Lecture Four. FASHION. Fashion made Superior to Health--Fashionable Religion--Unfashionable Ministers--Votaries of Fashion Despise it--Fashionable Women Short-lived--Mothers of Great Men Unfashionable--Woman's Greatness shown in Offspring--Example of Women of Fashion--Apostrophe to Fashion--Appeal to American Women--Nature in Freedom's Temple--Fashion Is Monotonous--Woman needs more Freedom.
Woman is accused of being the dupe of Fashion. Her fashionable follies are paraded in every public print; her dry-goods propensities are talked of in every circle where she is not truly respected, and in many where she is; her Parisian proclivities are made the butt of very general ridicule, and the dignity of her character is not a little lowered by her too great intimacy with fashion plates and dandy shops. Though, perhaps, man is as much to blame for this as woman—for she seeks to please him, and courts his smiles more than the smiles of all the gods of Fashion—still she must bear her part of the blame—I ought to say guilt—of this terrible and reckless folly.
It is a great fault with American woman, that they worship so blindly at the shrine of Fashion. They sacrifice taste and comfort, time and money, health and happiness, character and life, on this graceless and godless altar, What shopping—what trimming—what sewing and stuffing and padding—what bowing and scraping—what simpering and oiling and scenting—what cooking and spicing and preserving—what eating and sipping and drinking—what wasting and lying and cheating—what gossiping, slandering, and abusing—what forging, straining, and overreaching—what miserable time-serving and eye-serving at the expense of all that is pure and noble in the human heart and life, are resorted to keep pace with the changing moods of Fashion! What is there in our highly civilized life that escapes the palsying touch of Fashion? Dress, what is it? Fashion from head to foot. No matter if it outrages all physiology, puts hands around the lungs, gauze on the feet, and hangs multitudinous skirts upon the most vital and yielding portions of the female system. What of all that? Fashion is superior to health and life. What if it shrivel a woman into a mummy, and fade her into a ghost, and plant in her vitals the never-dying worm of consumption! What is beauty and physical womanhood to Fashion? Who would not rather fade at twenty-five, and die at thirty, than to be out of the Fashion?
Food, what is it good for if it is not in Fashion? If it is not greased and peppered, shortened and raised, concentrated and almost distilled, and then taken at hours of ton, and in wholesale quantities, of what avail is it? Better have the dyspepsia than eat coarse bread! What woman would not rather have a nervous debility than dispense with hot coffee and strong tea? Then, to refuse roast beef and baked ham would be very ungenteel! A bilious attack would be much more fashionable. It would be unwomanly not to have an animal die every time she was hungry, so that her life might pick the bones of death. It is very poetical to realize that life flowers on the sepulcher of death.
Friendship, its links must be forged on Fashion's anvil, or it is good for nothing. How shocking to be friendly with an unfashionable lady! It will never do. How soon one would lose caste! No matter if her mind is a treasury of gems, and her heart a flower-garden of love, and her life a hymn of grace and praise, it will not do to walk on the streets with her, or intimate to anybody that you know her. No, one's intimate friend must be À la mode. Better bow to the shadow of a belle's wing than rest in the bosom of a "strong-minded" woman's love.
And Love, too, that must be fashionable. It would be unpardonable to love a plain man whom Fashion could not seduce, whose sense of right dictated his life, a man who does not walk perpendicular in a standing collar, and sport a watch-fob, and twirl a cane. And then to marry him would be death. He would be just as likely to sit down in the kitchen as in the parlor; and might get hold of the wood-saw as often as the guitar; and very likely he would have the baby right up in his arms and feed it and rock it to sleep. A man who will make himself useful about his own home is so exceedingly unfashionable; that it will never do for a lady to marry him. She would lose caste at once.
