The disproportionate part played by costume and decoration in the sex-governed activities of the dependent woman, has given a peculiar cant to her beauty-sense. If she be well dressed,—or so considered, and richly ornamented, her sense of beauty is satisfied, quite regardless of shape, size and color in herself. This is perhaps a fortunate provision to meet our special case, where the male must be attracted as a means of livelihood, and under the average limitations of personal charms. But it is a pity, in the interest of a nobler race, that our preoccupation with cloths should so blind us to the real beauty of the human body.
I once knew a girl whose vanity led her to decline gymnasium work, on the ground that it would make her hands large. The same vanity would have urged her to it if she had even known of the beauty of a well proportioned, vigorous, active body. She had read and heard of small soft hands as a feminine attraction, but never of a smooth, strong neck, a well set head, a firm, pliant, muscular trunk, and limbs that cannot be beautiful unless they are strong.
"Slender," "plump," "rounded," "graceful,"—these words suggest beauty in a woman, but "strong" does not. Yet weakness,—in a healthy adult,—is incompatible with true beauty—race beauty—the beauty women have lost.
In their enforced restriction they have lost the beauty of expression that comes of a rich wide life, fully felt, fully expressed. Look at the puffy negation of a row of women's faces in a street car. Plump women, "pretty" women perhaps, well dressed, "stylish," not ill tempered,—and not anything else! Their range of experience is absolutely domestic; their interests and ambitions are either domestic or what they fondly call "social;" they do not feel, know, or act in the full sense of human life, and their faces show it. They are rated first, last, and all the time as mothers: mothers future, mothers present, mothers past; and much is made of "the maternal expression" in women's beauty. It belongs there, surely. It is a true large part of it; beauty in a woman could not be true which was inimical to maternity; but, but it is not the whole of life.
A man's face may be beautiful with a paternal expression, but if that is all the expression he has, he lacks much.
There is a lack of dignity in our types of female loveliness. There is the appealing type, the coquettish, the provocative, the mysterious; but seldom do we see the calm pride based on nature's mightiest power which should distinguish womanhood.
The woman of the remote past, the far distant matriarchal age, had the beauty of freedom and the beauty of power; though their hands were large, doubtless, and assuredly strong. In much later ages, while losing this, we still kept somewhat of the free beauty of untramelled bodies; but that too has gone under our binding weight of clothes. No free grace is possible under a huge, slouching, heavy hat, or to a body poised on sharp-toed shoes with towering heels.
If we knew beauty—human beauty; if we were familiar from childhood with the real proportions of the body; if we were familiar with pictures of the human figure, and then shown that same figure, the woman's, with her feet artificially mis-shapen and out of poise, her waist distorted, her head obscured, her every action hampered and confined,—we should see the ugliness of these things, as we do not now.
The human woman, now so rapidly developing, will regain the wholesome natural beauty that belongs to her as a human being; will hold, of course, the all-powerful attraction of her womanhood; but will leave to the male of her species,—to whom it properly belongs, the effort of conscious display.