‘I do not like the fashion of your garments—you will say, they are Persian attire, but let them be changed.’—King Lear.
Moderndress-reform crusades have ever been allied with womanly revolts against man’s authority. They proceeded originally from that fount of vulgarity, that never-failing source of offence—America. In the United States, that ineffable land of wooden nutmegs and timber hams, of strange religions, of jerrymandering and unscrupulous log-rollery, the Prophet Bloomer first arose, and, discarding the feminine skirt, stood forth, unashamed and blatant, in trousers! The wrath of the Bloomers (as the followers of the Prophet weretermed) was calculated to disestablish at once and for ever the skirts and frocks, the gowns and miscellaneous feminine fripperies, that had obtained throughout the centuries; and they conceived that with the abolishment of skirts the long-sustained supremacy of man was also to disappear, even as the walls of Jericho fell before the trumpet-sound of the Lord’s own people. For these enthusiasts were no cooing doves, but rather shrieking cats, and they were both abusive and overweening. No more should ‘tempestuous petticoats’ inspire a Herrick to dainty verse, but the woman of the immediate future should move majestically through the wondering continents of the Old World and the New with mannish strides in place of the feminine mincing gait induced by clinging draperies. Away Erato and your sister Muses—if, indeed, your susceptibilities would have allowed your remaining to behold the spectacle! For really, that must have been a ‘sight for sore eyes’— to adopt the expression of the period—the too-convincing vision of a middle-aged woman, proof against ridicule, consumed with all seriousness and an ineffable zeal for converting all and sundry to her peculiar views in the matter of a becoming and convenient attire. And never was prophet less justified of his country than the Bloomer seer of hers; for nakedness, even to undraped piano-legs, was then a reproach in the country of the Stars and Stripes, where legs are not legs, an’t please you, but ‘extremities’ or ‘limbs;’where trousers are neither more than ‘pantaloons’ nor less than ‘continuations.’ In that Land of Freedom, where one would have outraged all modesty by the merest mention of legs or feet—these last indispensable adjuncts being generally known as ‘pedal extremities’—it surely was illogical in the highest degree that women should wear a species of trouser, and thereby proclaim the indelicate(!) fact to all the world of their possession of legs. Truly Pudicitia is as American a goddess as Mammon is a god!
For the Bloomer costume was nothing else but a travesty of male attire. Aggressiveness is inseparable, it would seem, from all new ideas, and the minor prophets of Bloomerism were aggressive enough, in all conscience. They were not content with wearing the breeches in the literal sense: they sought to convert all womankind to their faith by the writing of pamphlets and the making of speeches on public platforms. Mrs. Ann Bloomer was their fount of inspiration. She it was who introduced the craze to America in 1849. Two years later it had crossed the herring-pond, and thatAnnus Mirabilis, the year of the Great Exhibition, witnessed a few of its enthusiasts—beldams in breeches—clad in this hybrid garb, walking in London streets. But women refused to be converted in any large numbers, and only a few more than usually impudent females went so far as to back their views by wearing the badges of the cult in public.
But although so few Englishwomen were converted to the new dress, and though fewer still had the courage to wear it, the Bloomer agitation was largely noticed in the papers and by the satirists of the time. It was noticed, indeed, in a manner entirely disproportioned to its real import, and the humorous papers, the ballad-mongers, and innumerable private witlings, had their fling at the follies of these early dress-reformers. The Bloomers—unlovely name!—held meetings in London, attended, it must be owned, by crowds of ribald unbelievers; and they even went to the length of holding a ‘Bloomer Ball,’ a grotesque idea hailed with delight by a roaring crowd which assembled ‘after the ball,’ and showed its prejudices by hooting the ridiculous women who had come attired in jackets and trousers like those of the Turk. No Turk, indeed, so unspeakable as they. But the crowd did not stop at this point. They had brought dead cats, decayed cabbages, rotten eggs, and all imaginable articles of offence with which to point their wit, and they used them freely, not only upon the women, but also upon the men who accompanied them. For discrimination was not easy between the sexes in the badly lit streets, when both wore breeches, and at a time when men went generally clean-shaven; and so the rightfully breeched were as despitefully used as the usurpers of man’s distinctive dress.
And so Bloomerism languished awhile and presently died out, but not before a vast amount hadbeen written and printed in its praise or abuse. The satirical effusions which owe their origin to this mania are none of them remarkable for reticence or delicacy. Indeed, the subject did not allow of this last quality, and the broad-sheet verses issued from the purlieus of Drury Lane by the successors of Catnach are, some of them, very frank. Perhaps the best and most quotable is the broad-sheet,I’ll be a Bloomer. The writer, not a literary man by any means, starts off at score, and his first verses, if models neither of taste, rhyme, nor rhythm, are vigorous. It is when the inspiration runs dry, and he relies upon a slogging industry with which to eke out his broad-sheet, that exhaustion becomes evident.
THE BLOOMERCOSTUME, 1851.
THE BLOOMERCOSTUME, 1851.
