We are all more or less devoted to ‘liberte’, ‘egalite’, and considerable
‘fraternite’, and we have various ways of showing it. It is the opinion
of many that women do not care much about politics, and that if they are
interested at all in them, they are by nature aristocrats. It is said,
indeed, that they care much more about their dress than they do about the
laws or the form of government. This notion arises from a misapprehension
both of the nature of woman and of the significance of dress.
Men have an idea that fashions are haphazard, and are dictated and guided
by no fixed principles of action, and represent no great currents in
politics or movements of the human mind. Women, who are exceedingly
subtle in all their operations, feel that it is otherwise. They have a
prescience of changes in the drift of public affairs, and a delicate
sensitiveness that causes them to adjust their raiment to express these
changes. Men have written a great deal in their bungling way about the
philosophy of clothes. Women exhibit it, and if we should study them more
and try to understand them instead of ridiculing their fashions as whims
bred of an inconstant mind and mere desire for change, we would have a
better apprehension of the great currents of modern political life and
society.
Many observers are puzzled by the gradual and insidious return recently
to the mode of the Directoire, and can see in it no significance other
than weariness of some other mode. We need to recall the fact of the
influence of the centenary period upon the human mind. It is nearly a
century since the fashion of the Directoire. What more natural,
considering the evidence that we move in spirals, if not in circles, that
the signs of the anniversary of one of the most marked periods in history
should be shown in feminine apparel? It is woman’s way of hinting what is
in the air, the spirit that is abroad in the world. It will be remembered
that women took a prominent part in the destruction of the Bastile,
helping, indeed, to tear down that odious structure with their own hands,
the fall of which, it is well known, brought in the classic Greek and
republican simplicity, the subtle meaning of the change being expressed
in French gowns. Naturally there was a reaction from all this towards
aristocratic privileges and exclusiveness, which went on for many years,
until in France monarchy and empire followed the significant leadership
of the French modistes. So strong was this that it passed to other
countries, and in England the impulse outlasted even the Reform Bill, and
skirts grew more and more bulbous, until it did not need more than three
or four women to make a good-sized assembly. This was not the result of,
a whim about clothes, but a subtle recognition of a spirit of
exclusiveness and defense abroad in the world. Each woman became her own
Bastile. Men surrounded it and thundered against it without the least
effect. It seemed as permanent as the Pyramids. At every male attack it
expanded, and became more aggressive and took up more room. Women have
such an exquisite sense of things–just as they have now in regard to big
obstructive hats in the theatres. They know that most of the plays are
inferior and some of them are immoral, and they attend the theatres with
head-dresses that will prevent as many people as possible from seeing the
stage and being corrupted by anything that takes place on it. They object
to the men seeing some of the women who are now on the stage. It
happened, as to the private Bastiles, that the women at last recognized a
change in the sociological and political atmosphere of the world, and
without consulting any men of affairs or caring for their opinion, down
went the Bastiles. When women attacked them, in obedience to their
political instincts, they collapsed like punctured balloons. Natural
woman was measurably (that is, a capacity of being measured) restored to
the world. And we all remember the great political revolutionary
movements of 1848.