Section II: The Effect Upon Women

Chapter VI: Beauty and Weakness

"There was no reason why woman should not labor in primitive society. The forces which withdrew her from labor were expressions of later social traditions. Speaking largely, these considerations were the desire of men to preserve the beauty of women, and their desire to withdraw them from association with other men. It is the connection in thought and fact between idle and beautiful women and wealth, indeed, which has frequently led to the keeping of a superfluous number of such women as a sign of wealth."

—Thomas—Sex and Society.

"Female selection . . . created a fantastic and extravagant male efflorescence. Male selection . . . produced a female etiolation, diminutive stature, beauty without utility."

—Lester F. Ward.

"The woman who is beautiful and vivacious, and not actually feeble-minded, will be endowed with all graces of mind and soul by three-fourths of all who see her on the street, while the most highly intellectual frump will often be set down as stupid and crabbed, purely on the strength of her appearance.

"In fine, beauty, to a woman of average intelligence and character . . . is her most valuable asset from a worldly standpoint. . . . Beauty is the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace—health. . . ."

—Woods Hutchinson.

The types of spurious and anemic beauty prevalent in the Nineteenth Century in this country may be accounted for historically by the conflicting ideas inherited, on the one hand from ascetic religion, on the other through the sensual luxury of higher English society. Behind both, permeating and coercing the lives of women even down to the present time, was the idea left over from still older societies, that the bodies of women were owned by the men who espoused them, which carried with it the implication that the chief use of beauty is the satisfaction of sexual greed. One of the foremost modern sociologists tells us that, if we go back far enough, there was a long period of time when women had no need to be beautiful in order to attract their mates; a time, indeed, when males put on a temporary beauty in order that they might be chosen; and that it was not until the power of choice had been transferred from females to males that women in their turn began to cultivate those physical qualities which would most attract men. Even then relatively few women were beautiful in the modern sense, and they only for the short period of extreme youth.

For the ordinary woman, beauty as an aim and asset is quite a modern idea. In the earlier ages of mankind, strength, fertility, and skill in handicraft were the qualities most desired in wives, as in slaves. When King Solomon pictured the ideal domestic woman, he did not dwell upon the color of her eyes and hair, nor upon the symmetry of her form, but described in great detail the things she could do, praising her indefatigable industry, and ending with these words:

"Favor is deceitful and beauty is vain; but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands and let her own works praise her in the gates."

Beauty in a wife or a slave was a rarity quite out of reach of the common man; a thing of great price, reserved for kings, princes, and the leaders of armies, and to be guarded, like treasure, in harems. The Greek hero, Paris, carried off women from Sidon, not for their beauty, but that they might weave purple cloth for Helen of Troy—a situation typical of the relative positions of the Beauty and the ordinary woman.

There was, in the ancient world, and even quite down to recent times, no economic surplus upon which society could fall back. War and waste, pestilence and the lack of mechanical inventions, made it necessary not only to breed great numbers of human beings, but that men, women, and children—all except a small upper class—should work incessantly. To the ordinary man, who could afford only one wife, strength and fertility were highly important; and though he might prefer the looks of one maid above another, his taste was likely to be overcome by his judgment or nullified by family and financial considerations.

At the beginning of the Christian Era, beauty in women was associated exclusively with luxury and sensuality—a fact which accounts for the antipathy toward them evinced by certain apostolic writers. Among the poverty-stricken masses of the later Roman Empire, severe labor and early marriage destroyed in girls, almost before they were grown, such ephemeral prettiness as they might possess. The ascetic reaction of the early Christian Church, during the Middle Ages, from the frank sensuality of the Roman world, emphasized still further the purely animal aspects of female beauty. With each recurrent wave of social reform in the Christianized world the essential relation between good looks and wickedness was reiterated until it culminated a second time among the Puritans—as it had the first time among the ascetics—in a belief that women, particularly attractive women, were agents of the devil.

Although Puritanism had begun to loosen its hold on the minds of American men at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, the theory that women were tempters and a menace to every good man, was still generally accepted. The natural instinct of youth to admire and to choose the more attractive maiden was morbidly distorted by the religious teaching of the day into a sinful suggestion, and robbed of all its innocent joy. This unwholesome suppression of the animal side of human nature produced a sort of subterranean vulgarity in the majority of common people, and a revulsion of exaggerated shame in those of greater refinement. The fear of loveliness in women was extended to other forms of beauty in American life—for Puritanism had put a ban, too, upon painting, sculpture, music, and the drama. All were still regarded as frivolous, if not dangerous to morals; and thus our parents and grandparents were almost destitute of any form of artistic pleasure.