Listen, females all,No matter what your trade is,Old Nick is in the girls,The Devil’s in the ladies!Married men may weep,And tumble in the ditches,Since women are resolvedTo wear the shirt and breeches.Ladies do declareA change should have been sooner,The women, one and all,Are going to join the Bloomers.Prince Albert and the QueenHad such a jolly row, sirs;She threw off stays and putOn waistcoat, coat, and trousers.It will be fun to seeLadies, possessed of riches,Strutting up and downIn Wellingtons and breeches.Bloomers are funny folks,No ladies can be faster:They say ‘tis almost timeThat petticoats were master.They will not governed beBy peelers, snobs, or proctors,But take up their degreeAs councillors and doctors.No bustles will they wear,Nor stocks, depend upon it;But jerry hats and capsInstead of dandy bonnet.Trousers to their knees,And whiskers round their faces;A watch-chain in their fob,And a pair of leather braces.The tailors must be sharpIn making noble stitches,And clap their burning gooseUpon the ladies‘ breeches.Their pretty fingers willBe just as sore as muttonTill they have found the wayTheir trousers to unbutton.The Bloomers all declareThat men are sad deceivers;They’ll take a turn, and bePrigs, dustmen, and coalheavers—Members of Parliament,And make such jolly fusses;Cobble up old ladies’ shoes;Drive cabs and omnibuses.Their husbands they will wop,And squander all their riches;Make them nurse the kidsAnd wash their shirts and breeches.If men should say a word,There’d be a jolly row, sirs!Their wives would make them sweatAnd beat them with their trousers.The world’s turned upside down;The ladies will be tailors,And serve Old England’s QueenAs soldiers and as sailors.Won’t they look funny whenThe seas are getting lumpy,Or when they ride astrideUpon an Irish donkey?The ladies will be right;Their husbands will be undone,Since Bloomers have arrivedTo teach the folks of London—The females all I mean—How to lay out their richesIn Yankee-Doodle-doosAnd a stunning pair of breeches.Female apparel nowIs gone to pot, I vow, sirs,And ladies will be finedWhodon’twear coats and trousers;Blucher boots and hats,And shirts with handsome stitches,—Oh, dear! what shall we doWhen women wear the breeches?Now some will wear smock-frocksAnd hobnail shoes, I vow, sirs;Jenny, Bet, and Sal,Cock’d hat and woollen trousers.Yankee-Doodle-doo,Rolling in the ditches;Married men prepareTo buy the women breeches!
Listen, females all,No matter what your trade is,Old Nick is in the girls,The Devil’s in the ladies!Married men may weep,And tumble in the ditches,Since women are resolvedTo wear the shirt and breeches.
Ladies do declareA change should have been sooner,The women, one and all,Are going to join the Bloomers.Prince Albert and the QueenHad such a jolly row, sirs;She threw off stays and putOn waistcoat, coat, and trousers.
It will be fun to seeLadies, possessed of riches,Strutting up and downIn Wellingtons and breeches.Bloomers are funny folks,No ladies can be faster:They say ‘tis almost timeThat petticoats were master.
They will not governed beBy peelers, snobs, or proctors,But take up their degreeAs councillors and doctors.No bustles will they wear,Nor stocks, depend upon it;But jerry hats and capsInstead of dandy bonnet.
Trousers to their knees,And whiskers round their faces;A watch-chain in their fob,And a pair of leather braces.The tailors must be sharpIn making noble stitches,And clap their burning gooseUpon the ladies‘ breeches.
Their pretty fingers willBe just as sore as muttonTill they have found the wayTheir trousers to unbutton.The Bloomers all declareThat men are sad deceivers;They’ll take a turn, and bePrigs, dustmen, and coalheavers—Members of Parliament,And make such jolly fusses;Cobble up old ladies’ shoes;Drive cabs and omnibuses.
Their husbands they will wop,And squander all their riches;Make them nurse the kidsAnd wash their shirts and breeches.If men should say a word,There’d be a jolly row, sirs!Their wives would make them sweatAnd beat them with their trousers.
The world’s turned upside down;The ladies will be tailors,And serve Old England’s QueenAs soldiers and as sailors.Won’t they look funny whenThe seas are getting lumpy,Or when they ride astrideUpon an Irish donkey?
The ladies will be right;Their husbands will be undone,Since Bloomers have arrivedTo teach the folks of London—The females all I mean—How to lay out their richesIn Yankee-Doodle-doosAnd a stunning pair of breeches.
Female apparel nowIs gone to pot, I vow, sirs,And ladies will be finedWhodon’twear coats and trousers;Blucher boots and hats,And shirts with handsome stitches,—Oh, dear! what shall we doWhen women wear the breeches?
Now some will wear smock-frocksAnd hobnail shoes, I vow, sirs;Jenny, Bet, and Sal,Cock’d hat and woollen trousers.Yankee-Doodle-doo,Rolling in the ditches;Married men prepareTo buy the women breeches!
