Section II: The Effect Upon Women

Chapter VII: The Pursuit of Dress

"We have plucked up a little spirit and have even signed a sort of feeble declaration of independence against our old enemies, French fashions and perfect uniformity in dress. How well I remember a certain spring season in my childhood, when every woman between the age of fourteen and forty wore a yellow straw bonnet trimmed with green ribbon on the outside and pink on the inside! And that summer, after Napoleon III.'s campaign in Italy, when no respectable person thought of having her bonnet trimmed with any other color than solferino or magenta.

"The study of dress in these days is an approved branch of female education. It has never been wholly neglected, only women have too often pursued it with their eyes shut, and now they mean to keep them open.

"Whether Woman is behind Man in civilization because she pays an attention to dress which she has long ago disused, or whether her devotion to it is because Man requires her to be robed in gay attire ... we are expected in this age to pay more attention to dress than men do, and are justified in doing so—within limits."

—From Social Customs—Florence Howe Hall, 1887.

"To get emancipated from Man, or the political sovereignty of men in the State, is a very small matter and a victory quite insignificant compared with the conquest of Fashion."

—Horace Bushnell.

The excessive and universal interest in dress displayed by American women, has been, like many other qualities, denominated "feminine,"

but has been only superficially accounted for. Whether, as the sociologists suggest, it be analogous to the gorgeous pelage and plumage assumed by certain animals in the mating season; or whether it be associated with caste and class distinctions in society, one primary factor must not be overlooked. Before the Nineteenth Century luxury in dress and toilet was quite as characteristic of men of any given rank as of their womankind. Since the decline of elaborate clothing among men is historically so recent, the significant point to be raised is: why has not the modern woman's interest in personal adornment declined in the same degree?

In the discussion of dress, as of politics, the American and the French Revolutions form a convenient landmark. When the coterie of Marie Antoinette played at dairying in the costumes of shepherds and maids, it might be regarded as a mere vagary of idle persons in search of a new sensation. But when the whole French nation assumed the dress of plain citizens; and when the American gentleman laid aside his peruke and lace ruffles, and went to work in the costume of the common man, it signified that the theories of democracy had taken a profound hold on the human mind. In the United States the absence of a large aristocratic class and the hardy life of a pioneer population tended to reduce men's clothing to the simple requirements of utility and cleanliness. Even for men of wealth and station, a single "costume de luxe" served every purpose. Thus, at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, dress as an important pursuit in life was confined to a small class of fine ladies, while the women of the mercantile and agricultural masses, busied with domestic manufactures, gave scarcely more attention to fripperies and changes in style than did their menkind.

In all ages clothing has been one of the first items of living to be affected by increasing prosperity. In proportion as the family surplus increased among Americans, it was exhibited in richer materials and greater variety of clothes—at first for use on Sundays and gala days alone. But as the poor, the well-to-do, and the rich were more clearly distinguished into classes, elegance in dress became in this country, as elsewhere, the mark of the least industrious section of society. And in the latter part of the century, as we shall see, an occupation in itself for the semi-idle and protected woman. The coincidence of great prosperity, arising in part from universal habits of industry among all classes of men, with the gradual release of large numbers of women from severe household labor by the removal of manufacture from the home to the factory, gave women money and leisure. Having slight intellectual im pulse toward self-culture, and no conception of philanthropy as a career, such as now engages much of the leisure of protected women, they devoted themselves to the elaboration of their clothes.

The ideals set before the boy and the girl by the parents and the teachers of this period were diametrically opposed: the boy must prepare to do something, the girl merely to be attractively feminine. One aimed directly at achievement, the other had no definite aim, but was encouraged to concentrate her attention on manners and appearance. Indirectly a premium was put on prettiness and docility in girls, with a covert suggestion that they might find an ultimate reward in marriage. Among young men, marriage was only one, and by no means the first, of several aims in life; while among girls—though not often consciously acknowledged—it was the chief ambition, because, on the one hand, wifehood and motherhood was the accepted and only creditable career, and, on the other, there was no wage-earning occupation, as there is now, offered as an alternative.

Since young women were properly the chosen, and not the choosers of their fate, they necessarily resorted to every indirect method of attracting a partner. Striking and elaborate apparel was the easiest and most conspicuous means of allurement. This efflorescence—not unlike the mating display among animals—was part of the appropriate behavior during courtship, and to some extent was affected by young men as well as maidens. Grave attention to neckties, the fit of clothing, and the use of hair and shaving cosmetics, was as common a symptom of the wooer as color, grace, and coquetry were of the wooed, but declined even more rapidly when the wooing-game gave place to the marital partnership.