But even if there had been the same racial and temperamental sense of beauty as that pervading the French and Italian populace of the same period, the life of a pioneer community was necessarily ugly. The struggle with nature for the crude necessities of living devastated alike whatever beauty of landscape or of human nature there might be, and left scant leisure or desire for the beautiful.

The higher manifestations of beauty, whether in art or in womanhood, are necessarily of slow growth, and are always coincident with a certain degree of material ease. In proportion as the New World became prosperous, the mere abundance of good food, the prevalence of relative peace and plenty throughout a selected population, produced a better grade of human being.

And as the lives of ordinary women became easier, with more comfortable conditions of living and the removal of some of the hardest domestic labor to factories, the young were born with a greater degree of physical symmetry, and were able to keep it through adolescence and even into adult years.

Nevertheless, while the general average of bodily perfection was rising, its higher realization was hindered by the tyranny of religious traditions and the distorted image of what beauty in women consisted in. The entirely inconsistent types of physique which had survived from wholly different classes in the Old World, were still the models for imitation. The "oversexed cow-mother" of medieval Europe—as Hutchinson calls her—found her analogue in America in the mother of a large family, whose too-frequent pregnancies and incessant industry left her at middle age either an exhausted, wrinkled creature, without a grace of body or mind; or else a shapeless bulk of flesh, more like a breeding animal than a human being. At the antipodes of such a woman was the attenuated fine-lady, modeled upon the type of the Eighteenth Century—as feeble, affected, and under-sexed as the breeding mother was vital. A third type, the French fashion-plate woman, who was, in fact, only slightly modified from the unwholesome suppression of the animal side of human nature produced a sort of subterranean vulgarity in the majority of common people, and a revulsion of exaggerated shame in those of greater refinement. The fear of loveliness in women was extended to other forms of beauty in American life—for Puritanism had put a ban, too, upon painting, sculpture, music, and the drama. All were still regarded as frivolous, if not dangerous to morals; and thus our parents and grandparents were almost destitute of any form of artistic pleasure.

But even if there had been the same racial and temperamental sense of beauty as that pervading the French and Italian populace of the same period, the life of a pioneer community was necessarily ugly. The struggle with nature for the crude necessities of living devastated alike whatever beauty of landscape or of human nature there might be, and left scant leisure or desire for the beautiful.

The higher manifestations of beauty, whether in art or in womanhood, are necessarily of slow growth, and are always coincident with a certain degree of material ease. In proportion as the New World became prosperous, the mere abundance of good food, the prevalence of relative peace and plenty throughout a selected population, produced a better grade of human being.

And as the lives of ordinary women became easier, with more comfortable conditions of living and the removal of some of the hardest domestic labor to factories, the young were born with a greater degree of physical symmetry, and were able to keep it through adolescence and even into adult years.

Nevertheless, while the general average of bodily perfection was rising, its higher realization was hindered by the tyranny of religious traditions and the distorted image of what beauty in women consisted in. The entirely inconsistent types of physique which had survived from wholly different classes in the Old World, were still the models for imitation. The "oversexed cow-mother" of medieval Europe—as Hutchinson calls her—found her analogue in America in the mother of a large family, whose too-frequent pregnancies and incessant industry left her at middle age either an exhausted, wrinkled creature, without a grace of body or mind; or else a shapeless bulk of flesh, more like a breeding animal than a human being. At the antipodes of such a woman was the attenuated fine-lady, modeled upon the type of the Eighteenth Century—as feeble, affected, and under-sexed as the breeding mother was vital. A third type, the French fashion-plate woman, who was, in fact, only slightly modified from the to meet the requirements of Puritan modesty. No better illustration could be found of the conflicting traditions which ignorant women were blindly following.

Without attempting to account for the vagaries of modesty—a subject upon which much has already been written—the effect of a single convention upon the health and beauty of women may be dwelt upon. Throughout the past century, to be obviously two-legged was to be immodest. The Chinese woman—as modest and feminine as any of her sex in the world, perhaps—has had the use of her legs, if not of her feet, for thousands of years, but the American woman has always had to pretend that she had only one. The peasant woman of northern Europe, though burdened with heavy petticoats, might exhibit her body below the knee, but the "free" woman of the new democracy had to conceal, as far as possible, even her ankles.