Punchhad, among other Bloomer skits, the following rather good example:—
Hoity-toity!—don’t tell me about the nasty stupid fashion!Stuff and nonsense!—the idea’s enough to put one in a passion.I’d allow no such high jinkses, if I was the creatures’ parent.‘Bloomers’ are they—forward minxes? I soon Bloomer ’em, I warrant.I’ve no patience nor forbearance with ‘em—scornin’ them as bore ’em;What! they can’t dress like their mothers was content to dress before ’em,—Wearing what-d’ye-call-’ems—Gracious! brass itself ain’t half so brazen;Why, they must look more audacious than that what!s-a-name—Amàzon!Ha! they’ll smoke tobacco next, and take their thimblefuls of brandy,Bringing shame upon their sex, by aping of the jack-a-dandy.Yes; and then you’ll have them shortly showing off their bold bare faces,Prancing all so pert and portly at their Derbys and their races.Oh! when once they have begun, there’s none can say where they’ll be stopping—Out they’ll go with dog and gun; perhaps a-shooting and a-popping.Aye! and like as not, you’ll see, if you’ve a Bloomer for your daughter,Her ladyship, so fine and free, a-pulling matches on the water;Sitting in a pottus tap, a-talking politics and jawing;Or else a-readingPunch, mayhap, and hee-heeing and haw-hawing.I can’t a-bear such flighty ways—I can’t abide such flaunty tastes.And so they must leave off their stays, to show their dainty shapes and waistses!I’d not have my feet filagreed, for ever so, like these young women.No; you won’t seeme, I’ll be bound, dressed half-and-half, as a young feller;I’ll stick to my old shawl and gownd, my pattens, and my umbereller.
Hoity-toity!—don’t tell me about the nasty stupid fashion!Stuff and nonsense!—the idea’s enough to put one in a passion.I’d allow no such high jinkses, if I was the creatures’ parent.‘Bloomers’ are they—forward minxes? I soon Bloomer ’em, I warrant.I’ve no patience nor forbearance with ‘em—scornin’ them as bore ’em;What! they can’t dress like their mothers was content to dress before ’em,—Wearing what-d’ye-call-’ems—Gracious! brass itself ain’t half so brazen;Why, they must look more audacious than that what!s-a-name—Amàzon!Ha! they’ll smoke tobacco next, and take their thimblefuls of brandy,Bringing shame upon their sex, by aping of the jack-a-dandy.Yes; and then you’ll have them shortly showing off their bold bare faces,Prancing all so pert and portly at their Derbys and their races.Oh! when once they have begun, there’s none can say where they’ll be stopping—Out they’ll go with dog and gun; perhaps a-shooting and a-popping.Aye! and like as not, you’ll see, if you’ve a Bloomer for your daughter,Her ladyship, so fine and free, a-pulling matches on the water;Sitting in a pottus tap, a-talking politics and jawing;Or else a-readingPunch, mayhap, and hee-heeing and haw-hawing.I can’t a-bear such flighty ways—I can’t abide such flaunty tastes.And so they must leave off their stays, to show their dainty shapes and waistses!I’d not have my feet filagreed, for ever so, like these young women.No; you won’t seeme, I’ll be bound, dressed half-and-half, as a young feller;I’ll stick to my old shawl and gownd, my pattens, and my umbereller.
The Bloomer agitation was but the beginning of a series of crazes for the reform of women’s dress, and the ‘Girl of the Period’furoresucceeded it, after an interval of several years. True, the Girl of the Period was scarcely a dress-reformer, but her dress and manners were sufficiently pronounced, and certainly her vulgarity could not have been surpassed by the most fat and blowzy Bloomer that ever held forth upon a public platform.
To Mrs. Lynn Linton belongs the honour of having discovered the Girl, and she communicated her discovery to theSaturday Reviewin 1868. This it was that gave some point to the saying that the Girl of the Period was but the Girl of a Periodical.
And certainly the vulgarity of the Girl of the Period was extremely pronounced. It was a vulgarity that showed itself in bustles and paniers; the ‘Grecian Bend;’ skirts frilled and flounced and hung about with ridiculous festoons, and short enough to display her intolerable Balmoral boots. An absurdly inadequate ‘Rink’ hat rendered her chignon all themore obvious, and ——. But enough! The Man of the Period was her equal in absurdity. He cultivated a hateful affectation of lassitude and indifference; he affected a peculiarly odious drawl, and he taxed his mind with an effort to sustain a constantlynil admirariattitude toward things the most admirable and happenings the most startling. He wore the most ridiculous fashion of whiskers, compared with which the perennial ‘mutton-chop’ and the bearded chin and clean-shaven upper lip of the Dissenter or typical grocer are things of beauty and a satisfaction to the æsthetic sense.
This fashion was the ‘Piccadilly-weeper’ variety of adornment, known at this day—chiefly owing to Sothern’s impersonation of a contemporary lisping fop—as the ‘Dundreary.’ This creature was a fitting mate to the Girl of the Period. He married her, and the most obvious results are the ‘Gaiety-Johnnies,’ the ‘mashers,’ and the ‘chappies’ of to-day, whose retreating chins and foreheads afford subjects for the sad contemplation of philosophers—to whom we will leave them.
As for their female offspring, they are, doubtless, the ‘Lotties and Totties’ of Mrs. Lynn Linton’s loathing, who smoke cigarettes and ape the dress and deportment of the ladies of the Alhambra or the Empire promenades.
