“Oh, every thing is done by machinery, as at your hotel. Every thing, the sweeping, bed making, window scrubbing and washing. Each separate department has its various appliances and apparatus. The women of every household are taught the use and management of the various machines, you know, at the expense of the state, during their youth; when they take the management of a house they can run it single-handed. Most of the machinery goes by electricity. A house can be kept in perfect order by two hours’ work daily. The only hard work which we still have to do is dusting. No invention has yet been effected which dusts satisfactorily without breakage to ornaments, which accounts for the fact, also, that the fashion of having odds and ends about a home has gone out. It was voted years ago by the largest women’s vote ever polled, that since men could not invent self-adjusting, non-destructive dusters, their homes must suffer. Women were not to be degraded to hand machines for the sake of ministering to men’s æsthetic tastes. So you see we have only the necessary chairs and tables. If men want to see pictures they can go to the museums.”
Perhaps it is this latter fact which accounts for my never being able to find the good citizen A—— at home. He is gone to the public club, or to the bath, or to the Communal Theater, I am told, when I appear again and again. This wonderful community has done much, of that I am convinced, in the development of ideal freedom; but there appears to be a fatal blight somewhere in its principles, a blight which seems to have destroyed all delight in domestic life. In my next I will tell you more and at length, of the peculiar development which the race has attained under these now well-established emancipation doctrines, and of their results on the two sexes.
I hope you are not wearying of my somewhat lengthy descriptions, but you yourself are to blame, as you bound me to such rigid promises of detail and accuracy.
Farewell, dear companion, would you were here to use your wiser philosopher’s eyes.
I am yours, Wolfgang.
IV.
Dear Friend: No one thing, I think, strikes the foreigners eye, on his arrival in this extraordinary land so strongly as does the lack of variety and of taste displayed in the dress of either the men or the women. Both sexes dress, to begin with, as I said in my last, precisely alike. As it is one of the unwritten social laws of the people to dress as simply, economically and sensibly as possible, it results that there is neither brightness nor color nor beauty of line in any of the garments worn. In passing the Government Clothing Distribution Bureaus, nothing so forcibly suggests the ideal equality existing between the sexes, as does the sight of the big and the little trowsers, hanging side by side, quite unabashed, the straight and the baggy legs being the only discernible difference. Baggy trowsers and a somewhat long, full cloak for the women—straight-legged trowsers and a shorter coat for the men, this is the dress of the entire population. Some of the women are still pretty, in spite of their hideous clothes. But they all tell me, they wouldn’t be if they could help it, as they hold that the beauty of their sex was the chief cause of their long-continued former slavery; they consider comeliness now as a brand and mark of which to be ashamed. From what I have been able to observe, however, I should say that the prettiness which has descended to some of the women fails to awaken any old-time sentiment or gallantry on the part of the men. There has, I learn, been a gradual decay of the erotic sentiment, which doubtless accounts for the indifference among the men; a decay which is due to the peculiar relations brought about by the emancipation of woman.