The making over of clothes every year, if not every six months, as the pace of fashion speeded up, came to take the place of many of those spurious handicrafts with which the clever woman of the mid-century had been wont to busy her hands. It became a matter of pride with those of small means to "make something out of nothing," as the complimentary phrase went to contrive a new and stylish dress out of two old ones; to conceal paucity of material by piecing small bits of cloth together, and decorating the tell-tale seams; to make a jacket of a man's discarded overcoat, lined with the less-worn portions of an old silk petticoat. As the rule of fashion spread to carpets, curtains, bedding, and furniture, the inexorable principle of multiplying designs to stimulate buying, invaded this field as well; and the devoted housewife, according to her means and her ingenuity, conscientiously set herself the duty of keeping her house as well as herself and children "in the fashion." In all this she exercised her brain as much as her manufacturing grandmother had done before her, but with infinitely less of real value to show for it.

Perhaps all the more because the result did not command satisfactory appreciation from her men-folk, whose crude tastes and practical turn of mind did not readily grasp the desperate need of women to be in the fashion, she required the approval of other womankind. So much struggle and economy must be worthy of recognition; and if, unhappily, her men friends did not notice and praise the triumphs of her ingenious-and often wasted skill, she turned to other women to secure their proper appraisal. It is no doubt true that women competing in the dress contest are often jealous of each other, but it is far more significant that they have devised a code of manners with which to satisfy each other's hunger for appreciation. Each agrees to admire, or, at any rate, to appear to admire, the other's dress. When two women meet, it is customary, after the conventional greeting, for one to say: "How pretty your new hat is!" And for the other to reply: "I'm so glad you like it — I saw the new shape at Smith's Emporium, and I trimmed it with the velvet off my last winter's hat." When this topic has been canvassed to the satisfaction of the wearer of the hat, she in turn will

compliment her friend's taste and ingenuity by praising something she is wearing. In such wise have women expended their perverted abilities and kindliness, spurred on by the race of commercial fashion, and lacking an education in larger things.

Dress, moreover, came to take the place of healthful exercise and recreation. The lazy afternoon parade through the shopping streets, to see the newest fashions displayed four times a year at the change of seasons, became a weekly excursion as the varieties of materials and style increased. And in our day many women of small means know scarcely any other way of spending their leisure except to drag a fretful child past the shop windows every week-day afternoon, and then to go home and try to copy the most violent combinations of color and the most striking designs in sleazy, cheap imitations.

It is a trite old saying that a man with a champagne taste and a beer income is sure of trouble. In women a similar desire for display, gratified at the cost of the earning power of which they themselves have no direct experience, is equally disastrous in producing effeminacy and discontent. The capacity for detail developed through a thousand generations of domestic necessity has been turned into a few narrow channels, the chief of which has at last come to be the pursuit of dress. Their age-long economy has become shortsighted pinching in some, and equally ill-judged extravagance in others. And the constant chase after fashions which no amount of money would enable them really to come up with has produced a state of chronic dissatisfaction with themselves, their lot, and with the men who supply their income. Petty-mindedness has at last become the distinguishing characteristic of the average woman. The marvelous thrift which enables her to dress stylishly on a small sum; the originality with which she contrives and imitates ever-new prettinesses; the ingenuity with which she makes a good show on small resources - all these valuable but perverted qualities would, if applied to the larger problems of common life, clean up the cities, find a home for every normal child, and reform our haphazard domestic economy; and would produce that sureness of aim, that sense of being a

useful cog in the world's machinery, without which no human being can be happy.

The female mind, thus fed on details of ephemeral importance, had no reason for larger intellectual interests; and constant occupation with the attainment of the correct accessories of her costume left little leisure for reading. Such books as she found time for would naturally be of the emasculated sort, whose heroines were the beautiful and perfectly dressed kind she strove to be; to whom impossible, but perfectly moral, adventures happened, until they culminated in a blissful engagement. For a quarter of a century at least, the Sunday-school novel and magazines of the type of Godey's Lady's Book supplied the mental pabulum of the majority of American women. The magazines inculcated the pursuit of dress as a most important duty of woman as part of the ideal of gentility and religion set before the perfect lady.

