This is Mrs. Comer’s description of the type of woman who is being evolved by Feminism:
One cannot travel far in these days without being filled with wonder at the vast numbers of these women roaming the continent. They are usually of a willful fatness, with flesh kept firm by the masseuse; their brows are lowering, and there is the perpetual hint of hardness in their faces; their apparel is exceedingly good, but their manners are ungentle, their voices harsh and discontented; there is no light in their eyes, no charm or softness in their presence. They are fitting mates, perhaps, for the able-bodied pagans who are overrunning the earth, but hardly suitable nurses for a generation which must redeem us from materialism, if, indeed, we are to be so redeemed. Facing them, one wonders if race-suicide is not one of nature’s merciful devices?
In a period of rapidly acquired fortunes women have accepted the dollar as the unit of individual worth quite as readily as men have, and have applied it more relentlessly, for men are more democratic than women; rich and poor wear the same costumes, and in their friendships they do not draw the financial line so closely as their wives do. During the spread of Feminism manners have coarsened, modesty is disappearing, the fiction and drama of the day familiarize the young with vice under the thin pretext of fortifying virtue. If it be true, as is sometimes charged, that women are taking to alcohol and tobacco, it is merely one additional evidence that in breaking down the distinctions between men and women, the standards of the former are not raised, but those of the latter are lowered.
Two women have lately suggested the assimilation of the figures of the male and female of the species. Ellen Key refers to the flattening of woman’s bosom as the result of the growing use of artificial means of nourishing infants, and “Lucas Malet” speaks of “large-boned, athletic, sexless persons, petticoated, yet conspicuously deficient in haunches and busts.”
III
As the garb of male and female in the lower animals does not differ radically, and seldom varies much except in the brighter hues of the male, so the socialist who seeks to assimilate the human sexes, objects to radical differences in their costume, and many essays toward the adoption of the costume of men have been made by advanced women. Morris and Bax, in Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome, deplore differences of costume, saying: “Another fault may be noted in all bad periods (as in the present), that an extreme difference is made between the garments of the sexes.” Since that was written the skirts of women have been reduced to a point suggestive of a single trouser instead of a pair, and the divided skirt, the harem skirt and the riding costume for the cross saddle indicate a movement that Morris and Bax would welcome.
There are history and politics in clothes. Trousers are described as a product of democracy, because they conceal the material of the stocking, whether silk or wool. Not so very long ago men wore laces, and ribbons, and jewels, and delicate tints. With the gradual breaking down of the caste system, the spread of democracy in politics, and of the brotherhood of man in philanthropy and religion, men have reduced their costumes to the present inartistic, but very serviceable standard. There has been no lasting change in that direction in the costume of women. If the determination of some women to “make men of themselves” had coincided with the severe simplicity of the tailor-made suit there would have been, as there has been in some cases, a certain measure of harmony between the inner and the outer woman. But the period of aggressive Feminism coincides with decrees of fashion that are designed to expose as much of the female figure as the police will permit. The paucity of garments, and their thinness and scantiness are suggestive of Vivien, upon whom
A robe
Of samite without price, that more exprest
Than hid her, clung about her lissome limbs.