The beauty of women has suffered from too narrow a field of appreciation. It has been measured solely from a masculine viewpoint, primarily as a characteristic of s.e.x, secondarily as pertaining to a subject creature; and a.s.sociatively, to every mad extreme of fancy in nature"s variant, the male.
Among other creatures the beauty of the female is mainly that of race.
The lioness is a more appreciable working type of feline power than the lion, whose s.e.x-beauty, the mane, is somewhat similar to that of a bison, or a great seal.
In our case, where the dependent female adds to her neutral race-beauty the shifting attributes of s.e.x-attraction, she has gained to a high degree in the field man most admires, and lost in the normal beauty of humanity.
Relative size and strength are elements of beauty in an animal; neither dwarf nor giant is beautiful; and we for many years have dwarfed our women, under the direct effect of restraining conditions and the selective action of the master, whose pride would brook no equal.
Of late years, in some cla.s.ses and countries, this is changing; so frequently that the tall woman no longer excites remark or disapproval.
There is no reason whatever, in a civilized condition, why the male and female should differ markedly in size, and the difference is disappearing as above noted, as is also the extreme weakness so long held desirable in women.
But in the great majority of cases our women are still content to be what they consider beautiful as _women_, and never to consider human beauty at all.
The disproportionate part played by costume and decoration in the s.e.x-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 n.o.bler 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 a.s.suredly 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.
COMMENT AND REVIEW
How many of you have read the life story of Alexander Irvine--"From the Bottom Up"?*
It is one of the most vivid, interesting, readable of books. It talks, it laughs, it lives,--and it reveals. It is not a "confession;" not the overflow of a self-conscious soul like Marie Barklirtseff"s outpourings; it is a story; an account of what happened to the man, and how he grew.
A hungry, ragged, barefoot, ignorant little Irish boy; handicapped in all ways but three; unusually fortunate in these. He had a good body, a good mind, a good heart. Up and up and up he pushes; helped now by the body, now by the soul, now by the intellect, till we find him, still in strong middle life, educated, experienced, traveled, en.o.bled by loving and serving, awake to our larger social needs, and working with all his splendid power to help humanity.
Never was there a man more alive; learning Greek roots while delivering milk; converting miners, practicing a score of trades, and boxing like a professional.
The book has a double value; in the hope and courage which must rise from contact with such a personality and its rich experience, and in the strong light it throws upon "how the other half live." As Rose Pastor Stokes so quaintly put it, "Half the world does not know how. The other half lives."
In this book one-half may learn much of the unnecessary misery of "the submerged;" and the other half may begin to learn how to live.
* _From The Bottom Up._ The life story of Alexander Irvine. Doubleday Page & Co. New York, 1910.
The English Suffrage papers are an inspiration--and a reproach.
_"Votes for Women"_--the London organ of the militant suffragist, is so solid and a.s.sured; so richly upheld; so evidently the strong voice of a strong party.
_"The Common Cause,"_ published in Manchester, is another, not militant, giving the same sense of a settled position and masterly leadership.
The women of England are awake to their needs, and valiantly support their defenders; but American women, as a rule, are still asleep as to the responsibilities of citizenship. Here suffrage papers still give much s.p.a.ce to argument and appeal: there, they are mostly filled with the record of work planned and done; they are party organs, secure and effective.
One of our best is _"The Progressive Woman"_ of Girard, Kansas.
It is edited by a progressive woman--Josephine Conger-Kaneko.
This is a Socialist as well as Suffragist paper, and more than that; it stands for the whole front rank of the woman"s movement.
In the August number we read of Kate O"Hare"s campaign for congress in Kansas; of "The Socialist Woman"s Movement in Russia;" of "The White Slave Traffic"--quoting from Elizabeth Goodnow"s impressive book of stories, "The Soul Market;" of "The Work of Madam Curie;" of "The Marriage Contract;" of "The Woman"s Suffrage Movement and Political Parties;" with much other valuable matter.
The "Arena Club" of New Orleans is doing good work. It has prepared a bill against the "white slave traffic" in Louisiana, which was submitted to the legislature by Hon. J. D. Wall, Representative for East Feliciana, La. This bill is now a law, and the next step is enforcement. This calls for activity on the part of the "City Mothers."
_"The Union Labor Advocate"_ is one of our exchanges, and a good one.
It is the organ of the National Woman"s Trade Union League. One of the most practical and useful of all woman"s organizations.
As women work for the world they become more human; becoming human, they organize; and in organization grow in further humanness. This was well shown in the shirt-waist strike of last winter in New York, the new sense of common interest bringing out college women, society women, all kinds of women, to help the workingwomen in their struggle for decent conditions.
Professor Francis Squire Potter formerly of Michigan University, is now general lecturer for the League: a good field for her unusual powers.
PERSONAL PROBLEMS
The _Forerunner"s_ question in this department of the June issue, reached a good many, it would seem. Here is another response:
"When people must wake up too early every morning, half dead, or at least half asleep, to begin the ceaseless, monotonous daily grind, keep at it all day until half dead or at least half asleep until too late at night, for the mere privilege of existence, they are too tired to wake up and LIVE--the rest of the night.
When people are entombed in conventions, customs, _Beliefs_! from which they may only be freed by digging, filing, gnawing, sc.r.a.ping, _wearing_, themselves as well as their way out, few have the strength and spirit to emerge and LIVE--only occa.s.sionally one comes out _alive_."
"Such _purely_ personal questions as "how may I, half (or truly a minute fraction of that) educated, half alive by reason of ill-health, wholly unaccustomed to push my way in the world, grub out an existence and keep out of the poor-house, and keep out of the way of others who are doing things;" seem rather too small, and altogether too numerous."
A. These "purely personal" questions are the most universal, and open to the most universal answers.
To "Wake up and Live--World size" means this: Your personality is only the smallest part of your consciousness. A child with a hurt finger howls inconsolably; a conquering king with a hurt finger doesn"t know it.