It is at once singular and amusing to notice how surely all women’s dress-reform agitations move in the same groove—that of a more or less closeimitation of man’s attire. Even fashions which are not ostensible ‘reforms’ have a decided tendency to make for masculinity. The girls who, some few years since, cut their hair short—like the boys; who wore bowler hats, shirt-fronts, men’s collars and neckties; who carried walking-sticks, or that extraordinary combination of walking-stick and sunshade known facetiously as a ‘husband-beater;’ who affected tailor-made frocks, donned man-like jackets, and adopted a masculine gait, were not accredited reformers with a Mission, but they showed, excellently well, the spirit of the age, and if they were wanting in thoroughness, why, Lady Harberton, with her ‘divided skirts,’ was a very Strafford for thoroughness in her particular line.
Divided skirts were introduced to the notice of the public some ten years ago by Viscountess Harberton and a Society of Dress Reformers, calling themselves, possibly onlucus a non lucendoprinciples, first a ‘National’ Society, and at a later period arrogating the title of ‘Rational.’ It may seem matter for ridicule that an obscure coterie of grandams should adopt such a grandiose title as the first, or that they should, by using the ‘Rational’ epithet, be convicted of allowing the inference that they considered every woman irrational who did not adhere to their principles; but, like all ‘reformers,’ they were without humour and consumed with a deadly earnestness. They (unlike the rest of the world) saw nothing for laughter in the public discussionswhich they initiated, by which they sought to show that corsets were not only useless but harmful, and that the petticoat might advantageously be discarded for trousers worn underneath an ordinary skirt, somewhat after the fashion that obtains in riding costumes.
THE RATIONALDRESS.
THE RATIONALDRESS.
But, for all the pother anent divided skirts, they did not catch on; and a newer rival, another variety of ‘Rational Dress,’ now rules the field, the camp, the grove, but more especially the road. For the popular and widespread pastime of cycling has given this newest craze a very much better chance than ever the Bloomer heresy or the original Divided Skirt frenzy obtained; and it is not too much to say that, if the cycle had not been so democratic a plaything, this latest experiment in dress reform would have been but little heard of. Rational Dress, as seen on the flying females who pedal down the roads to-day, is only Bloomerism with a difference. That is to say, the legs are clothed in roomy knickerbockers down to the knees, and encased in cloth gaiters for the rest, buttoned down to the ankles. These in place of the Turk-like trousers, tied round the ankles and finished off with frills, of over forty years ago. As for the attenuated skirts of the Prophet Bloomer, Rational Dress replaces them with a species of frantic frock-coat, spreading as to its ample skirts, but tightened round the waist. A ‘Robin Hood’ hat, even as in the bygone years, crowns this confection; and,really, the parallels between old-time schismatics and the modern revolting daughters are wonderfully close. Everything recurs in this world in cycles of longer or shorter duration. The whirligig of time may be uncertain in its revolutions, but it performs the allotted round at last; and so surely as yesterday’s sun will reappear to-morrow, as certainly will the crinolines, the chignons, and the Bloomer vagaries of yester-year recur. You may call the recurrent fashions by newer names, but, by any name they take, they remain practically the same. The farthingale of Queen Bess’s time is the crinoline of the Middle Victorian period, and ‘came in’ once more as the ‘full skirt’ of some seasons since. The chignon is resurrected as the ‘Brighton Bun,’ and is as objectionable in its reincarnation as it was in its previous existence; and we have already seen that Rational Dress, Divided Skirts, and the Bloomer costume are but different titles for one fad. The very latest development is not pretty: but there! ’tis ‘pretty Fanny’s way,’ and so an end to all discussion.
Inthese days, when women begin to talk of their Work with all the zeal and religious fervour that characterises the attitude of the savage towards his fetish, it behoves us to inquire what that Work may be which arouses so much enthusiasm and is the cause of the cool insolence which is becoming more and more the note of the New Woman. A very little inquiry soon convinces the seeker after the true inwardness of modern fads and fancies that Woman’s Work—so to spell it in capitals, in the manner dear to the hearts of the unsexed men and women who reckon Adam a humbug and Eve the most despitefully-entreated of her adorable sex—has nothing to do with the up-bringing of children or the management of the home. Those traditional duties are nothing less, if you please, than the slavery which man’s tyranny has imposed upon the physically weaker sex, and are not worthy of sharing the aristocratic prominence of capital letters which the desultory following of artsand sciences has arrogated. Moderndoctrinairespreach heresies which would make miserable that very strong man, St. Paul, who constantly enjoined woman to silence and submission.Place aux damesis the century-end watchword, in a sense very different from the distinguished consideration which the dames of years bygone received.Place aux damesis all very well, as some one has somewhere said—but then, dames in their place, which, with all possible deference to the femininely-influenced philosophers of to-day, is not in politics, nor in any arts or sciences whatever.
Those who so blithely advocate the throwing open of the professions to woman, and invite her to work with them, side by side, in works of practical philanthropy, base their arguments on false premises. They assume, at starting, that womankind has been throughout the centuries in an arrested condition. Her mental and bodily growth has, they say, been retarded by cunningly-devised restrictions; she has not been permitted to develop or to reach maturity—she is, in short, according to these views, undeveloped man, rather than a separate and fully developed sex. Those views are, of course, merely fallacies of the most unstable kind. Woman’s place and functions have been definitely fixed for her by nature, and those functions and that place are to be the handmaid of man (or the handmatron if you like it better), and to be the mother of his children; and her place is the home. Her physicaland mental limitations are subtly contrived by nature to keep woman in the home and engrossed in domestic matters; and, really, if abuse is needed at all, man does not deserve it, but to nature belongs the epithet of tyrant, if an owner must be found for the unenviable distinction.
