"They must put it off, then, for I am not ready. We will try your dress for the second act this afternoon." And the grande couturière settles herself in her arm-chair, calls for her footstool, her fan, her cup of beef-tea, her smelling-salts, and so proceeds to preside over the terrible and imposing ceremony of trying on the dress of a fashionable actress.
Doubtless the luxury of the Parisiennes is not so great now as it was under the Empire; but the falling off in the home trade is partly compensated by the increase in the foreign customers. In Paris alone the dress-making trade represents the movement of fifty millions of dollars a year and gives employment to some fifty thousand women; and many of the elegant society women spend from twenty to thirty thousand dollars a year on their costume and toilet. But it must not be believed that the modern couturier is the first who has known how to draw up big bills, or that the modern lingère is the first who has dared to charge two hundred dollars for a chemise and half as much for a pocket-handkerchief. Dress has always reigned supreme in France at least. Louis XVI. has been guillotined, Napoleon I. exiled, Charles X. dismissed, Louis Philippe and Napoleon III. replaced without their leave by a new form of government. But dress has never been dethroned; and, just as in our own days Dupin thundered in the Senate against the desperate luxury of the Parisiennes of the Empire, so in the eighteenth century old Sebastien Mercier lamented that the fear of the milliners' bills prevented young men from marrying, and so left fifteen hundred thousand girls without husbands! The great dress-makers of those days were Madame Eloffe, the artist who dressed Marie Antoinette, and whose account-books have recently been published; with notes and curious colored plates, by the Comte de Reiset, and Madame Cafaxe, the modiste-couturière of the Fauburg St.-Honoré, celebrated for her exorbitant charges. One has only to consult the curious historical researches of the brothers De Goncourt in order to appreciate the luxury and extravagance of the past century. Imagine that in the wedding-trousseau of Mademoiselle Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau there figured twelve blonde wigs, varying in shade from flax to gold! Madame Tallien alone possessed thirty of these wigs, each of which was valued at that time at one hundred dollars,—that is to say, some two hundred dollars of modern money. None of our modern élégantes would ever think of buying six thousand dollars' worth of false hair. At the same epoch the ladies who had fallen in love with Greek and Roman fashions had abandoned the old-fashioned shoe in order to adopt the cothurnus; and Coppe, the chic shoemaker, or corthurnier, of Paris charged sixty dollars a pair for his imitation antique sandals, with their straps. Alas! Coppe's sandals were no more durable than the fleeting rose, and whenever a fair dame came to show her torn cothurnus to the great Coppe he replied sadly, "The evil is irremediable: madame has been walking!"
THEODORE CHILD.
* * * * *
OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
A Future for Women.
From the last report of the Bureau of Education it appears that twice as many girls as boys enter high schools in the United States, and that three times as many complete the four years' course. "Nature," in commenting upon this fact, attributes it to the great attractiveness of commercial pursuits in this country, and the consequent eagerness of boys to enter upon them at as early an age as possible. This is doubtless the true reason, and the disproportion is more likely to increase than to diminish, even though the actual number of boys who rush into a money-making career as soon as they have mastered the arithmetic necessary for it may be growing smaller. It is beginning, moreover, to be an every-day matter for women to receive a college education. There are already three well-filled colleges of high rank exclusively their own, and the new Bryn Mawr bids fair to be a powerful rival to Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley. Many of the colleges for men are open to them; now, and the capitulation of those strongholds of conservatism. Cambridge. New Haven, and Baltimore, is only a question of time. Great colleges are ravenous for fresh endowments, and the offer of a large sum of money may at any moment procure from them the full admission of women. It is not impossible that before many years have passed there will be as many women as men receiving a college education. How is this army of educated women going to occupy itself?
