A close study of this mad dressing shows that there is always a "hump." At one time it went all around; later appeared only behind, like an excrescence on a bilbol-tree. At the present time the designer has drawn his picture showing it as a pendent bag from the "shirtwaist," like the pouch of the bird pelican. A few years ago the designer, in a delirium, placed the humps on the tops of the sleeves, then snatched them away and tipped them upside down. Finally he appeared to go utterly mad with the desire to humiliate the woman, and created a fashion that entailed dragging the skirt on the ground from one to two feet.
Did the American woman resent the insult; did she refuse to adopt a custom not only disgusting but really filthy, one that a Chinese lady would have died rather than have accepted? By no means; she seized upon it with the ardor of a child with a new toy, and for a year the side-paths of the great cities of the country were swept by women's skirts, clouds of dust following them. The press took up the question, but without effect; the fashion dragged its nauseating and frightful course from rich and poor, and I was told by an official that it was impossible to stop it or to force a glimmer of reason into the minds of these women. Then they gave it up, and passed a law making it a statutory offense, with heavy fines, for any one to "expectorate" on the sidewalk or anywhere else where the saliva could be swept up by the trains of the women of nearly all classes who followed the fashion. The American woman, as I have said, looks askance at the footgear of the Chinese—high, warm, dry, sanitary, yet revels in creations which cramp the feet and distort the anatomy. The shoes are made of leather, inflexible, pointed; and to enable them to deceive the men into the belief that they have high insteps (a sign of good blood here) the women wear stilt-like heels, which throw the foot forward and elevate the heel from two to three inches above the ground.
But all this is but a bagatelle to the fashions in deformity which we find among nearly all American women. There are throughout the country numbers of large manufactories which make "corsets"—a peculiar waist and lung compressor, used by nearly every woman in America. These men are as dogmatic as the designers of the fashion-plates. They also issue plates or guides showing new changes, and the women, like sheep, adopt them. The American woman believes that a narrow waist enhances her beauty, and the corset-maker works upon the national weakness and builds creations that put to shame and ridicule the bound feet of the aristocratic Chinese woman. The corset is a lace and ribbon-decorated armor, made either of steel ribs or whale-bone, which fits the waist and clings to the hips. It is laced up, and the degree of tightness depends upon the will or nerve of the wearer. It compresses the heart and lungs, and wearing it is a most barbarous custom—a telling argument against the assumption of high intelligence on the part of the Americans, who, in this respect, rank with the flat-headed Indians of the northwest American coast, whose heads I have seen in their medical offices side by side with a diagram showing the abnormal conditions caused by the corset.
A year ago the fiat went forth that the American woman must have wide hips. Presto! there appeared especially devised machinery, advertised in all the journals, accomplishing the condition for those whom nature had not well endowed. Now the dressmaker has decided that they must be narrow-hipped, and half a million dollars in false hips, rubber pads, and other properties are cast aside. No extravaganza is too absurd for these people who are abject slaves to the whimsicalities of the designer, who is a wag in his way, as has been well shown in a story told to me. The designers for a famous man dressmaker in Paris had a habit of taking sketches of the latest creations to their club meetings. One evening a clever caricaturist took a caricature of a fashion showing a woman with enormous and outlandish sleeves. It created a laugh. "As impossible as it is," said the artist, "I will wager a dinner that if I present it seriously to a certain fashion paper they will take it up." This is said to be the history of the "big-sleeve" fashion that really amazed the Americans themselves.
The customs of women here are so at variance with those of China that they are not readily understood. Our ways are those culled from a civilization of thousands of years; theirs from one just beginning; yet they have the temerity to speak of China as effete and behind the times. In writing, the women affect the English round hand and write across from left to right, and then beginning at the left of the page again. They are fond of perfumes, especially the lower classes, and display a barbaric taste for jewels. It is not uncommon to see the wife of a wealthy man wear half a million pounds sterling in diamonds or rubies at the opera. I was told that one lady wore a $5,000 diamond in her garter. The utterly strange and contradictory customs of these women are best observed at the beach and bath. In China if a woman is modest she is so at all times; but this is not true with some Americans, who appear to have the desire to attract attention, especially that of men, by an appeal to the beautiful in nature and art; at least this is the impression the unprejudiced looker-on gains by a sojourn in the great cities and fashionable resorts. If you happen to be riding horseback, or walking in the street with a lady, and any accident occurs to her costume whereby her neck, her leg, or her ankle is exposed, she will be mortified beyond expression; yet the night previous you might have sat in the box with her at the opera, when her décolleté gown had made her the mark for hundreds of lorgnettes. Again, this lady the next morning might bathe with me at the beach and lie on the sand basking in the sun like a siren in a costume that would arrest the attention of a St. Anthony.
Let me describe such a costume: A pair of skin-tight black stockings, then a pair of tights of black silk and a flimsy black skirt that comes just to the knee; a black silk waist, armless, and as low in the neck as the moral law permits, beneath which, to preserve her contour, is a water-proof corset. Limbs, to expose which an inch on the street were a crime, are blazoned to the world at Newport, Cape May, Atlantic City, and other resorts, and often photographed and shown in the papers. To explain this manifest contradiction would be beyond the powers of an Oriental, had he the prescience of the immortal Confucius and the divination of a Mahomet and Hilliel combined.