Mr. Romanes wants us to ‘give her the apple, and let us see what comes of it.’ Heaven forbid: let her pluck it if she has the courage and the power, but let us not earn our own condemnation by inviting her to do so. He is of opinion that ‘the days are past when any enlightened man ought seriously to suppose that, in now again reaching forth her hand to eat of the tree of knowledge, woman is preparing for the human race a second Fall.’ There may be two opinions on this head. Women may occasionally surpass in learning the Senior Wrangler of as good a year as was ever known; they may exercise their brains and their muscles to their utmost tension; but let them not in those cases exercise the natural function of woman and bring children into the world. For nature, which never contemplated the production of a learned or a muscular woman, will be revenged upon her offspring, and the New Woman, if a mother at all, will be the mother of a New Man, as different, indeed, from the present race as possible, but how different the clamorous females of to-day cannot suspect, or surely they would at once renounce the platform and their prospects of the tribune
But it is not to be supposed that even the prospect of peopling the world with stunted and hydrocephalic children will deter the modern woman from her path, even though her modernity lead to the degradation and ultimate extinction of the race. She will raise the old, half-humorous query once more: ‘Why trouble about posterity; what has posterity done for us?’ and thus go her triumphant gait heedless of the second and greater Fall she is preparing for mankind.
II.—The Dress Reformers.
‘I do not like the fashion of your garments—you will say, they are Persian attire, but let them be changed.’—King Lear.
Modern dress-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 were termed) 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 that Annus 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 had been 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.