This convention restricted every activity, and was, unquestionably, one of the factors in the deterioration of the health of American women. For three hundred years western women have ridden on horseback sidewise, with feet enveloped in a voluminous skirt, solely because a French Princess long ago set the fashion to conceal her own deformed spine. Because the roués of a decadent society attached sexual significance to ankles, the American girl walked encased in heavy drapery, which compelled a narrow, uncertain tread. Millions of women lifted their petticoats billions of times in the course of their lives; while housewives scoured their floors, hampered by the uniform of their sex, and endangered their lives whenever they got in or out of a vehicle; all for no other reason than that the particular form of modesty inculcated by Puritan society had tabooed legs in women. The early advocates of Women's Rights were right, if not wise, in associating a bifurcated costume with equality and freedom, but it was equally necessary to the production of true beauty.

Shame and inactivity, thus linked together, produced a strangely distorted and bloodless creature whose only sign of real loveliness was a pretty face. The grace of symmetry and the exhilaration of free motion were denied not only to women of the leisure classes, but to working-women as well, because every woman in America was trying "to be a lady," and the conventions of the Fore-time had so ordained. Even when the Puritan régime declined and women were beginning to be released from the older conventions, they were at the same time presented with a vicious foreign model by the vogue of fashions which had been brought in to promote journalism and manufacture.

Convention has this peculiarity: it is no sooner established than it tends to become exaggerated; probably for the reason pointed out by Darwin, that men like what they are accustomed to, carried to a moderate extreme. In the United States, before the Civil War, the almost total absence of art education in any form-painting, sculpture, and decoration-caused men to be satisfied with the most perverted and crude standards of pseudo-beauty in women. The pinched waist, the flat chest, and protruding abdomen, the bodily outline wholly destroyed by drapery in the wrong places, were merely symptoms of the general crudity of taste displayed in the architecture of the same period. Doric columns reproduced in wood, medieval towers in shingles, and the gingerbread decorations of the planing-mill, represented a riot of untrained, artistic ambition.

This period of base reproduction and violent novelties in art did give, fortunately, an opportunity for the release of varied and less conventional types of beauty among women. Red hair, which for several generations had been considered ugly-all but improper-began to be tolerated and, among people who had acquired some slight culture in foreign art, was even admired. The more permanent aspects of physical loveliness—grace of outline, purity and richness of color—gained some attention. Two extreme types of women-the household drudge who stood for efficiency without beauty, and the doll-woman who represented beauty without utility-began to go out of fashion. For as the new types of men produced by democracy became prosperous and worldly, they wanted something more in a wife than a homely sex-mate and servant; or, than a pretty but half-sick and helpless fool.

There began to emerge among us a conception of human beauty which might have higher reason than sexuality for its existence. The type of beauty developed among the Greeks had lacked, so far as women were concerned, essential elements. While exhibiting symmetry, color, and grace, it had been greatly deficient in expression; that is to say, it was the perfection of the physical female without the capacity for varied emotion and intelligence which is an inseparable part of the modern ideal. The Venus of Melos would probably attract very little attention now as a woman in cultivated society, though she might serve as an artist's model for life study.

Aside from the sensual and ascetic traditions which largely determined the conventional ideas of the earlier part of the past century, another influence of quite a different sort was brought to bear upon the feminine physique. It is not too much to say that science, particularly biological science, has assured the emancipation of woman; nor that freedom from the limitations and deformities of the domestic tradition was impossible until the facts of evolution had been discovered. For the perpetuation of the weakness and sub­jection of women was certain so long as the Christian scriptures continued to be literally in­terpreted; around them had been built a wall of social convention which was all but impregnable. So long as the doctrine that "the woman is the glory of the man" dominated the Church and, therefore, mankind, so long women would con­tinue to be weak because they were dependent; so long would they mold themselves into what men wanted them to be, rather than develop their own capacities. In less than one century science undermined the view that the female was neces­sarily weak, bringing to light a mass of proof that among many orders of animals and that among primitive men she was strong, even stronger than the male. Physiology and hygiene, medicine and bacteriology, have uncovered the hidden sources of the physical weaknesses of modern women, and have demonstrated that the greater part of them, perhaps all, are pre­ventable.