Religion, too, must be fashionable to be of any worth. What is a church out of Fashion? Who goes there? God never will hear a prayer in such a church, nor pardon a penitent, nor give grace to a striving soul. That antiquated pulpit! Those plain old pews! That queer-looking gallery! Oh, yes; the pews are very comfortable; the singing sounds most admirably; the preaching is God's unvarnished truth quickened by divine love and mercy. Oh, how it would melt one's soul if it was only in a fashionable church. And then the minister. He is such a plain man, and says such plain things; he is all the time talking about such every-day matters, and makes one feel so ashamed because he seems to know just what we have all been doing and thinking about. Instead of preaching about Babylon and Belshazzar, and pouring out his eloquence upon the antediluvians and the glorious company in heaven, he aims every word right at us, and gets so earnest about our daily sins that he really makes one's heart ache. It is unpleasant to listen to such a minister unless one can really forget the world and go with him into his spiritual idea of life. Then he does not try to please the ladies enough. He talks to them just as plainly as to the men. He is always wanting to have them do something that is not pleasant, go to see some poor person, teach some ragged little urchins, give up some fashionable way of life, read some book on duty or some homily on fashionable sins. True, he is a very kind man, the kindest man in all the parish all admit. He never speaks an unpleasant word to any body; it is said he spends half his salary for the poor, and visits them a great deal, and spends much of his time in trying to reform the wicked and dissolute. The common kind of people think he is a great man, and they flock to hear him, and love him strangely. But fashionable people do not go there much, and he gets a poor living. One may know that by his poor dress and small house. So it is; religion must be done up in fashionable order, or it is soon out of date in the market. The minister must be a ladies' man, or the saloon will be more thronged than the church. And to be a ladies' man it is understood that he must be a fashionable man, a conformist, a pliant, time-serving, honey-mouthed, smile-faced, glove-handed, eel-natured kind of a creature, as ready to smile on a sin as a virtue; whose rebukes are so sugared that they are as agreeable to take as homeopathic pills. There are multitudes of churches that have more fashion in them than religion, and enough of worshipers and ministers who think more of the mode than the matter of worship.
Literature must have on it the brand of Fashion, and even education must receive the crown stamp of this graceless monarch, or be rejected by the world and receive no diploma at its hands. It is true that the rule of Fashion is almost omnific. To be out of Fashion is to be a mark for the cold finger of scorn from its votaries, and set up as a target for the shafts of their ridicule. So true is this, that it has become a common saying, that "one may as well be out of the world as out of the Fashion!" Yet what is Fashion, what does it amount to? Is one really more respected, more beloved, more received into the arms of the good, more caressed by the worthy, for being fashionable? We think not. The best and most beloved men and women that have ever lived have been far from the votaries of Fashion. They have lived with little thought and little conformity to the demands of this prince of weak minds. They have rather asked what was right, what was best, than what was fashionable. Conformity to Fashion tends rather to disgust than respect. Deep down in the hearts of all people there is a sense of the hollowness of Fashion, and a just loathing of its pretension and show. Even its votaries secretly despise it, and obey its dictates only because they think they must. They know its baseness better than we can tell them. True, they do not fully realize its sinfulness nor wholly appreciate its evils. But its hollowness and falseness they feel at times most keenly. Else why their perpetual unrest, their longing, dissatisfied condition of mind? Oh, if we could pull off the false glitter that lays like a gorgeous mantle over the fashionable world, we should see such an aching void, such a palpitating heart of woe, as would make the very stones cry out for sympathy. Look at a fashionable woman—one woman, a poor, weak mortal, apprenticed to earth to learn the work of the skies, pupiled here to be schooled in the great lessons of beauty and goodness written on all the outward universe and taught by the constant voice of God in the soul in its best experiences; see such a woman fretting herself well-nigh to death in chasing the butterfly delusions of Fashion, seeing them fade in her hands as fast as she grasps them, starving her soul and dwarfing her mind in the pursuit of such phantoms, enfeebling her body, irritating her nerves, breaking down her constitution, fading in early womanhood, and dying ere her years are half lived; what object is more sorrowful and has higher claims upon our pity? We think it sad when a woman is thus crushed by neglect or abuse, by the hand of poverty, by hard toil, or the harder fate of a consuming death at the hands of a false or brutal companion. But really, why is it sadder than to die by inches on the guillotine of Fashion? The results are the same in either case. Abused women generally outlive fashionable ones. Crushed and care-worn women see the pampered daughters of Fashion wither and die around them, and wonder why death in kindness does not come to take them away instead. The reason is plain: Fashion kills more women than toil