A Frenchwoman once expressed her amazement to me at the enormous amount of money Englishwomen spend on what is as useless as froth. Chiffon is the bane of the Englishwoman; she drapes herself in cheap chiffons while a Frenchwoman puts her money in a bit of good lace. She adorns herself with poor furs where a Frenchwoman would buy herself a little thing, but a good little thing. Finally, when the thrifty Frenchwoman has gathered together quite a nice collection of lace and fur, the Englishwoman has nothing to show for her money but a mass of torn and dirty chiffon whose destination is the rag-bag. After all it is an age of wax beads and imitation lace, and they represent as well as anything our extravagant economy.
Is not our middle-class cooking a monument to our extravagance? A British housewife has it in her power to take away the stoutest appetite with her respectable joint, her watery vegetable, and the pudding or tart that should lie as heavy on her conscience as they do on the stomach. If the Englishwoman would only take to the chiffons of cooking instead of the chiffons of clothes! It is an extravagance to cook badly; it is an extravagance to buy things because they are cheap; it is an extravagance to waste time in doing what someone else can do better (if one can afford it). After all it is only fair to employ others when one has the means. Don't we all want to live? Suppose editors wrote the whole contents of their papers, and publishers only published their own immortal works! What then?
The other day I had to buy some china to replace what had been broken. "They break it so quickly," I said to the polite salesman, in a burst of grief. "But if they didn't, what should we do?" he asked. It really had not occurred to me before, so a polite salesman taught me a lesson.
It belongs to the economy of the universe that neither we nor anything else should last for ever. Nature herself is methodically economical, witness the regular passing of the seasons. And does she not utilise one in the making of the next?
Yes, what we women need most of all is to be taught unextravagant economy, which includes the value both of money and of time, for the day is coming when women's time will really be worth something. Probably it will work a political economical revolution, but that cannot be helped, and, after all, the world's progress is punctuated by revolutions. If women enter men's sphere, the men will have to do something else. Still, women are barred by their very weakness from innumerable employments, and though they demand to vote, one never hears a very enthusiastic plea on their part to fight.
So let women earn, or at all events let them be given money as a right and not as a begrudged charity, and it will be cheaper for men in the end, with the result that our economy will become less irresponsibly extravagant. Possibly we will not save much, but we may live better, and, joy of joys, the doctors' bills will undoubtedly grow beautifully less, for I am sure that the immense prosperity of that learned and disinterested profession is mainly due to our extravagant economy.
A Modern Tendency
Where are the aged gone? At any rate the aged women? The fact is, there are no aged women; for, behold! the hairdresser, the milliner and the dressmaker have all decreed that there shall be no old age—and, lo! the miracle is performed; and our venerable grandmothers who once were old are now only strenuous copies, perhaps a trifle overdone, of our more or less youthful selves.
Who has not been told that she looks most lovely in a hat in which her last grain of common sense must clamour aloud that she really looks like a fright? Have not each of us, my suffering sisters, had relays of awful hats tried on our unoffending heads till we look like tortured ghosts, crowned by a wreath of roses or cabbages, and loomed over by a terrible young person in black satin? How that young person—well—prevaricated, and how the cold irony of her eye cut us to the quick!