And if it be thought that women no longer feed on this anæmic literary diet, one has only to examine any one of the strictly feminine journals to learn how pervasive it still is. Many of them profit by, if they are not published in, the interest of trade and manufactures for women, and it is highly important to them that the love of dress should be intensified.

Since the days of the forties, when French fashion plates were successfully introduced, this sort of literature has been served up to make women buy new, and always more fantastic, clothing. It requires no great acumen to conclude that it would inevitably lead to extravagance. Having no responsibility for earning their own money— though indirectly they might, nevertheless, earn it - and very little experience in handling it, except in small amounts, they did not reckon its value in the large. And having been encouraged to concentrate their energies on appearance, they came to have a highly cultivated taste nay, more than taste, appetite for pretty clothes which, like an appetite for drink or games of chance, must be satisfied. Yet it, like many another social habit, could never be satisfied. It might also be said that the more time and money they had to give to dress, the more discontented they were sure to be. If the father or husband

could not meet this rising demand, they pitied themselves for his lack of success; if he set a limit of expenditure, they regarded him as a selfish brute. Now and then they degenerated into dishonest schemers, running up large bills for which their menkind were responsible; cheating the dressmaker and the milliner; sending back garments as unsatisfactory after wearing them; practicing the deceits of the adventuress in the guise of a respectable woman of society.

Yet, in justice to womankind, it must be granted that the dress mania produced very few of these types, as compared with hundreds of conscientious, economical women, who, misled by the conventions of their social station, took out of themselves, rather than out of men's pockets, the wherewithal to achieve the proper clothes of a lady. These dear, fussy, dutiful creatures sacrificed their health, their love of nature, their taste for art, for literature, even their companionableness, to the Juggernaut of women -Suitability. Moreover, because men were conspicuously the producing class, and women for the most part obviously the consumers, extravagance came to be regarded as a female propensity; while, as a matter of fact, it was no more truly characteristic of one than of the other. What men spent in cigars and tobacco, in heavy eating and drinking, in club life and dues, and in careless, unconsidered sums, women balanced by their equally wasteful but careful spreading of small sums upon the elaboration of dress.

One of the last and most demoralizing aspects of fashionpromotion has been the infliction upon children of the overdeveloped taste for tawdry ornament. The women's magazines cater to the mother's pride by providing embroidery patterns to be worked upon little boys' blouses; suggestions of how to cut over little girls' dresses to keep pace with the newest idea. While the laundry bills mount ever higher, the fashionable little girl is rigged out in more fragile and impracticable and unwholesome clothing. It is as if the mother were still a child herself, playing with a live doll which, though it cannot be broken, may still be distorted into her own foolish image.

As a result of the combined influence of economic forces and social traditions, centering in dress, women have acquired a set

of habits of expenditure and thinking which lead to discontent and waste of time in the trivialities of taste, in the pursuit of petty economies, and in the discussion of dress detail. These are, however, the least of the evil effects of the dress cult: in many women they degenerate into exploitation of men, dishonesty toward tradespeople, and the vulgarities of conspicuous display. It may almost be asserted that competence, good humor, and intelligence in women are now in inverse proportion to the amount of time they spend on the fashion of their clothes. A woman of influence and a "real lady" in the twentieth century is known, more often than not, by the fact that she is not dressed conspicuously in the latest fashion. She may be known even more by the fact that her children are dressed in the simplest and most childlike manner.

50. HOW HOME CONDITIONS REACT UPON THE FAMILY1

Discussion of social processes, to be fruitful, must rest on some hypothesis as to the nature and purpose of society. It is here assumed that society is a life-form in course of evolution, that its processes are to be measured like those of other life-forms, as they affect the three main issues of existence-being, reproduction, improvement.

In so far as social processes are genetic they interest us as students and critics; in so far as they are telic they form the most practical and important subjects of study. The family has its origin in the genetic process of reproduction; but is modified continually by telic forces. In its present form it is an institution of confused values, based on vital necessity, but heavily encumbered with rudiments of earlier stages of development, some beneficent, some useless, some utterly mischievous; and showing also the thriving growth of new and admirable features.

We must consider it first on its biological basis, as a sex-related group for the purpose of rearing young; and the effect of conditions upon it should be measured primarily by this purpose.

1 By Charlotte Perkins Gilman. From Publications of the American Sociological Society, Vol. III (1908), pp. 16–29.