Woman is essentially narrow-minded and individualistic. Her time has ever been fleeted in working for the individual, and the community would be badly off at this day had not the State been thoroughly masculine for a time that goes back beyond the historians into the regions of myths and fairy tales. Small brains cannot engender great thoughts; which is but another way of saying that woman’s brain is less than man’s. It is only recently that woman has organized her forces at all, and she would not have done so, even now, had she not a plentiful lack of anything to occupy her thoughts withal in these days of the subdivision of labour and of extended luxury. And so, with plenty of time to spare, she begins to ask if there is nothing that becomes her better than the ‘suckling of fools and the chronicling of small beer.’ But although Carlyle said in his wrath that men and women were mostly fools, yet there be children nourished with nature’s food who have developed a certain force of intellect; and as for the chronicles of small beer, gossip and scandal-mongering have never been compulsory in women, but only unwelcome features of their nature. Idleness,luxury, and the supreme consideration with which even the most foolish feminine manifestations have been received, have always been fruitful sources of mischief, and this by-past consideration has favoured the development of vanity and the growth of the feminine Ego to its present proportions.
Woman never becomes more than an ineffectual amateur in all the careers she enters. Her practice in art and literature inevitably debases art and letters, for she is a copyist at most. In literature she never originates, but appropriates and assimilates men’s thoughts, and in the transcription of those thoughts seldom rises above the use ofclichés. But the Modern Woman desires most ardently to enter those spheres of mental and technical activity, undeterred by any disheartening doubts of her fitness for letters or government, of her capacity for organizing or originating. She points triumphantly for confirmation of her sex’s endowments to the lives and works of the George Eliots, the Harriet Martineaus, the Elizabeth Frys, the Angelica Kauffmanns, or the women of the French political salons; but she does not stop to consider that those distinguished women succeeded not because, but in spite of, their sex, and that few of the women who have made what the world terms successful careers had any of the more gracious feminine characteristics beyond their merely physiological attributes. Many of them were unsexed creatures whose womanhood was an accident of their birth.
The rush of women into the artistic and literary professions has always had a singularly ill effect upon technique, for the woman’s mind is normally incapable of rising to an appreciation of the possibilities of any medium. They have not even a glimmering perception of style, and would as cheerfully (if not, indeed, with greater readiness) acclaim Dagonet a poet as they would the Swan of Avon, although the gulf that divides Shakespeare from Mr. G. R. Sims is not only one formed by lapse of the centuries: to them the works of Miss Braddon appear as the ultimate expression of the passions, and they would as readily label a painting by Velasquez ‘nice’ as they would call the productions of Mr. Dudley Hardy ‘awfully jolly.’ Subject rather than execution wins their admiration, and the nerveless handling of a painting whose subject appeals to their imagination wins their praise while the highest attainments of technique are disregarded. For them does Mr. W. P. Frith paint theDerby DayandSo Clean; for their delight are the ‘dog and dolly’ pictures of Mr. Burton Barber, theCan ’oo Talk?the ‘peep-bo’ and ‘pussy-cat’ stories in paint contrived; and for their ultimate satisfaction are they reproduced as coloured supplements in the summer and Christmas numbers of the illustrated papers.
You may count distinguished women artists upon the fingers of your hands, with some fingers to spare, and some of these achieved their fame by reason oftheir womanhood, rather than the excellence of their art. Angelica Kauffmann is a notable example. She attained the unique position of a female Royal Academician through Reynolds’s infatuation: she painted portraits and classical compositions innumerable, but the portraits are poor and her classicism the most futile and emasculate. Literature, too—although more women have made reputations with the pen than the brush—can show but a very small proportion of feminine genius; and (although the ultimate verdict of the critics may yet depose these) Charlotte Brontë, Fanny Burney, and George Eliot are the most outstanding names in this department. These few names compare with an intolerable deal of mediocrity, cosseted and sheltered from the adverse winds of criticism in its little day; but yet so constitutionally weak that it has withered and died out of all knowledge. The women who, like George Eliot, and her modern successor, Mrs. Humphry Ward, adventure into ethical novels, are too excruciatingly serious and possessed with too solemn a conviction of their infallibility for much patient endurance; and really, when one remembers the spectacle of G. H. Lewis truckling to the critics, intriguing for favourable reviews, and endeavouring to stultify editors for the sake of his George Eliot, in order that no breath of adverse criticism and no wholesome wind from the outer world should come to dispel her colossal conceit, we obtain a curious peep into the methods by which the feminine Egois nourished. But the spectacle is no less pitiful than strange.
It is not often, however, that women writers present us with philosophical treatises in the guise of novels. Their high-water mark of workmanship is theFamily Heraldtype of story-telling, even as crystoleum-painting and macramé-work exhaust the energies and imagination of the majority of women ‘art’ workers. What, also, is to say of the lady-novelists’ heroes, of god-like grace and the mental attributes of the complete prig? What but that if we collate the masculine characters of even the better-known, and presumably less foolish, feminine novels, we shall find woman’s ideal in man to be the sybaritic Guardsman, the loathly, languorous Apollos who recline on ‘divans,’ smoke impossibly fragrant cigarettes, gossip about theiraffaires du c[oe]ur, and wave ‘jewelled fingers’—repellent combinations of braggart, prig, and knight-errant, with the thews and sinews of a Samson and the morals of a mudlark.