There is another aspect to the question. Not only is the mass of women better fitted than ever before for worthy occupation, there has never been a time nor a country in which their traditionary sphere has shrunk to so small dimensions. Nowhere else are there so many women of such a station that they are not obliged to toil and spin, nor to sleep all day to make up for nights of dissipation. For all those who do not have to concern themselves with the wherewithal of living, the art of living easily has been brought to a state of great perfection. The general care of the house and of the children is still the duty of the woman, but the labor involved in acquitting herself of that duty is a very different matter from what it was a generation ago. Then all her energies were needed to bring up a family well. Brewing and baking and soap- and candle-making were all carried on in the house, and there were a dozen children to be kept neatly dressed with the aid of no needle but her own. Now the purchase of the day's supplies is the only important demand upon her time; well-trained servants, the descendants of the raw Irish girl her mother struggled with, are capable of carrying on the cooking and the scrubbing by themselves. Sewing it is hardly worth her while to do in the house. Stitching her linen collars was once an important item in her year's work; now it is safe to say that there is not a single woman who does not buy her collars ready made. Making cotton cloth into undergarments has become a manufacture in the unetymological sense of the word. The Viscount de Campo-Grande, in addressing the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences at Madrid, two years ago, admitted that sewing was no longer an economy, but urged women to practise it still for the purpose of quieting their nerves. But the modern American woman who has had a healthy bringing up, who has divided her girlhood between vigorous study and active out-door exercise, who can row and skate and play ball and tennis with her brothers, has no unquiet nerves. She does not ask for sedatives, but for some high stimulus to call into play her strong and well-trained faculties. Money-making, the natural sphere of man, has become a more and more absorbing pursuit, while the usual feminine occupations have become more than ever trivial and unimportant at the very moment when the feminine mind has taken a new start in its development. The woman who is fresh from reading Gauss and Pindar, and who has taken sides in the discussion between the adherents of Roscher and of Mill, cannot easily content herself with the petty economies that result from doing her own cutting and fitting and dusting and table-setting. Still less, if she has not married, is she satisfied to look forward to the position of nursery governess to her sister-in-law's children. Her education has fitted her for something better than to save the wages of an upper servant. Again the question is forced upon her, where can she find a fitting field for the exercise of her powers?
To many people, who have all the means of existence they care for without a struggle, it seems that the only thing that can give a thorough interest and zest to life is to devote themselves to the elevation of the degraded classes of society. They find such monotony in their own comfortable ways of living, and the misery of the very poor seems so appalling to them, that they cannot escape from the passionate desire to spend themselves in their service. The problems connected with the relief and the prevention of the wretchedness by which they are surrounded have all the interest of a scientific experiment, and are capable of calling out all the fervor of a religion. But for the few people here and there who have now the passion of the reformer it is not impossible that another generation may see many thousands. A second christianization of the world may convert all the happy into the consolers of the unhappy, instead of leading people to absorb themselves in the question of their own salvation. No one can say how great a change might be made in the fair face of the earth if the effort to remove the causes of poverty and of disease should become the serious occupation of half mankind. In the lower stages of existence the extermination of evil has been the work of a slow and gradual process. Millions of individuals have been sacrificed in order to produce the few who were fitted to their surroundings. But at last a creature has been produced of so much intelligence that he is able to undertake his own further development. He can speculate upon the causes of his failures in the search for happiness, and he can apply remedies. It is true that those remedies have often been productive of more harm than good, it is true that it would be hard to calculate the evil effects of the English poor-laws, for instance, but all the experiments that have hitherto worked badly are but so much material from which to draw a knowledge of better methods. When the Wlllimantic Thread Company has found a way to make its girls come singing from their work as they go to it, and to make better thread at the same time, no one can say that great changes may not be brought about when once scientific methods shall have been discovered for the extermination of disease and crime. What more interesting field for investigation, for theory, for active work, can women find than that large kind of charity which is to supersede in the future the indiscriminate alms-giving of the past? The unselfishness that is demanded by the life of a reformer they have already in large abundance. There is no limit to the devotion which many women show their families, but such devotion has in these days become so unnecessary as to be little more than a higher form of selfishness. Perhaps it only needs a leader to turn this store of energy into wider channels and to make it subservient to larger ends. Perhaps the labor and patience and self-renunciation that are necessary to the regeneration of the world are to come from women. Such an absolute disregard of self as they are capable of, if it were once allowed to overflow the narrow limits of the home, might in no long time turn a goodly portion of the world into a garden of roses. There are still men who wish to appropriate to themselves all the high qualities of their women, but they belong to a race that is destined to rapid extinction, and to most rapid extinction in this country. That American men are more thoroughly chivalrous than English is a common belief. It was curiously confirmed by the English clergyman who wrote to the "Nation," some years ago, to describe the qualities which an English clergyman ought to have in order to be successful in this country, and who said that he had found it necessary not to let it be known that his wife warmed his slippers for him. The theory that woman exists solely for the purpose of smoothing the wrinkles from the brow of man is one that seldom finds expression now, except in the Lenten sermons of men who are content to drop out of the ranks of those who influence opinion. But the great freedom that the modern woman has gained for herself, the thorough education that is for the first time within her reach, the strong sympathies that are her inheritance,—these are grounds of a responsibility that she cannot but feel to be a heavy one. What better outlet can she find for her activities than to carry forward that slow process of fitting together the human race and its surroundings which it is no longer necessary to leave to chance?