Section II: The Effect Upon Women
Chapter VIII: Clothes and Character
"He that is proud of the russling of his silks like a madman laughs at the rattling of his fetters. For, indeed, Clothes ought to be our remembrancers of our lost innocency."
—Thomas Fuller.
"Thy Clothes are all the Soul thou hast."
—Beaumont and Fletcher.
Ever since the Civil War the amount of time and expense put upon dress by women in this country has been increasing, until now it has become the chief occupation and the accepted amusement of a very large number of those above the laboring class. It has been generally assumed that this is due to some inherent personal taste on the part of women; but it is a matter of economic history, as we have already seen, that dress as a pursuit has been the result of the development of manufacture and of modern methods of trade promotion rather than of an innate frivolity, to which leisure and idleness have always contributed.
When we visualize the typical jeweler, deft-handed, short-sighted, and stoop-shouldered; or the drygoods clerk, radiating smiles and ladylike manners; or the politician, swollen with self-confidence and over-eating; we do not assume that he could never have been any other sort of man, even though his natural temperament may have dictated his choice of occupation. It is taken for granted in explaining such men that their ambitions in life have been molded by their environment to produce certain types of physique and character. It is a matter of common experience that there are very few human beings so specialized by their hereditary qualities that they could not have been different had they been born in another environment than the one in which we see them. When they are so specialized they are called eccentrics, and sometimes recognized as having genius.
One has only to observe the modifications of character and habits which take place in men who change from one industrial medium to another, requiring very different qualifications, to infer that women of the same breed might show unexpected variations if their environment were as varied and as stimulating. The effect of social surroundings in developing in women an inordinate love of adornment can be best measured, perhaps, by contemplating other and rather unusual types produced by exceptional circumstances. During the past century, wherever a girl, by force of circumstance or natural hatred of physical restraint, refused to submit to the tyranny of dress, she became almost invariably and, it might almost be said, by virtue thereof, a superior human being. The wives of the California pioneers, brought up like other Eastern girls to give the utmost care to their dress, when transplanted to isolated homes on ranches and in mining camps, without servants, and often compelled to do the labor of a large household, while rearing their families, almost always emancipated their bodies from the trammels of long skirts and from corsets. Utility and cleanliness became the sole requisites of their clothing, and thus was released a vast amount of physical and mental energy to be spent in other and worthier directions. They managed complicated households, reared vigorous children, in emergencies guarded water-rights and mining properties with a shotgun; and in their old age were as fearless, as able-bodied, as warm-hearted, and as capable as their partners.
The influence of the Quaker costume and plain traditions in minimizing feminine and developing larger human qualities in women is registered in the Woman's Rights movement, in which the Friends played so large a part between 1840 and 1870. Lucretia Mott, the Quaker preacher, an exquisite, gentle, frail, and yet brilliant woman, was doubtless the most important figure among all the delegates to the World's Convention in London. Clothes were the least of all concerns to her, we may infer, for she wrote of herself:
"My life, in the domestic sphere, has passed much as that of other wives and mothers in this country. I have had six children. Not accustomed to resigning them to the care of a nurse, I was much confined to them during their infancy and childhood. Being fond of reading, I omitted much unnecessary stitching and ornamental work in the sewing for my family, so that I might have time for this indulgence and for the improvement of the mind. For novels and light reading I never had much taste. The 'Ladies' Department' in the periodicals of the day had no attraction for me."
By dwelling on such exceptional women, it may be possible to conceive what the effect of ornamentation as a principal aim in life has been upon the greater number of average young girls brought up in middle-class homes. To them dress involved a constant consideration of money—how to get it without directly entering the wage-earning class; how far it might be made to go, and even how things might be got without it. Money has rarely been looked at in the large by women as income or capital, but rather as a succession of petty, irregular sums to be spread over a thousand necessities and luxuries. Because the husband and father was the earning partner he was inevitably the financial head, paying the larger household expenses himself, and handing out to the wife and minor children for their clothing and incidentals such generous or niggardly pin-money as his temperament and means dictated. The effect upon women was similar to that of an irregular wage upon the casual workingman; there was no incentive to thrift, but every inducement to shortsighted and petty extravagance. There was never butter to cover a whole slice of bread, therefore why trouble about butter at all?-why not have a string of imitation pearls?-so women naturally reasoned. Expenditure dribbled along on the hand-to-mouth principle: a girl might need hat, shoes, underwear, all at once, but, as the sum given her at any one time was never enough to cover them all, she naturally bought the hat first, the shoes next, and postponed the underwear, making the best appearance she could. A constantly rising scale of dress accessories often cut off-among poorer girls-garments, and even food, necessary to health.