Philanthropy is a field upon which the modern woman enters with an enthusiasm that, unfortunately, is very much greater than her sense. Her care is for the individual, and she it is who encourages indiscriminate almsgiving, but cannot understand the practical philanthropy which compels men to work for a wage, or organizes vast schemes of relief works. Her whole nature is individualistic, and we would not have it otherwise, for it has, in manyinstances of womanly women, made homes happy and comfortable, and nerved men in the larger philanthropy which succours without pauperising thousands. But she has no business outside the home.
Philanthropy, of sorts, we have always with us, and the undeserving need never lack shelter and support in a disgraceful idleness while the tender-hearted or the hysterical amateur relieving-officers are permitted to make fools of themselves, and rogues and vagabonds of the lazy wastrels who will never do an honest day’s work so long as a subsistence is to be got by begging. The fashionable occupation of ‘slumming’ made many more paupers than it relieved, and the ‘Darkest England’ cry of Mr. William Booth, whom foolish folk call by the title of ‘General’ he arrogates, is the most notorious exhibition of sentimentalism in recent years. That appeal to the charitable and pitiful folks of England was, like the Salvation Army itself, engineered by the late Mrs. Catherine Booth, and it captured many thousands of pounds wherewith to succour the unfit, the criminal, the unwashed; the very scum and dregs of the race whom merciless Nature, cruel to be kind, had doomed to early extinction. But mouthing and tearful sentimentality has interfered with beneficent natural processes, and the depraved and ineffectual are helped to a longer term of existence, that they may transmit their bodily and mental diseases to another generation, and so foulthe blood and stunt the growth of the nation in years to come.
Science, anthropology, and economics have no meaning for the femininely-influenced founders of Salvation Army doss-houses: the body politic—society, in the larger sense—national life, are phrases that convey no meaning to the sobbing philanthropists to whom the welfare of the dosser is a creed and Darwinian theories rank blasphemy.
The tendency of sentimental philanthropy is to relieve all alike from the consequences of their misdeeds, and to preserve the worst and theunfittest, and to enable the worst to compete at an advantage with the best, and to freely propagate its rickety kind. Philanthropy of this pernicious sort is essentially sentimental and feminine.
But the most disastrous interference, up to the present, of sentimental fanatics—women and femininely-influenced men—has been their successful campaign against those beneficent Acts of Parliament, the Contagious Diseases Acts, framed from time to time for the protection of Her Majesty’s forces of the Army and Navy.
Those Acts, applied to the garrison towns and the dockyard towns of Aldershot, Chatham, Plymouth, Dover, Canterbury, Windsor, Southampton, and others, provided for the registration and compulsory periodical medical examination of the public women who infest the streets of those places. Horrible diseases, spread by these abandonedcreatures, decimated the regiments and the crews of the ships that put in at their ports; and thus, through them, the blood of future generations was poisoned and contaminated. The women whose depravity and disease spread foul disorders among not only the soldiers and sailors, but also amongst the civil populations of these garrison towns, were free, before the application of the C. D. Acts, to ply their trade no matter what might be their bodily condition; but the operation of those measures, at first providing for voluntary inspection and examination, and afterwards making those precautions compulsory, rendered it a criminal offence for a woman registered by the police to have intercourse with men while knowing that she was suffering from disease. Such an offence, or the offence of not presenting themselves at the examining officer’s station at the fortnightly period prescribed by the Acts, rendered women of this class liable to imprisonment. If at these examinations a woman was found to be healthy, a certificate was given her; if the medical officer certified her to be diseased, she was taken by compulsion to hospital, and detained there until recovery.
Plymouth, Aldershot, and Chatham, in especial, were in a shocking condition before the Acts came into force; but during the years in which they were administered by the police, a diminution of disease by more than one-half was seen in the Army and Navy, and the registration of the women led toa very great falling-off of the numbers who obtained so shameful a living. Evidence given before the Royal Commission upon the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1872 proved this beyond question, and also proved that these women not only had no objection to the medical examinations, but regarded them and the hospitals as very great benefits.
The shocking revelations as to the social condition of Plymouth, Devonport, and Stonehouse, afforded by the evidence of the police, cannot be more than hinted at in this place. It is sufficient to say that over 2000 women were put upon the registers, either as occasionally or habitually living a loose life, and that all classes were to be found in these documents, but especially girls employed behind the counters of shops during the day. The police seem everywhere to have been conscientious in the execution of their duty, and to have performed ungrateful and delicate tasks with great discretion. The registers were private and strictly confidential official documents, and both the medical examinations and the police visits to suspected houses were conducted with all possible secrecy, the police in the latter case being plain-clothes men, and not readily to be identified by the public.