In these displays the young were encouraged by their parents, partly out of affectionate pride, but chiefly, no doubt, as a way of calling attention to their rising standard in life. For in this freer country it was the mark of a good parent to give his children the opportunity and the means of attaining a higher social plane. The sons of sober, industrious people were permitted to splurge into smoking, drinking, horse-flesh, and sports; the daughters were released from the heavier household tasks to spend their time in contriving flirtation, finery, and fancy-work. Long before the destined husband appeared, the bride-to-be was preparing household linen, and accumulating the requisite dozens of hand-made undergarments trimmed with hundreds of yards of crochet, tatting, and embroidery. In all this elaboration there was, fortunately, some opportunity for the development of the artistic sense, and a training in thoroughness of detail, which later found application to the perfection of domestic matters.

Mixed up with the conventional theory of marriage as the suitable outlet for woman's ability, there was also a general opinion that one of her secondary functions should be "to please," not only all marriageable men, but society at large. This involved incessant attention to appearances, to manners, and to lively conversation. Young women, therefore, spent a good deal of their time in pleasing and piquing each other—practising, so to speak, the art by which their future station might be secured, and which would perfect them in the graces expected of leisurely womenkind. The art of setting off the person with beautiful clothes, carefully put on and enhanced with grace of manner, required constant rehearsal, and this, in turn, resulted in competition among women to see who could attain the highest standard.

Women gradually devised, as their occupations came to be less and less directly productive, a round of social functions in which men had little or no part, and in which they found stimulation for their ultra-feminine tastes and trivial duties, to take up the time which, in a previous generation, would have been employed in domestic industries. When marriage provided them—ac cording to the theory-with plenty to do, it was supposed that this harmless and pretty efflorescence of the young female would cease. As a matter of fact, when the income of the new household was not enough to afford plenty of service, and when children came promptly, it did stop abruptly. The worn-out trousseau was replaced with few and serviceable garments; the delicate bridal lingerie was often laid away to yellow because it would cost too much labor to launder it; and the young mother, struggling with duties for which she had almost no preparation, was content to dress her babies elaborately, while herself relapsing prematurely into the plainness deemed suitable to motherhood and middle-age.

But when a girl had had urged upon her from babyhood the vital importance of dress; when she had spent not less than ten years of her life in adornment as one of the chief aims of her existence, making a game of it, and enjoying the zest of competition, she did not all at once lose her taste for pretty clothes, even though diverted by motherhood. If her husband was of the sort who observed such matters, and wished her to please the public as well as himself by her appearance, she might have encouragement to continue after marriage the arts which had filled up her girlish days. Wherever money is easily made, as it was in the Nineteenth-Century America, men are generous with it; but in such a pioneer society men had not the leisure to cultivate the habits of luxurious expenditure, and they left to the woman the function of "vicarious consumption." Her costly and troublesome clothes were comparable, according to Professor Veblen, to "the livery of the chief menial of the household." In default of men's leisure the wife became the social representative of the family, expressing in her person, in her entertainments, and her engagements, the rising social status and the degree of her husband's financial success.

Beyond this, to what degree the lack of absorbing duty and labor on the one hand, and, on the other, the appetite for amusement, have contributed to the elaboration of dress by married women, it is not easy to say; but these were unquestionably some of the reasons for prolonging the excessive absorption of young girls in their appearance, into the later life of women. The pursuit of the fashions afforded satisfaction, moreover, to the desire for variety and novelty; and here originality and taste found expression. Thus a variety of economic and social motives added to the initial impulse of self-adornment in women a force out of all proportion to its normal value. Under similar circumstances, and denied so apparently harmless a diversion, men were accustomed to resort to sports and vice, to gambling, racing, and athletics.

Aside from these two main influences-increasing leisure and great prosperity-another of even greater force was set in motion by the increase of machine-made goods in the latter half of the past century. Until then, rapidly changing. fashions had been within the reach of only a small upper class; while all other classes in society continued to wear for generations, almost unaltered, the distinctive dress which marked them off from those above and below them. In the New Democracy, in proportion as the boundaries of class were blurred and obliterated by successful men passing up from a lower to a higher stratum, and taking their womankind with them, the fashion of clothing became more varied, especially among the younger members of the family. And always the women had more time than men to give to these insignia of affluence.

