Revolted Woman: Past, present, and to come

by Charles G. Harper

It seems but a few years since when women who smoked cigarettes were voted fast: to-day, the smoking-room of the country house is not sacred to the male sex, and the ‘good stories’ of that sometime exclusively masculine retreat are now not alone the property of the men. She has not annexed the cigar and the pipe yet—not because she lacks the will, but her physique is not yet equal to them; but she can roll a cigarette, can take or offer a light with the most practised and inveterate smoker who ever bought a packet of Bird’s Eye or Honey Dew, and she wears—think of it, O Mrs. Grundy, if, indeed, you are not dead!—a smoking-jacket.

At the more ‘advanced’ houses, amongst the ‘smartest’ sets, the women do not retire to the drawing-room at the conclusion of dinner—they sit with the men, not infrequently; and if the usual not over-Puritanical talk that was wont to follow upon the ladies’ withdrawal is not indulged in so openly, at least the conversation is sufficiently unconventional.

Slang and swearing are the commonest—in two senses—accompaniments and underlinings of the smart woman’s speech: any little disappointment that would have been ‘annoying’ to her mother is to the modern and up-to-date woman a ‘condemned nuisance,’ if not more than that; and ‘damns’ fall as readily from her lips as the mild ‘dear me!’ of a generation ago. For the first cause of this unlovely change we must look to the theatre and music-hall stages, whose women have in some few instances married the eldest sons of peers, and have succeeded to titles upon their husbands’ heirship being fulfilled. Their husbands’ titles have given them rank and precedence, whose mothers toiled at the wash-tub in some public laundry, or disputed not unsuccessfully with the most foul-mouthed of Irish viragoes on the filthy stairs of some rotten tenement in the purlieus of Saint Giles’s. The symmetry of their legs and the voluptuousness of their persons captivated the callow youths who night by night occupied the front rows of the stalls at the Gaiety Theatre, and who—under the well-known nickname of ‘Johnnies’—fed the Sacred Lamp of Burlesque with a stream of half-guineas. These heirs to wealth and hereditary honours kept the chorus-girls and skipping-rope dancers in broughams and villas ornées in the classic Cyprian suburb of St. John’s Wood, and, when they were more than usually foolish, married them.

Society is become, through them, quite demimondaine, and it is not uncommon to have pointed out to you in the Row titled women who have notoriously been under the protection of more than one man before they, by some lucky or unlucky chance, caught their coronets. Nearly all Society is free to-day to these whited sepulchres; only the Queen’s Court—that last bulwark of virtue and decency—holds out against them. Elsewhere they are more than tolerated; it is scarcely too much to say that they are admired by fin-de-siècle womanhood, who are notoriously and obviously Jesuitical. If the adaptation of their outrés manners is proof enough of admiration, then you shall find sufficient warranty for this statement, for the slangy girl or young married woman is rather the rule than the exception in this year of grace, and their manners are arrived at that complexion which would make their grandmothers turn in their graves, could that cold clay become sentient again for the smallest space of time.

This decay of decency began with the advent of that loathsome amalgam of vanity and reckless extravagance in dress and speech, the Professional Beauty, whose profession first became recognised about the year 1879. You will not find that ‘profession’ entered under ‘Trades’ in the Post-Office Directory; but if logic ruled the world, then the shameless women whose photographs for years filled the shop-windows of town would find their trade recognised on the same commercial standing with any one of the thousand and one ways of getting a living shown in that volume. They would be on precisely the same moral level with the quasi milliners of London, had necessity brought about their flaunting pervasion of Society, but, seeing that merely the love of admiration and notoriety induced their careers, it is difficult to find a depth sufficiently deep for them.

But indignation is apt to melt into a scornful pity when we see the Professional Beauty of sixteen years ago, who left her husband for the questionable admiration of great Personages and the envy of London Society, a faded and struggling woman of the world, who, without a shred of histrionic ability, has taken to the stage, relying upon the magnificence of her diamonds and the abandon of her dress for an applause which had never been hers for her acting or her elocution. A just resentment fades into melancholy commiseration for a woman like this, who has sunk so low that scandal can no longer harm her; who essays the rôle of ‘beauty’ when her years are rapidly totting up to fifty.

These are the tawdry careers which, appealing to woman’s innate love of admiration, bid her go and do likewise. The contempt with which all right-thinking men regard the spotted and fly-blown records of the Professional Beauties is hidden from them by the glare of publicity, and vanity still bids them adventure out from the home before the eye of the world.

One does not find the New Women justified of their sex, for cosmetics have no commerce with common sense, and high heels are not conducive to lofty thinking; rouge, violet powder, tight-lacing, or an inordinate love of jewellery, are not earnest of brain-power; and yet these are the commonest adjuncts to, or characteristics of, a woman’s life.

The sight of many diamonds at Kimberley impressed Lord Randolph Churchill mightily awhile ago, and the contemplation of those glittering objects of feminine adornment led to the historic pronouncement that ‘whatever may have been the origin of man,’ he is ‘coldly convinced that womankind are descended from monkeys.’ However that may be, certain it is that imitation is, equally with the simians, her forte. Men originate almost everything; even the fashions are set and controlled by M. Worth, and women follow his lead, both dressmakers and clients.

And Woman is a consistent and inveterate poseur, from the time of her leaving the cradle, through girlhood, young-womanhood, and matron-hood, to her last gasp. That tale of the old lady, dying from extreme age and decay of nature, who had her face rouged over against the arrival of her doctor, so that she should receive him to the best effect as she lay on her death-bed, is characteristic of her sex. Vanity, thy name is woman!