pain or loss, either to bird, beast, or human being; and which has for economic merit that lasting test—the most achievement for the least expenditure.

Some one, not unusually short-sighted, may ask: “But if these men are not killing birds and beasts for use, they will be thrown out of employment. What will they do? They will starve." No, they will not starve. They will merely, finding that there is no more market for those wares, turn their attention to other work. They will have to.

There are people “thrown out of emplovment" every time a fashion changes. When “Irish lace” is “in," the makers of Valenciennes must suffer.+ When beads are “out," there will be mourning in the glass works. Indeed, in merely catering to our seasonal demands, there are thousands and thousands “thrown out of employment" every year. We need not muster up any sudden sympathy for the trappers. They can trap enough to eat till they find a better job.

The elimination of fur and feathers from the yearly demand would reduce the expense account of women's clothing most materially. Only lace and jewels remain as conspicuous means to exhibit wealth.

There is no reason, no real reason, that is, why women spend as much as they do on dress. Quite aside from the ultra extravagant ones, there is a most unnecessary drain on ordinary purses for this use.

Some thirty years ago it was estimated that a woman could dress well enough to be in good society, on $$300$ a year. This allowed for one new evening gown, and one new tailor suit each year, both lasting over as second-best for another; and may be filled out according to preference. It might have been as follows:

Evening dress . . . . . . . . . $75.00
Evening wrap (per year) . . 15.00
Gloves, fans, etc. . . . . . . . .15.00
Hats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40.00
Tailor suit . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50.00
Shoes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15.00
Hose. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6.00
Summer dresses . . . . . . . . .20.00
Handkerchiefs . . . . . . . . . . . 4.00
Coats, per year . . . . . . . . . .15.00
Blouses, neckwear, etc. . . . 30.00
Underwear . . . . . . . . . . . . .15.00
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .$300.00

Even at that time I can remember these estimates being scoffed at as ridiculously low by a group of trained nurses. Yet one would hardly imagine a trained nurse as needing more than that list, substituting her starched uniforms for the richer evening wear.

Of course we must bear in mind, when criticizing women's expenditure for dress, that it is to them not only clothing, not only decoration, not only an avenue for their restricted personal expression; but that it has a distinct strategic value. It is often the means of securing a livelihood. A dress, even a hat, may turn the scale of attractiveness and secure the attention of a supporter-for-life. We cannot call the most extravagant costume wasteful, if, by means of it, a whole life of ease is secured.

But we can and should discriminate between such frankly stated values as this, and the unacknowledged tendency urging women to spend and spend, even after they have accomplished that main purpose.