Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women

G >> George Sumner Weaver >> Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women

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She must learn that she has a great soul, a great mission, a great duty,
and a great power, before she will break away from the bonds of the
toilet and be herself. Woman by nature is no more a toilet puppet than
man. Her mental and moral duties are equal to his. Her powers of mind
and heart are equal to his. Her field of labor it is wide as his. Her
time is as precious as his. It is as important that her soul should grow
as his. She has as much need of knowledge, wisdom, courage, strength of
mind and purpose, as much need of all the powers and beauties of a
cultured soul, as he. Why should she not adorn her mind, develop her
powers, live to a high purpose, act well a noble part, do and be
according to her capacity? Let young women elevate their aims; give less
time to the toilet, more to study, duty, and active employment; regard
themselves as something more than dolls, as something intelligent,
useful, to be improved, to grow wise and great. Let them dress their
minds in wisdom, adorn their hearts with virtue, clothe their souls with
strength, with the majesty of noble purposes and high resolutions, and
they will soon be something more than automatons on which the milliner
and mantua-maker hang their wares.

I have written plainly rather than flatteringly, and I have done so
because I believe the time has fully come when woman should be a woman,
and not a mere gaudy appendage to man; when her soul should wake up from
its long lethargy and put on the habiliments of wisdom and usefulness;
when she should live to a grander purpose than she has done, and should
make her power felt more sensibly in the morality and religion, business
and bosom, of the world. I am not a disregarder of the beauties and
proprieties of Dress. On the contrary, I admire appropriate Dress. It
speaks out the man or woman. But I would have everybody feel that the
man makes the Dress. Almost any thing looks well on a noble woman. The
plainest Dress becomes agreeable when worn by a person of grand purpose
and good-doing life. Real life when unadorned is most adorned. Noble
womanhood is always beautiful. The world always has and always will
admire it. The richest Dress is always worn on the soul. The adornments
that will not perish, and that all men most admire, shine from the heart
through this life. God has made it our highest, holiest duty to dress
the soul he has given us. It is wicked to waste it in frivolity. It is a
beautiful, undying, precious thing. If every young woman would think of
her soul when she looks in the glass, would hear the cry of her naked
mind when she dallies away her precious hours at her toilet, would
listen to the sad moaning of her hollow heart, as it wails through her
idle, useless life, something would be done for the elevation of
womanhood. I hope I address those who appreciate my words and my
feelings. Above almost every thing else do I desire woman's elevation in
the moral and intellectual scale of life. You may not see the mental or
moral nakedness of the mass of our young women as I do; you may not hear
the pleading voice of religion as I do; but I trust you do see your need
of higher purposes in life, and more active usefulness; I trust you do
see that you have souls to dress and hearts to adorn, and will attend to
this, your highest duty.

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 _a 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?

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