At the present day, health and beauty are in our minds very nearly inseparable, but when we go back two or three generations we read constantly about the delicacy and ill-health of well known society beauties. The very term formerly in polite use—female complaints—stood for the physical poverty of womankind. A perfectly normal function, like menstruation, which rarely gave discomfort to primitive women, or to women of active, outdoor life, had come to be regarded as a periodic sickness. Girls were imbued with the idea that it must inevitably incapacitate them, and this pervasive suggestion, combined with bad physical habits, heavy and constrictive clothing, and inactivity, made it so. The period of gestation, which, among Indian and peasant women, and even among the vigorous farmers' wives of a hundred years ago, caused relatively slight inconvenience, had taken on the aspect of a prolonged, chronic illness.

As the young girl became anemic, and the young wife inactive, for want of vigorous, compulsory outdoor occupation, pregnancy became a serious discomfort, and childbirth a terror. At the very time when the prospective mother should have been developing her abdominal muscles and stimulating her nutrition to the utmost, the conventional prudery of the Nineteenth Century dictated a careful concealment of her condition. Among South European peoples prospective motherhood is a subject for public congratulation, but in America the "sacred duty" and the "only worthy sphere" was a thing to be concealed—a subject of jest and shameful innuendo. This degenerate prudery went so far in the middle of the Nine­ teenth Century that many girls were married in complete ignorance of their wifely functions, and were, in consequence, the victims of licensed, though unintentional, rape.

It was to be expected that girls, only partially informed about their physical destiny, and observ­ ing, as they grew up, the nasty attitude toward the pregnant woman, and her ashamed aspect, would acquire a repulsion for everything con­ nected with motherhood. After overhearing the painful details of the discomforts of pregnancy and of agonizing childbirth, they could not help looking forward to marriage with fear. Such girls would want to marry, but they would be afraid of the consequences. It was not surpris­ ing that women began to search for and to take advantage of devices for preventing conception, nor that men who loved their wives should abet them in doing so.

At the time when the sciences were beginning to make their first helpful applications to common life, the health of American women was at a very low point. Pale, undeveloped, over-feminized wives were finding themselves wholly inadequate to the bearing and rearing of even small families, and the suggestive modesties which were de­ manded of conventionally educated girls pre vented them from attaining any high degree of health. Such a state of things might have gone on indefinitely, to the extinction of the native-born American, perhaps, but for the advance of medicine, the gradual spread of hygienic knowledge, and their effects in liberating younger women from the traditions of prudery and inactivity.

But the process of freeing women from the tradition of weakness and bodily shame is a very slow one. Nearly two generations have elapsed since the Bloomer costume was mobbed; and it is only in exceptional places and for special purposes, such as horseback-riding, swimming, and gymnastics, that young women are permitted to reveal their two legs. Even yet the prospective mother must hide herself like a thief or a prostitute till after dark during the latter time of her pregnancy.

The majority of people who lived in the Nineteenth Century did not die of tuberculosis, typhoid fever, cancer, or even in accidents or in war—but in their beds after a period of lingering degeneration. In their last years they reaped the accumulated results of the petty, physiological misdeeds of their earlier life. It is a fact, too little dwelt upon in discussing the physiological limitations of womenkind, that all the minor causes of ill-health have operated with much greater injury upon them than upon men in civilized life. A recent writer enumerates a few of what he calls the commonest physical peccadilloes:

"The respiration of a very little impure air eighteen times a minute eighteen times a day for twenty years; a few foods preserved by injurious substances; teeth irregularly brushed; stuffy sleeping-rooms; living-rooms excessively upholstered; carpets full of dust; domestic atmosphere at once motionless, furnace-dried, and kept at high temperature; clothing impervious to sun and air; insufficient baths; insufficient exercise; late hours; overwork; overeating; under-drinking (of water); eating and drinking together instead of separately; and patent medicines; not to mention in the case of woman, the strangling of her vital organs by the stylish harness of society—these are a few of those so-called ‘negligible transgressions.’"

Nearly all of these degenerative influences affected the women of the past generation more than they do the women of the present; but it still remains true that, owing to conventionalities of dress and behavior, to the sedentary character of their occupations, and their relatively inactive, indoor lives, they suffer from them far more seriously than men.