Such a perversion of judgment in the distribution of income was, and is still, quite characteristic of the average woman. I have known a mother of a family, living on a scale of several thousand a year, in a pretty house, among cultivated people, who set a meager luncheon (when her husband was absent), and never had blankets enough for all the beds, who, nevertheless, "had to have" solid silver and cut glass on her table, and décolleté dinner dresses, in order to feel happy and respectable. There are many others of the same type, who find money to buy pretty clothes and artistic house furnishings, but never to pay adequately for house-services. A woman who lived on a scale twice that of a college professor, who was always beautifully gowned and bejeweled, seriously asked that a university should give her son a scholarship because the standard of living expected of people in their social position did not permit them to send their son through college, nor admit of his working his own way. A lecturer on dress reform, who urged that one conservative tailor-made suit, with the necessary accessories, bought carefully each year, was the most economical way of being well dressed, was continually met by the objection that her hearers could not save up enough ahead to get what they needed all at once.
Even when the woman had a regular allowance her sense of proportion was seldom developed to the point of providing the necessities first, and choosing among a thousand luxuries afterwards. Yet that such lack of judgment is due rather to lack of education in personal finance than to sex may be illustrated by the idiosyncrasies of college boys in the same matters. The college boy usually pays his board bill, because he must eat, and he buys such books as he cannot borrow; but he lets the laundryman and the tailor wait, sometimes indefinitely, wears a sweater and corduroys not merely because he is lazy and they are a sort of collegiate livery, but to economize. He thinks himself justifiably "cute" when he arrives at home in vacation so shabby that his foolish parents insist on presenting him with new clothes without reflecting that he spent in unreported extravagances what should have clothed him properly.
It is evident enough without further illustration that, because women did not earn their money, and received it irregularly in small amounts, they had no occasion to develop a balanced financial sense; but acquired, on the one hand, a wonderful skill in spreading petty amounts thinly over large areas, and, on the other, a perverted judgment of values. If this had produced in them only a petty thrift and foolish expenditure, the remedy would be obvious and easy; but it has, in truth, eaten into character much more deeply. For the love of dress and the necessity of satisfying it by getting it from some man who earned it, made girls from their childhood contrive, deceive, and maneuver. It is a common enough joke that men are better-humored after dinner than before, but among women it is a commonplace quite without any humorous color. Every dependent creature, whether woman or child, peon or dog, as a matter of safety or comfort, learns to read the temper of his master; and in proportion as he is able to play upon it, finds life easier. Wheedling and cunning, the whole battery of feminine weapons from caresses to tears and temper, were inevitably employed upon negligent and selfish men by their dependents; and often to the extent of imposition upon generous men.
Sometimes, when there was no man to supply an income, or the man was too unremunerative, the woman resorted to other means of eking out her purse without appearing to work for a living. The business of the Woman's Exchange was originally devised to give the untrained gentlewoman a chance to market her products without being known. Many a woman, who, in our day, would go into a shop or become a typist, tried to keep herself within the pale of her social class by selling, surreptitiously, embroideries and pastry. While even yet the society girl, whose standard of dress must be kept up as a matter of convention, receives the second-hand dealer quietly at her home, and turns her slightly worn evening dresses into money, which may be spent for those of the latest mode.
If the initial expense in time, money, and thought required in stylish dressing had been all that the pursuit demanded, as it has been generally among men, it might be worth the price, for good appearance has everywhere a recognized value in the world. But it did not end there, as in the case of a man who might purchase a whole outfit and its accessories at one or two stores, and, after a few days, put it on with the assurance that for six months at least he was properly clothed. In our country the ready-made clothing industries have greatly diminished the amount of time and attention necessary to procure the essentials, even of women's clothing, but this is of quite recent date, and has not by any means done away with the minute attention which has to be bestowed on every detail if a woman wishes to attain the recognized standard.