and sorrow. Obedience to Fashion is a greater transgression of the laws of woman's nature, a greater injury to her physical and mental constitution, than the hardships of poverty and neglect. The slave-woman at her tasks will live and grow old and see two or three generations of her mistresses fade and pass away. The washerwoman, with scarce a ray of hope to cheer her in her toils, will live to see her fashionable sisters all die around her. The kitchen-maid is hearty and strong, when her lady has to be nursed like a sick baby. It is a sad truth, that Fashion-pampered women are almost worthless for all the great ends of human life. They have but little force of character; they have still less power of moral will, and quite as little physical energy. They live for no great purpose in life; they accomplish no worthy ends. They are only doll-forms in the hands of milliners and servants, to be dressed and fed to order. They dress nobody; they feed nobody; they instruct nobody; they bless nobody, and save nobody. They write no books; they set no rich examples of virtue and womanly life. If they rear children, servants and nurses do it all, save to conceive and give them birth. And when reared what are they? What do they even amount to, but weaker scions of the old stock? Who ever heard of a fashionable woman's child exhibiting any virtue or power of mind for which it became eminent? Read the biographies of our great and good men and women. Not one of them had a fashionable mother. They nearly all sprung from plain, strong-minded women, who had about as little to do with Fashion as with the changing clouds. I have given considerable attention to this fact. It is worthy of the deepest thoughtfulness. Oh, it is a solemn fact that we descend into our children, in our weakness or strength, in our meanness or majesty, as we have lived. And what a lean, meagre, moonshine inheritance does a fashionable mother convey to her offspring! I confess that to me there is something grand in being the mother of a noble son or daughter, of a strong and virtuous family of children. If there is a just human pride, it may live in such a mother's heart. The mothers of Washington, Adams, and Channing; of Josephine, Hemans, and Stowe, stand higher in my mind than any kings or queens that ever lived. The proof of their greatness was in their children. Such sublime inheritances could not have been given if they had not been possessed. Such grandeur of mind, such greatness of heart, such majesty of soul, such royal worth, are everlasting honors to their noble mothers. And I doubt not but when the vail of flesh is taken from such women, their true greatness will be visible. By the side of such how will stand the fashionable mother? In that upper world, souls will rate according to their real worth, according to the gold that is in them. Oh, if vigorous health, great virtues, a large heart, and capacious powers of mind are to be coveted for any thing, it is that they may descend into our children, and reappear in them, to adorn and bless themselves, us, and the world, and be a glory unto God in earth and heaven. I had rather sire a noble son or daughter than win a thousand victories as brilliant as Napoleon's proudest or sit on the throne of earth's greatest kingdom. To me there is something so grand in virtue, so priceless and deathless, so celestial in the powers of a great and good human soul, that to give existence to one is the cause of a deeper joy and a richer gratitude than is otherwise granted to mortals here below.
In this light, how stands the tawdry foolery of Fashion? and what place does the fashionable woman take?
Then the example of a fashionable woman, how low, how vulgar! With her the cut of a collar, the depth of a flounce, the style of a ribbon, is of more importance than the strength of a virtue, the form of a mind, or the style of a life. She consults the fashion-plate oftener than her Bible; she visits the dry-goods shop and the milliner oftener than the church. She speaks of Fashion oftener than of virtue, and follows it closer than she does her Saviour. She can see squalid misery and low-bred vice without a blush or a twinge of the heart; but a plume out of Fashion, or a table set in old style, would shock her into a hysteric fit. Her example! What is it but a breath of poison to the young? I had as soon have vice stalking bawdily in the presence of my children, as the graceless form of Fashion. Vice would look haggard and mean at first sight, but Fashion would be gilded into an attractive delusion. Oh, Fashion! how thou art dwarfing the intellect and eating out the heart of our people! Genius is dying on thy luxurious altar. And what a sacrifice! Talent is withering into weakness in thy voluptuous gaze! Virtue gives up the ghost at thy smile. Our youth are chasing after thee as a wanton in disguise. Our young women are the victims of thine all-greedy lust. And still thou art not satisfied, but, like the devouring grave, criest for more. Where shall we get the strong women of the next generation—the women who will live for principle—whose commanding virtues shall be a tower of strength—whose wisdom shall be a poem of prophecy, and whose love a hymn of praise? Who will be the mothers of genius and wisdom, of the manhood and womanhood that shall redeem mankind? Oh, not from thee, all-degenerating Fashion! shall we get them. Thy reign is the blast of womanly virtue and manly strength. Thou art the precursor of destruction. Thou dost intoxicate, bewilder, and make mad the nations whom thou wouldst destroy. Thou dost lead to dazzle and delude to ruin. Avaunt, thou grand sycophant of the nineteenth century, thou vile usurper of the people's throne!
