satisfaction of fulfilment, the transcendent solace of release. Rest! and he had been so harried; completion, and life had been so long! Green hills to blot out remembrance of dusty cities, fresh winds after the smother of narrow streets. “I’ll come back one day, be sure of that,” he’d told her, and through all warring circumstances, he had stood committed to that promise. Now, freely, triumphantly, he had made good his word.
FASHION AND FEMINISM
Nina Wilcox Putnam
Hitherto, dress reform has always proved a failure. And this is because dress reform has usually been only the effort of a few scattered individuals to force their personal taste upon the world. And while social consciousness is often awakened by the daring examples of such pioneers, all real social growth comes from a collective consciousness, which is born in a body of people, by reason of some economic or moral pressure which affects them all. When such a body begins to murmur of a reform, that reform is almost certain of accomplishment. And such a murmur, concerning dress, can be heard to-day among those women who are banded together by the fight they are making for freedom.
Dress seems, at first glance, to be one of the least important of the questions which modern women are taking up: but the smallest examination into its practical aspects reveals the fact that it affects all their other interests—not as a mere expression of vanity, but as a serious economic factor.
When we women first entered factories and workshops in numbers, we met unfair conditions on every side. This was particularly true of the garment trades, which were among the first to employ a great many women. And when we met this unfair treatment, women dreamed of legislating virtue into manufacturers. But it can’t be done! And now it is dawning upon the consciousness of a number of women that the way to reform clothing manufacturers, textile manufacturers, etc., the way to cut down insane speeding, overwork, underpay, is to change our insane conception of clothing—to strive to make it a normal, useful thing, instead of a hampering, exotic, extravagant thing, which works one group of women to death at a miserable wage, because a far smaller group of parasitic women wish to be arrayed like peacocks! Knowing this to be true, one naturally turns to the fundamental question, and asks—what is dress—what is fashion? And what, indeed, is dress? Is it simply a means of protection from cold? A concession to so-called modesty, a
means of displaying wealth, and advertising leisure? Of attracting the opposite sex? It has been all of these in the past, and many of the same factors are still apparent in our present-day use of garments: but a new interpretation of the word has come in with our new industrial conditions. Dress is an enormous economic factor the world over, and nowhere more so than in America, where it is an over-exploited industry, whose markets have been stretched abnormally, not only by the increasing production of inferior articles, but by a psychological factor, far more potent even than the law of normal supply and demand; and that factor is Fashion: a purely hypothetical need of change in order to meet a purely hypothetical standard, which is entirely ephemeral and continually altered, artificially.
Year after year, we are made to put the money we begrudge, that we can ill afford, money we would honestly rather put into other things; money, often, that we have not got, into that particular twist to skirt or coat or hat which will keep us as ridiculous-looking as our neighbor, while, at the same time, safe from his ridicule; in other words, to save ourselves the discomforts of being out of style. And yet, detesting fashion, as I think the majority of us do in our most secret hearts, we are often hypnotized by it to such an extent that free action is prevented.
If the number and character could be estimated of those people who have stayed away from entertainments for lack of a new gown, or dress suit, or some accessory thereof, almost every human being who has ever received an invitation would probably be included in the list. That people stay away from church for the same reason is traditional, and a favorite method of imprisonment has always been to take away formal clothing, and substitute loose garments. This trick has been successful in the instance of white slavery, for it is found that the girls are unwilling to go out into the street in the brilliant “parlor clothes” furnished to them.
So deeply rooted is this fear of being wrongly dressed, and so serious may its consequences become, that it is high time that an examination into the forces behind the accepted forms of fashions be made, and our slavish adherence, not only to fashion, but often to discomfort, be shown for what it is, a chimera which