The stylish woman had forever to pursue that will-o'-the-wisp of fashion, "the newest thing," not only in boots, stockings, lingerie, dresses, and hats, but also the latest-uttermost-refinement-of-the-newest-thing in braids, lace, embroidery, beads, passementerie, trimmings, of which there were hundreds of designs rapidly succeeding each other. There were, besides, an infinitude of shades, widths, textile surfaces in an ever-enlarging variety of stuffs; and these had to be combined by herself or the dressmaker, after consultation of several American and French fashion books, in the momentarily approved design. And all this energy was expended without hope of anything more than temporary success, except for those who could make over or replace the garment to meet the next incoming fashion.
The making-over of clothes every year, if not every six months, as the pace of fashion speeded up, came to take the place of many of those spurious handicrafts with which the clever woman of the mid-century had been wont to busy her hands. It became a matter of pride with those of small means to "make something out of nothing," as the complimentary phrase went—to contrive a new and stylish dress out of two old ones; to conceal paucity of material by piecing small bits of cloth together, and decorating the tell-tale seams; to make a jacket of a man's discarded overcoat, lined with the less-worn portions of an old silk petticoat. As the rule of Fashion spread to carpets, curtains, bedding, and furniture, the inexorable principle of multiplying designs to stimulate buying, invaded this field as well; and the devoted housewife, according to her means and her ingenuity, conscientiously set herself the duty of keeping her house as well as herself and children "in the Fashion." In all this she exercised her brain as much as her manufacturing grandmother had done before her, but with infinitely less of real value to show for it.
Perhaps all the more because the result did not command satisfactory appreciation from her men-folk, whose crude tastes and practical turn of mind did not readily grasp the desperate need of women to be in the fashion, she required the approval of other womankind. So much struggle and economy must be worthy of recognition; and if, unhappily, her men friends did not notice and praise the triumphs of her ingenious—and often wasted—skill, she turned to other women to secure their proper appraisal. It is no doubt true that women competing in the dress contest are often jealous of each other, but it is far more significant that they have devised a code of manners with which to satisfy each other's hunger for appreciation. Each agrees to admire, or, at any rate, to appear to admire, the other's dress. When two women meet, it is customary, after the conventional greeting, for one to say: "How pretty your new hat is!" And for the other to reply: "I'm so glad you like it—I saw the new shape at Smith's Emporium, and I trimmed it with the velvet off my last winter's hat." When this topic has been canvassed to the satisfaction of the wearer of the hat, she in turn will compliment her friend's taste and ingenuity by praising something she is wearing. In such wise have women expended their perverted abilities and kindliness, spurred on by the race of commercial fashion, and lacking an education in larger things.
Dress, moreover, came to take the place of healthful exercise and recreation. The lazy afternoon parade through the shopping streets, to see the newest fashions displayed four times a year at the change of seasons, became a weekly excursion as the varieties of materials and style increased. And in our day many women of small means know scarcely any other way of spending their leisure except to drag a fretful child past the shop windows every weekday afternoon; and then to go home and try to copy the most violent combinations of color and the most striking designs in slazy, cheap imitations.
It is a trite old saying that a man with a champagne taste and a beer income is sure of trouble. In women a similar desire for display, gratified at the cost of the earning power of which they themselves have no direct experience, is equally disastrous in producing effeminacy and discontent. The capacity for detail developed through a thousand generations of domestic necessity has been turned into a few narrow channels, the chief of which has at last come to be the pursuit of dress. Their age-long economy has become shortsighted pinching in some, and equally ill-judged extravagance in others. And the constant chase after fashions which no amount of money would enable them to really come up with has produced a state of chronic dissatisfaction with themselves,
their lot, and with the men who supply their income. Petty-mindedness has at last become the distinguishing characteristic of the average woman. The marvelous thrift which enables her to dress stylishly on a small sum; the originality with which she contrives and imitates ever-new prettinesses; the ingenuity with which she makes a good show on small resources-all these valuable but perverted qualities would, if applied to the larger problems of common life, clean up the cities, find a home for every normal child, and reform our haphazard domestic economy; and would produce that sureness of aim, that sense of being a useful cog in the world's machinery, without which no human being can be happy.