And yet, in spite of the very evident benefits derived from the Acts and deposed to before the Commission by such unimpeachable authorities as the foremost medical officers of the Army and Navy, commanding officers, clergymen of the EstablishedChurch, Wesleyan ministers, the entire medical and nursing staffs of hospitals, and the police authorities themselves, these Acts were repealed, in submission to the outcries of the ‘mules and barren women,’ who, headed by the rancorous Mrs. Josephine Butler and the gushing sentimentalists from the religio-radical benches of the House of Commons, called public meetings, and shrieked and raved upon platforms throughout the country: a chorus of shocked spinsters and ‘pure’ men, whose advocacy of what they called, forsooth, ‘the liberty of the subject’ and the abolition of what they falsely termed the ‘State licensing of vice,’ has resulted in a liberty accorded these women to spread disease far and wide.
The nation, the men of Army and Navy, have reason abundant to curse the sentimental women, the maiden aunts, thereligieuses, the gorgons of a mistaken propriety and a peculiarly harmful prudery, whose interference with affairs which they were not competent to direct has wrought such untoward results.
This is what a writer says in theWestminster Review: ‘The struggle for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts was an ordeal such as men have never been obliged to undergo. It involved not merely that women should speak at public meetings, which was a great innovation, but that they should discuss the most painful of all subjects, upon which, up to that time, even men had notdared to open their mouths. Yet so nobly did the women bear their part all through those terrible years of trial, that they raised a spirit of indignation which swept away the Acts, but never, by word or deed, did they deservedly incur reproach themselves.’
Rubbish, every word of it! The women who spoke upon these painful subjects were under no compulsion, legal or moral, to initiate or take part in the frenzy of wrong-headed emotion, which was exhibited upon public platforms to the dismay and disgust of all right-thinking men and women. It cannot be conceded that the subject was painful to these persons, nor can the statement be allowed to go unchallenged that they did not deserve reproach. Reproach of the most bitter kind was and is deserved by the prejudiced persons who distorted facts and gladly relied upon any hearsay evidence that would seem to square with their theories, and even refused to admit the weight of incontrovertible statistics produced against their rash and windy statements. The examinations of Mrs. Josephine Butler1and of those two ridiculous persons, the Unitarian pastor from Southampton and his wife,Mr. and Mrs. Kell, are damning indictments of their good faith and good sense. These are types of women and womanish men who take delight in the investigation of pruriency, whose noses are in every cesspool and their hands in the nearest muck-heap.Their kind stop at nothing in the way of unfounded statements, and are greedy of rumour rather than of accredited facts. Want of acquaintance with, or experience of, the subjects they dogmatise upon deterred them as little then as now from case-hardened obstinacy; and perhaps no one cut such a sorry figure before the Commission as that illogical and contradictory person, the late John Stuart Mill, the femininely-influenced author of the nowadays somewhat discreditedSubjection of Women. ‘His chief ground for objection to the system’ (of the C. D. Acts) ‘was on the score of the infringement of personal liberty’ (i.e., the liberty to spread loathsome diseases); ‘but he considered it also objectionable for the Government to provide securities against the consequences of immorality. It is a different thing to remedy the consequences after they occur’—as who should say, in the manner of the proverb, Lock the stable door when the horse has been stolen.
This sham philosopher and political economist of ill-argued theories, who is to-day honoured by an uncomfortable and ungainly statue on the Victoria Embankment, forgot that England has not achieved her greatness by the study or practice of morality: and shall we fall thus late in the day by a Quixotic observance of it?
The sooner the statue of this woman’s advocate is cast into the Thames, or melted down, the better.
Woman’s influence and interference in thesematters have proved an unmixed evil. It would be hopeless, however, to convince her of error: as well might one attempt to hustle an elephant.
Political women are, fortunately, rare in England. A Duchess of Devonshire, a Lady Palmerston, and the politico-social Dames of the Primrose League, these are all the chiefest and most readily-cited female politicians: and their interest was, and is, not so much in the success or defeat of this party or the other as in the return of their favoured candidate or the failure of a pet aversion. Politics have no real meaning for women: their natures do not permit of their comprehension of national and international questions. What does Empire signify to woman if her little world is distracted? and what is a revolted province to her as against a broken plate?
The Fates preserve us from Female Suffrage; for give women votes and patriotism is swamped by the only women who would care to exercise the privilege of voting: the clamorous New Woman, all crotchets, fads and Radical nostrums for the regeneration of the parish and the benevolent treatment of subjugated races in an Empire won by the sword and retained by might.
The‘strong-minded woman,’ as the phrase goes, we have always with us nowadays; and as this species of strength of mind seems really to be a violent and uncertain temper, there can be little doubt but that the strong-minded woman has always been more frequent than welcome. Certainly shrewishness and termagancy have been too evident throughout the ages, from the days of Xanthippe to the present time. That much we know from the lives—or shall we say, under the painful circumstances, the ‘existences?’—of public men who have been cursed with scolding wives. But what Asmodeus shall unveil the private conjugal tyrannies, the hectorings, and the curtain-lectures that make miserable the undistinguished lives of men of no importance for good or evil in the State? How many women, in fine, ‘wear the breeches’ through the ‘strength of mind’ which may be justly defined as readiness of that impassioned invective which in its turn may be reduced (like a vulgar fraction) to itslowest common denominator of ‘nagging.’ Not a pretty word, is it? And it is a practice even less pretty than that cross-grained definition would warrant. We cannot, however, lift the veil that hides the domestic infelicities of the lieges, but must be content to recount the troubles and oppressions that have befallen historic Caudles, who bulk a great deal larger in the history of England than they did, in their own homes, to their wives.