So long, however, as materials and garments continued to be hand-made, the fashions remained, as compared with our day, relatively stable. Too much labor and time was consumed in producing garments for the ordinary person to discard them before they were worn out. The socks, which cost the housewife days of labor in the knitting, besides the expense of yarn, had to be darned and patched and refooted; while in our time they are so cheap that the traveling man and the prospector might almost be trailed by the unwashed pairs he leaves at each stoppingplace. The element of irreplaceableness in determining use and value, which now applies to only a few accessories of dress, such as lace, jewels, rare shawls, and the like, once applied to nearly all good clothes. As invention brought about the rapid and comparatively inexpensive production of dress materials, and then of readymade clothing, the variety of stuffs for clothing increased, and the incentive for women to vary their clothing was immensely augmented.

The manufacturer and the merchant, meanwhile, set out to sell an ever-increasing product by coaxing the consumer to throw away the old garment long before it was worn out, and to buy new; and, as if this were not inducement enough, the designer, the tailor, and the dressmaker added a threat in the shape of that Bug-a-boo, Beingout-of-Fashion. Thus Fashion, once the amusement of the highly born and the leisurely, and associated with "reputable futility," became, in the Nineteenth Century, the principal means of stimulating trade. Its subtle tyranny has spread far beyond the original limits of class distinction and occupation: determining the width of mourning-crape and the designs of household furniture; the color of men's hats and the type of auto-cars; the length of hair and the brand of whiskey; the size of trousers and the markings of thoroughbred animals.

Its coercion, now primarily commercial, is felt by men as well as women, though not, perhaps, to the same extent. To be out-of-style marks a man as being unsophisticated or unsuccessful—characters not to be endured except by the day laborer, the artist, and the scholar. Nor do men, as a class, rise superior to this social convention; they merely restrict their changes of clothing to a narrower range of more practicable garments, exercising their taste by proxy, and leave to their wives or a haberdashery expert the determination of what they shall wear. The standardization of men's clothing has reduced them to a certain uniformity of appearance, and has produced a class of clerks whose business it is to act as arbiters of fashion, but it has not done away with the necessity of keeping up with the styles. One has only to recall the punctilious and agonizing care with which modest gentlemen of infrequent social excursions attend to every detail of their evening-dress, to realize that not even they can tolerate with courage the possibility of seeming queer in the eyes of their friends.

Even less can any man endure that his wife or his sister should appear out-of-date, a dowdy or an esthetic freak in dress. When monstrous hats recently came into fashion, the newspapers and mankind generally belabored women with ridicule in order to remove these obscurations at the theater. Yet quite as powerful as the conservatism of women in delaying the reform, was the reluctance of every individual man to let his womankind be the first to begin it. The inconsistencies produced in women by the domination of the styles are well-matched by those among men of crude and traditional tastes, who inveigh against the extravagance and vagaries of the other sex, and yet no less openly give their admiration to the most "stylish" women of their acquaintance. Whatever they may say, most men want their own women-folk to be dressed "with the best," and this is, in itself, aside from the stimulus of an ever-changing display, the most potent influence in making older women as well as young girls devote an inordinate attention to self-adornment.

Nothing more aptly illustrates the control which men exercise over the type of women's clothing than the rise and decline of the various dress-reform movements of the Nineteenth Century. Of these the best known and one of the shortest-lived was the street dress misnamed the "Bloomer" costume. Designed for the relief of invalid women from the heavy skirts of the

Civil War period, it was adopted and worn in Washington by a beautiful and cultivated woman whose prestige led to other women—most of them connected with the Woman's Rights movement—adopting it. It consisted of a short skirt to the boot-tops, at first, with Turkish trousers, afterwards buttoned gaiters, underneath. It must be granted that it was a sensible and modest, if not perfectly graceful costume. Yet the violence of men, expressed through the newspapers, and the vulgarities of street mobs, made it impossible for women of the most irreproachable reputations to wear the costume, as the following quotation will show:

"The outcry against it extended from one end of the country to the other; the Press howled in derision, the pulpit hurled its anathemas, and the rabble took up the refrain. On the streets of the larger cities the women were followed by mobs of men and boys ... throwing sticks and stones and giving three cheers and a tiger ending in the loudest of groans. Sometimes these demonstrations became so violent that the women were obliged to seek refuge ... their husbands and children refused to be seen with them in public, and they were wholly ostracized by other women.

