Urged to its logical conclusion, the argument of the Audubon Society (named in honor of the most eminent avicide of his time) against the killing of song-birds to decorate their betters withal would forbid the killing of the sheep, an amiable quadruped; the fur-seal—extremely graceful in the water; the domestic cow—distinguished for matronly virtues; and the donkey, which, although it has no voice, is gifted with a fine ear and works up well into a superior foreign sausage. In short, we should emancipate ourselves from Nature’s universal law of mutual destruction, and, lest we efface something which has the accidental property of pleasing some of our senses, go naked, feed upon the viewless wind and sauce our privation with the incessant spectacle of song-birds pitching into one another with tigerish ferocity and committing monstrous excesses on bees and butterflies.
We need not concern ourselves about “extermination”; the fashion is not going to last long enough for that, and if it threatened to do so the true remedy is not abstention, but breeding. Probably there was a time when appeals were made for preservation of what is now the domestic “rooster”—a truly gorgeous bird to look at. If he had not been good to eat (in his youth) and his wife a patient layer their race would have been long extinct. All that preserves the ostrich is the demand for its plumage. If dead pigs were not erroneously considered palatable there would not be a living pig within reach of man’s avenging arm. Who but for the value of their scalps would be at the trouble and expense of breeding coyotes? Thus we see how it is in the economy of nature that out of the nettle danger the lower animals pluck the flower safety; and it may easily be that the hatbird will owe its life to the profit that we have in its death, and in the flare of the plume-hunter’s gun will “hail the dawn of a new era.”
II
Women have a comfortable way of personifying their folly under the name “Fashion,” and laying their sins upon it. The “tyranny of Fashion” is of a more iron-handed quality than that of anything else excepting Man. I do steadfastly believe that many women have a distinct and definitive conception of this monster as a gigantic biped (male, of course) ever in session upon an iron throne, promulgating and enforcing brutal decrees for their enslavement. Against this cruel being they feel that rebellion would be perilous and remonstrance vain. The person who complains of “the tyranny of fashion” is a self-confessed fool. There is no such thing as fashion; it is as purely an abstraction as, for example, indolence in a cat, or speed in a horse. Fancy a wild mare complaining that she is a slave to celerity! Moralizers, literarians and divers sorts of homilizers have been cracking this meatless nut on our heads and comforting the stomachs of their understandings with the imaginary kernel for lo! these many generations, and have even persuaded the rest of us that there is something in it—as much, at least as there was in the pocket of Lady Locket. It has not even so much in it as that; not the half of it: the phrase “women’s slavery to fashion” has absolutely no meaning, and one about to use it might as profitably use, instead, John Stuart Mill’s faultless example of jargon: “Humpty Dumpty is an abracadabra.” Woman can not be called submissive to fashion, for the submission and the thing submitted to are the same thing. Even a woman can not be called a slave to slavery; and it is the slavery that is the fashion. What else can we possibly mean by “fashion,” when using the word with reference to women’s bondage, than women’s habit of dressing alike and badly? It can not mean, in this connection, the style of their clothing; that cannot “enslave”; and we do not speak of slavery to anything good and desirable. Habit and addiction to habit are not two things, but one. In short, women, having chosen to make fools of themselves, have personified their folly and persuaded men to see in it a tyrant with a chain and whip.
The word fashion is used as a convenient generic term for a multitude of related stupidities and cowardices in character and conduct, and for the results of them. To say that one must “follow the fashions” is to say that one is compelled to be stupid and cowardly. What compels? Under what stress of compulsion are women in making themselves hideous in one way or another all the time—each year a different kind of hideousness? Who commands them to get their shoulders above their heads, blow up their sleeves and elongate their lapels to suggest the collar-points of a negro minstrel? When have not men tried to prevent them from doing these things and remain content with a tideless impulchritude—an ugliness having slight and slow vicissitudes, such as themselves are satisfied withal? Doubtless women’s quarrel with their outward and visible appearance is a natural and reasonable sentiment, a noble discontent; for they do look scarecrows, and no mistake; but the effect which they have at any given time achieved, and at which they afterward are aghast, is not to be bettered by eternal tinkering with the same tools. In new brains and a new taste lies their only hope of repair; lacking which, they would do well to let Time the healer touch our wounded eyes, and inurement bring toleration.
“The iron hand of custom and tradition,” wails one of the female disputants, “makes a pitiable race of us.” What a way to put it! Could it not occur to this gentle creature that if we were not a pitiable race—pitiable for our brute stupidity—custom and tradition would not be iron-handed? We are savages in the same sense that the N’gamwanee is a savage, who will not appear at any festival without his belly painted a joyous sky-blue. But among us none is so amusing a savage as she who squeals like a pig in a gate at “the tyranny of custom,” when nothing is pinching her.
III
An error analogous to this personification of her own folly as a pitiless oppressor is that of considering at length and with gravity the character, fortunes, motives and duties of “woman.” Woman does not exist—there are women. Of woman nothing that has more than a suggestive, literary or rhetorical value can be said. Like the word “fashion,” the word “woman” is convenient, and of legitimate use by persons of sense who understand that it is not the name of anything on the earth, in the heavens above the earth, nor in the waters under the earth—that there is nothing in nature corresponding to it. To others its use should be interdicted, for like all abstract words, it is a pitfall to their clumsy feet. If the word is used to signify the whole body of women it obviously assumes that, with regard to the matters under consideration, they are all alike—which is untrue, for some are dead. If it means less than the whole body of women it is obligatory upon the person using it to say precisely what proportion of the sex it means. The way to determine woman’s true place in the social scheme is simple: make an exhaustive inquiry into the character, capacities, desires, needs and opportunities of every individual woman. When you have finished the result will be glorious: you will know almost as much as you knew before.
Concerning woman, I should like to be allowed a brief digression into the troubled territory of her “rights”—a field of contention in which her champions manifest an inadequate conception of the really considerable powers of Omnipotence. A distinguishing feature of this logomachy is the frequent outcrop of a certain kind of piety that is unconnected with any respect for, or belief in, the power of Him evoking it. These linked assumptions of God’s worth and God’s incompetence are made variously: sometimes by implication, sometimes with a directness that distresses the agnostic and makes the atheist blush. One disputant says: “Would a woman be less womanly because conceited Man had granted her the rights that God intended she should have?” Now, if man really has the power to baffle the divine will and make the divine intentions void of effect he may reasonably enough cherish a fairly good opinion of himself—perhaps any degree of conceit that is consistent with his scriptural character of poor worm of the dust.
A noble example of piety undimmed by disrespect is that of a Presbyterian minister, who began his remarks thus: “Has woman to-day all the rights she ought to have—all the rights Christ meant her to have? I fully concede she has not.” This is not very good English, but I dare say it is good religion, this conception of Christ as a “well-meaning person,” but without much influence in obtaining favors for his friends. Anyhow, it is authenticated by the clerical sign-manual, which sets it at a longer remove from blasphemy than at first sight it may seem to be, and makes it so holy that I hardly dared to mention it. I hope it is not irreverent to say so; it is not said in that spirit, but I can not help thinking that if I were God I should find some way to carry out my intentions; and that if I were Christ and had not a sufficient influence to secure for Lively Woman the rights that I meant her to have I should retire from public life, sever my connection with the Presbyterian church and go to work.