Sir Edward Coke, the great law officer of James the First’s reign—the revered ‘Coke upon Lyttleton’ of the law-student—was little enough of an authority in his own household after he had married his second wife, herself a widow—the ‘relict,’ in fact, of Sir William Newport-Hatton. He married her but a few months after his wife’s death, privately and in haste; probably urged to such an indecent speed by the necessity of forestalling the Lord Keeper Bacon in the lady’s affections. But he had not been wise in his haste; for affection—for him, at least—she had none. She had probably buried all her kindly feelings in the grave with Sir William Hatton, for she would never be known as Lady Coke, but always as Lady Hatton, and, in truth, she led that distinguished and bitter lawyer the life of a dog. One wonders, indeed, why she married him at all, who was old enough to be her father. It was not ambition, for she was by birth a Cecil and daughter of the second Lord Burleigh; nor the want of money, nor the need of a protector, for she was very wellable to take care of herself, as Sir Edward presently discovered, and she was sufficiently wealthy. They quarrelled incessantly—about property, about the marriage of their daughter, about anything and everything. Sir Edward Coke was only suffered to enter her house in London by the back door, and she plundered his residence in the country. She sent her daughter away to Oatlands to prevent a marriage with Sir John Villiers, which Sir Edward was pressing forward; and he, ‘with his sonne and ten or eleven servants, weaponed in violent manner,’ repaired thither, broke open the door, and took her away. Lady Hatton intrigued at Court against the distracted Coke, who was already in disfavour at St. James’s, and procured an interference by the Star Chamber, which condemned his ‘most notorious riot;’ but Coke eventually gained the upper hand in this matter at least, and the girl was married to the man of his choice. This did not end the enmity. For years they contended together until death parted them. But she survived him by ten years.
Legal subtlety and ability had no terrors for Lady Hatton, and martial prowess daunted the wife of Monk as little, for, in very truth, Lady Albemarle, the famous Nan Clarges, wife of that General Monk who was created first Duke of Albemarle, was so awe-inspiring a termagant that her husband declared he would rather fight a battle than dispute with her, and that the roar of a whole park of artillery was not so terrible to him as her tongue loosened infloods of abuse. There is no doubt that he regretted his union with the washerwoman’s daughter whom he had married, who was neither beautiful nor witty. Nan Clarges had all the ancestry and upbringing that made for shrewishness. Her mother was one of the five women barbers who gained notoriety by their vulgarity even in that age, and her father was a blacksmith and farrier, one John Clarges, who lived at the corner of Drury Lane and the Strand, over his forge. Her mother became afterwards a laundress, and she herself dabbled in the soapsuds before and after her marriage to Thomas Ratford, whose father was also a farrier. This marriage took place in 1632, and she and her husband occupied a shop in the New Exchange in the Strand, where they sold gloves, powder, and cosmetics. Her parents died in 1648, and she and her husband separated in the following year. Three years later she married Colonel Monk, whose laundress she had been. Although the tongue of scandal was not idle when one re-married who was not a widow, the farrier never reappeared to claim his wife, and when the Restoration was accomplished (partly, it is said, owing to her Royalist sympathies), and General Monk became Duke of Albemarle, none were found to question her title of Duchess. But she became the laughing-stock of the Court and gave general disgust to Pepys, who calls her in good faith ‘a plain, homely dowdy,’ and ironically ‘that paragon of virtue and beauty.’ On one occasion he ‘foundthe Duke of Albemarle at dinner with sorry company; some of his officers of the Army; dirty dishes and a nasty wife at table, and bad meat.’
But she was mildness itself compared with that ‘she-devil,’ Bess of Hardwicke, who was wedded and a widow before her sixteenth year, and saw four husbands into the grave. She was the daughter of a rich Derbyshire gentleman, who died and left her his sole heiress at an early age. She fascinated and married a neighbour, the young and invalid Mr. Barley, whose property ranged with her own. He lived but a short while, and left her a charming widow with a great access of wealth.
Her second venture was Sir William Cavendish, a Suffolk gentleman of good family and great property, whom she married and constrained to sell his Suffolk lands and settle with her in Derbyshire. She ruled him thoroughly, and he seems to have been little better than her chief director of works in the building operations that were a passion with this singular woman through the whole of her long life. Her home was at Hardwicke Hall; but she now began to build a very much more magnificent house at Chatsworth. She had not proceeded very far with this work before Sir William Cavendish, probably wearied out with being ruled in all things, followed her first husband to the grave. Lady Cavendish mourned him for a decent period, keeping her eye open the while for another eligible, whom she presently found in the person of thewidower, Sir William Saint Lo, a captain in Queen Elizabeth’s guard and a gentleman of considerable property in the neighbourhood of Bath. But Sir William had a family, and she could not think of wedding him until he had made a settlement upon her of all his lands. He did so readily, this bluff soldier; for he was absurdly fond of her, as his letters show. He was, however, detained much in the service of the Queen, in London and at Windsor, and died very soon.