"With the exception of Gerrit Smith, all the prominent men, Garrison, Phillips, Channing, May, were bitterly opposed to the short dress, and tried to dissuade the women from wearing it by every argument in their power. The costume, however, was adopted as a matter of principle, and for it they suffered a martyrdom which would have made burning at the stake seem comfortable. . . . No pen can describe what these women endured for the two or three years in which they tried to establish this principle, through such sacrifice as only a woman can understand."¹

When the bifurcated costume was revived in a modified form toward the end of the Nineteenth Century by the vogue of the bicycle, it was joyfully adopted by a large number of modest but active young women; and it shortly went out of use, chiefly because the more conservative men did not want their feminine companions to be conspicuous. This illustrates another of the anomalies of dress: A woman might make herself very conspicuous—indeed, was encouraged to do so—by the novel and bizarre aspect of her dress, so long as it followed the newest mode from Paris, but she was always dubbed "strong-minded," or worse, if she made herself conspicuous by merely being rational.

In addition to economic motives and the necessity of pleasing men, there are other lesser considerations leading to excessive emphasis on personal adornment. Whether girls have inherently more artistic impulse than boys, may be questioned; but there is no doubt that women have a more cultivated taste in clothing and furnishing than men. It is a difference arising largely from education and incessant attention on the part of women, for the male dressmaker, the male artist, and the curio dealer often have as refined, if not as conventional, a sense of color and design as the woman milliner and the fine lady. Whatever artistic impulse girls may have had in past times, was expressed within the limits of dress, house decoration, and gardening; and its restriction within these narrow fields served probably to intensify the more fundamental motives, leading them to constantly elaborate and make over their clothes, and to redecorate and refurnish their houses.

The ornamentation of even the most hideously furnished houses of the past century discloses an astonishing amount of crude potential art-sense in the housewife. The rag carpet, for instance, cleverly woven from the bits of worn clothing, although displaced by ugly patterns of factory-made floor coverings, has now come back again with the revival of art handicrafts. Fashion, which now encourages originality at any rate in the designers and purveyors of goods, formerly perverted and suppressed it. If the ability which our grandmothers expended on rag-rugs and woven bedspreads had been turned into channels more free and stimulating, outside as well as inside the house, the artistic capacity and impulse of the modern woman might be much better developed than it is.

Indirectly, the increase in variety of materials stimulated both men and women to desire a greater diversity of clothes. Because men's garments earlier became standardized, the multiformity of materials and modes played within a narrower range; but in women's dress it has, as yet, found no limit. The delicacy and manifold beauty of textiles; the infinite number of patterns; and the constantly changing styles have stimulated the desires of women for varied clothing, just as the ever-widening range of foods in the hotels and restaurants have taught men to demand a larger variety of more elaborately prepared dishes on their home tables. Fragility of texture, too, has been emphasized, until durability has become an essential only of the most expensive articles. That a thing should be showy and stylish was much more desirable than that it should be lasting. When fashions in the accessories of dress, such as collars, ties, bags, gloves, handkerchiefs, stockings, petty jewelry, combs, et cetera, came to be changed at least once or twice a year, the more quickly they grew shabby, the sooner the consumer would be justified in buying new ones. In the case of women, the mere habit of indoor living, which permitted the use of perishable and delicate clothing, in turn reacted to make them want frequent changes; while in the measure that they were at leisure they welcomed dress as an occupation affording an outlet for taste and a variety of interest to break the insipid monotony of their lives.

Briefly, then, the pursuit of dress as a serious matter by a larger number of women than ever before in the history of the world, has been primarily due to a number of political, social, and commercial influences, for which women themselves were not responsible. It was one of the first signs that the "ages of deficit" were ended, and the era of surplus arrived. It was one of the earliest expressions of democratic principles, and, as invention and manufacture have developed, it has become the approved means of promoting trade. And these national forces were acting throughout the Nineteenth Century with constantly increasing strength upon women. The degree of female receptiveness depended upon two things: the amount of leisure, and the extent to which they had imbibed the tradition that a lovely appearance was the quality most to be desired in woman. This beauty-cult is now fast becoming secondary among well-educated women to the cultivation of the mind and the practice of gentle manners. Why, then, do the majority of women still pursue the vagaries of fashion so madly? Because the average woman does not easily outgrow impressions stamped upon her by the traditions of her kind, we must turn for an explanation to the effect of the pursuit of dress upon her personal character.

Notes

1 Harper, Life and Work of S. B. Anthony, Vol. I, p. 112.