One has only to listen to the conversation of women among themselves to realize that clothes are sure to come to the top. From the latest sensation in the newspapers or the last play, the talk drifts quickly around to the newest departure in fashions proposed by the Ladies' Scrap-Bag, the pretty knitted capes for babies depicted in the last number of the Perambulator, or the wonderful bargains in petticoats to be had at Rosenberg's. They skip from topic to topic without apparent logic, each new subject being suggested by the speaker's latest interest in dress. Since the experience of the domestic woman was necessarily limited to a certain round of topics—clothes, cooking, servants, and children-her conversation had rarely any continuity, because her life had none. It consisted rather of hopping from one unrelated fact to another without that impulse of a ball lightly tossed back and forth by which an intelligent conversation is developed. When opportunity offered, her talk degenerated into that bog of narrowness and ill-breeding, a monologue of her personal grievances.
The female mind, thus fed on details of ephemeral importance, had no reason for larger intellectual interests; and constant occupation with the attainment of the correct accessories of her costume left little leisure for reading. Such books as she found time for would naturally be of the emasculated sort, whose heroines were the beautiful and perfectly dressed kind she strove to be; to whom impossible, but perfectly moral, adventures happened, until they culminated in a blissful engagement. For a quarter of a century at least, the Sunday-school novel and magazines of the type of Godey's Lady's Book supplied the mental pabulum of the majority of American women. The magazines inculcated the pursuit of dress as a most important duty of woman, as part of the ideal of gentility and religion set before the perfect lady.
And if it be thought that women no longer feed on this anemic literary diet, one has only to examine any one of the strictly feminine journals to learn how pervasive it still is. Many of them. profit by, if they are not published in, the interest of trade and manufactures for women, and it is highly important to them that the love of dress should be intensified. From one of them, which may be matched by many others published in 1910, I quote the following passage:
"Indeed, all women in this enlightened age study the subject of dress in a way so thorough that it would have been considered irreligious a century ago. Now, it is as well understood and accepted as any other duty, for being well-dressed, which means suitably dressed, imparts the serenity and poise which make for happiness; and the woman who is happy and well-poised makes everybody around her better and more serene."
This harping on the "duty" of being well-dressed, which is, in plain English, an invitation to throw away the old and buy new, whether the woman can afford it or not, is the stock in trade of the Fashion writers:
"Since hats first came into fashion woman has found them an inexhaustible source of interest. The quest for becomingness is always fascinating, and though we do not always find it, it is every woman's duty to make the most of herself. . . .
"It has become wellnigh impossible to create anything sensational in the way of a hat. Extreme size and overabundance of trimming have ceased to surprise."
In the same magazine I find another appeal to the feminine conscience:
"There never was a time when Dame Fashion's hairdresser made it so possible for every woman to look her best as now. No matter what her features, she can make them appear to the best advantage by adopting the most becoming style of hair-dressing. . . . It is a common fault of women that they fail to realize the importance of making the most of their crowning glory—the hair."
In an article on the mistakes of women in dressing, the matter is put on a higher plane:
"The study of clothes is considered to be a good deal of a frivolous subject, unworthy of thought or consideration by serious people; and yet to attain the good taste which results thereby, and which means true simplicity and good art in clothes, requires the same effort and thought which are necessary to reach a high standard in any other art worthy of the name."
The elderly woman is then encouraged not to let herself be left behind by the statement that "fashion no longer relegates the woman past the youthful years to circumscribed styles . . . as worn but a short time ago;" and the crafty expert in female psychology then gives a page of charming heads of middle-aged women with lovely complexions, regular features, and not a wrinkle, encased in the smartest of hats-not in bonnets. The plain elderly woman is still further tolled along by such phrases as "these have more dignity," or "have an indefinable sense of fitness," until, by the time the sheet is finished, a thousand women are convinced not only that they must have a new hat, but that this particular new style will make them young and beautiful.