Oh, American women, be exhorted to flee from the sorceress whose enchantments are binding you in the silken chains of an ignoble effeminacy. Your weakness weakens our nation and sends a destructive palsy down into succeeding generations. Your loss of strength is humanity's loss. How can there be individual identity where Fashion rules? how individual taste, individual opinion, individual virtue and character? How can there be genius and talent where Fashion molds the will and cuts the life to a pattern? How can there be wisdom where Fashion dictates the mode of thought and the form of utterance? How can there be greatness where Fashion shapes the growth and prescribes its bounds? There is nothing in our country so paralyzing to the growth of mind and the progress of righteous principles as the easy and general conquest of Fashion over our people. If it were only in matters of dress and equipage, of outward adornment, that it bore sway, it would not be so ruinous. But it goes into every department of thought and life, into opinions, principles, religion. It shapes the creed, prescribes the form of worship, and puts its excommunicating ban upon all heresy. It enters the sweet retreat of home and poisons its love and life. It sets up its proud form in the sanctuary and dishonors worship with its cold formality. Everywhere it is a godless tyrant. To develop our strength of body and mind we want freedom. Genius expands its wings in freedom's airs. Health blooms in freedom's prairie-fields. Wisdom grows in the hermit-cells of individual thought where no binding chains of custom cramp the mental powers. Love is always truest and sweetest and noblest where it is freest. Nature is freedom's temple. No forming shears of Fashion cuts her patterns. She grows every leaf, and opens every flower, and solemnizes every bird-marriage, and utters every hymn of praise in the truthful and innate spontaneity of her universal soul. So humanity should be free; not free to sin with impunity, but free to dress according to its own individual taste and comfort; free to live in homes arranged without respect to Fashion, but agreeable to the wants and interests of their members; free to eat and swear and act as seemeth good in each one's mental sight; free to think and speak on all the great subjects of human interest; to believe and worship by the light of reason and the inspiration of conscience without fear of the guillotine of public opinion established by Fashion. The greatest want of our country is this freedom. We now do every thing so much by rule, that the rule crams the soul out of every thing done. The rule is always of Fashion's make. We love and marry, educate and worship, by rule. I would not recommend an abjuration of all rules. Rules are good so far as they are just and founded on universal principles. But arbitrary, time-serving rules are evil. In matters of dress I would have every woman consult her own taste, form, complexion, comfort, character, and person. In doing this she may develop her mind, cultivate her taste, and gratify a reasonable desire to please others. Instead of every one's dressing alike as Fashion dictates, let each one consult her convenience and circumstances, and dress as best becomes her ideas of a suitable wardrobe for herself. If one chooses to wear a dress very long, let her do it; another to have her dress Bloomerized, let her do it. If one prefers a close bonnet, another an open; one thin shoes, another thick boots; one a flowing robe, another a tight dress; one a high-necked, another a low-necked dress, one a belted, another a bodiced waist, let it be as each one shall prefer. In a word, let each woman dress herself and her household as her judgment, skill, and taste shall dictate, without everlastingly consulting the last fashion-plate. It would be better that every one was dressed differently from all others, than as now, all rigged up to order by the last nuncio from Paris. In nature, variety spreads a curious interest over all her vestiture. In the human world, Fashion clothes all in a tiresome sameness. To say the least, a very great improvement might be made by a little more freedom and courage, and exercise of individual judgment and taste. As it is, individualism is laid on the shelf, and all are swallowed up in a fashionable generalization. So in matters of household arrangement, in the general character and style of equipage, in food, culinary affairs, social etiquette, and all that pertains to the outward life, to health, to labor, to individual interests, I would have more freedom, ease, and flexibility, would see more of individual judgment and peculiarity, more marks of personal character and affirmative force of will and opinion. As it is, there is a tedious monotony in all these things. Our houses are all made and furnished too nearly alike; and so of all our affairs. A fashionable sameness, somber and dull, spreads over our whole outward life.
Then, in opinions of men and things, of politics and social relations, in education, literature, art, in morality and religion, there should be more freedom, more conformity to individual judgment, more thinking for self and less by proxy, more personal and less party influence. There is a terrible tyranny over us in these things. We are cast in the stiff mold of Fashion. We have our fashionable forms of thought, and seem afraid to break them. We have our formulas and creeds, and they bind us. If there were more freedom there would be less error and atheism. Our minds are all different. No two think exactly alike, or look exactly alike, or feel exactly alike. Then why should we not be free and use our own reason for our own purposes and give others the same privilege? Why be such slavish conformists, and brand as traitors or heretics all who differ from our party or church?
I would awaken young women to these things. They have their individual interests, both temporal and eternal. They have their characters and life-connections to form. They have great and stirring interests to hold in their hands. They have examples to set and lives to live And they have a mighty influence to exert in their day both upon the present and coming generations, both upon this and the future world. The subject of this essay is one of inexpressible interest to them. Woman is too much in chains. She wants more freedom. And she will never have it till she takes it herself. She should covet and seek a higher life. She should claim her full equality with her brother, man, and strive to show herself worthy. In woman and her life are wrapped up some of the greatest interests and issues of humanity. O that each individual woman could feel it, and live as realizing the solemn fact!