It is one of the ironies of social development that, while ascetic religion has been a most powerful hindrance to women, the stage has become one of the strongest influences to elevate our ideals of pure beauty. At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century the drama was generally regarded in America as an evil influence, and an actress as a foredoomed prostitute. But in the last hundred years the stage has drawn to itself the highest productions of literary and scenic art, and the acting profession has produced some of the noblest human beings of our time. The vulgarities which appealed to the audiences of the Eighteenth Century are no longer tolerated in the better theaters; even Shakespeare has to be expurgated. While there is still too frequent appeal to the obscene mind in the poorer and cheaper theaters, the level of dramatic art is constantly rising. Dancing, from being an appeal merely to the lascivious imagination, has reached the plane of an art as fine in its tone as Grecian sculpture. The French ballet, with its affected and tortured movements, and its suggestive costume, is being more and more replaced by posture and folk dancing, in which the sensual is subordinated to beauty of line and form, to grace of movement, and to picturesque grouping.

All this has had a perceptible effect on the general standards of modesty, beauty, and taste, and especially among women. In proportion as the stage has become more "respectable," it has been patronized by the religiously minded, conventional middle classes, who have learned from it what a really beautiful human creature may be. The average American at the time of the Cen tennial, 1876, had seen once, or twice perhaps, a few bronze monuments, possibly a single gallery of poor and very proper paintings, and had probably never seen a nude statue in his life. The cultivation of the eye to enjoy symmetry and untrammeled grace has come chiefly through dramatic art in this country. As the public became accustomed to really beautiful women on the stage, the tightly corseted, flat-chested, thickhipped figure, encased in mosaic clothing from the ears to the toes, began to look ugly.

The dress of the fashionable woman, too, has been revolutionized by the artistic ideal-a movement in which actresses have set the model and led the way. In the pursuit of novelty and to enhance her own personal charm, each actress has compelled the dressmakers-educated by the French fashion-plate-to devise new and ever more graceful draperies, and more exquisite combinations of color; until now the whole field of Oriental and European art is studied in pursuit of fresh ideas.

The new idea, to be sure, when once offered for admiration on the stage, is quickly snatched up by manufacturers and designers, and usually exaggerated, if not perverted, into some monstrous travesty of style. But at the swift pace of modern changes in fashion, the most extreme, although it is the first to be adopted by persons of crude taste, is also the first to be supplanted by another. And, owing to the enormous variations produced in any one season in a single fashion, the various grades of taste, from crude to highly refined, will find satisfaction.

But the most conspicuous contribution of the stage to the emancipation of women lies in its liberation of legs and torso. Good legs are an asset to a chorus girl, and, the city population having become accustomed to seeing them unashamed at the theater, is no longer shocked at a moderate display of ankles on the street. The corset, worn originally for the distortion of the body to make its sex characters more conspicuous, became conventionalized in this exaggerated style. The fashion-plate figure admired in the last century was truly hideous—as far from flexibility and grace as the form of the lady of the Civil War period was from that of the Laughing Bacchante. But stage beauties, as a mere matter of business, have demanded innumerable variations, which have stimulated the corsetière to devise models for mitigating the most imperfect figures. The straight-front corset, an invention for distributing the abdominal flesh, has, in ten years, revolutionized the ideas of every country woman in America, as to what a "good figure" should be. Thousands of women have seen Madame Sara Bernhardt, when long past middle age, play L'Aiglon, the part of a youth of nineteen; and many more thousands read the interviews in which she explained how she kept her youthful figure by muscular activity and hygienic living. Such examples, and the industrious careers of a large number of actresses at the present day, are having an astonishing reaction upon the physique and dress of young women of the domestic type.

In addition to the correction and cultivation of taste the stage has had an incalculable influence upon the standards of health among women. The actress, the dancer, and the prima donna must have, before all talent, strength to endure the training and the hardships of her profession. However sensual and violent her temper may be, to win success she must deny her appetites and work-work incredibly hard. With the neverceasing curiosity of the general public regarding the lives of stage people, these facts have become known, and in their dissemination have educated every stage-struck girl as well as many feeble amateurs.

The modification of religious dogma, the discoveries of science and their application to common life, the development of dramatic art, and the practice of physical exercise-these and other less important influences are the first steps toward separating physical beauty from its exclusive association with sensual images. Health and beauty are becoming legitimate aims for the enrichment of life, as well as for the elevation of the race. Scientific discovery and medical skill are emancipating women from the enervating complaints once thought inherent in femaleness, but due in fact to constricting conditions of life, to over-breeding, and to the contamination of venereal diseases. Physical training, the development of the body by systematic activity, which has only in the last quarter of the century become acceptable, is doing away with the prudery in which girls were once reared, and preparing them for a kind of motherhood no longer blindly instinctive, but adequate and intelligent. Beauty is no longer merely "vain," nor favor inevitably deceitful—and the fruit of her hands shall yet praise her.