In order to focus the feminine mind on the spring fashions-and incidentally to sell their wares-another journal has a clever article on the Paris dressmakers, in which we are led to see the poetry of design, in this wise:
"For there is something in the atmosphere of Paris that seems to create a desire for lovely things and to furnish dressmakers with an incentive and an inspiration for their work. . . . Perhaps it is because Paris has always been a sort of playground for rich men and lovely women, exquisites with whom pleasure is a life study, dress a fine art, beauty a religion.
"If the dressmakers do not create their styles out of thin air they at least have a wizardry of touch that makes the dross of the commonplace turn into pure gold in their hands. . . . Manufacture is rather a sordid term, perhaps, to apply to the turning out of masterpieces that will surprise and delight the expectant public at the coming openings."
After a résumé of the dominating characteristics of the styles, this subtle promoter of novelty soothes us into the delusion that, after all, we are not compelled to adopt any one of the new ideas:
"Further than that no one, not even the dressmakers themselves, can say what will be worn, for the decision on a new style or a change in an old style rests with the public. Ultimately by continually harping on one string the dressmakers may lure the populace into dancing the tune they pipe, but they cannot force it. They can only lead and suggest, and make their suggestions so attractive that the public, like a spoiled child, drops its old toy and reaches out its hand to grasp the new."
Since the days of the forties, when French fashion-plates were successfully introduced, this sort of literature has been served up to make women buy new, and always more fantastic, clothing. It requires no great acumen to conclude that it would inevitably lead to extravagance. Having no responsibility for earning their own money—though indirectly they might, nevertheless, earn it—and very little experience in handling it, except in small amounts, they did not reckon its value in the large. And having been encouraged to concentrate their energies on appearance, they came to have a highly cultivated taste—nay, more than taste, appetite—for pretty clothes which, like an appetite for drink or games of chance, must be satisfied. Yet it, like many another social habit, could never be satisfied. It might also be said that the more time and money they had to give to dress, the more discontented they were sure to be. If the father or husband could not meet this rising demand, they pitied themselves for his lack of success; if he set a limit of expenditure, they regarded him as a selfish brute. Now and then they degenerated into dishonest schemers, running up large bills for which their menkind were responsible; cheating the dressmaker and the milliner; sending back garments as unsatisfactory after wearing them; practising the deceits of the adventuress in the guise of a respectable woman of society.
Yet, in justice to womankind, it must be granted that the dress-mania produced very few of these types, as compared with hundreds of conscientious, economical women, who, misled by the conventions of their social station, took out of themselves, rather than out of men's pockets, the wherewithal to achieve the proper clothes of a lady. These dear, fussy, dutiful creatures sacrificed their health, their love of nature, their taste for art, for literature, even their companionableness, to the Juggernaut of women—Suitability. Moreover, because men were conspicuously the producing class, and women for the most part obviously the consumers, extravagance came to be regarded as a female propensity; while, as a matter of fact, it was no more truly characteristic of one than of the other. What men spent in cigars and tobacco, in heavy eating and drinking, in club life and dues, and in careless, unconsidered sums, women balanced by their equally wasteful but careful spreading of small sums upon the elaboration of dress.
One of the last and most demoralizing aspects of fashion-promotion has been the infliction upon children of the over-developed taste for tawdry ornament. The women's magazines cater to the mother's pride by providing embroidery patterns to be worked upon little boys' blouses; suggestions of how to cut over little girls' dresses to keep pace with the newest idea. While the laundry bills mount ever higher, the fashionable little girl is rigged out in more fragile and impracticable and unwholesome clothing. It is as if the mother were still a child herself, playing with a live doll which, though it cannot be broken, may still be distorted into her own foolish image.
As a result of the combined influence of economic forces and social traditions, centering in dress, women have acquired a set of habits of expenditure and thinking which lead to discontent and waste of time in the trivialities of taste, in the pursuit of petty economies, and in the discussion of dress detail. These are, however, the least of the evil effects of the dress-cult: in many women they degenerate into exploitation of men, dishonesty toward tradespeople, and the vulgarities of conspicuous display. It may almost be asserted that competence, good humor, and intelligence in women are now in inverse proportion to the amount of time they spend on the fashion of their clothes. A woman of influence and a "real lady" in the Twentieth Century is known, more often than not, by the fact that she is not dressed conspicuously in the latest fashion. She may be known even more by the fact that her children are dressed in the simplest and most child-like manner.