or mahogany; while women, of whatever material, must be carefully veneered with a thin and costly layer of unreality-a sort of imitation composite, a spurious femininity.

It is certainly significant that, in proportion as the women of the Nineteenth Century were released from domestic, manual labor, they became more and more extravagantly feminine; and that this phenomenon was a repetition of what had previously marked the behavior of every class of women at leisure throughout the world's history. There is no evidence that our manufacturing grandmothers of the early Nineteenth Century were afflicted with any such degree of effusive, excitable, unreasoning temperament as that which characterized the strictly feminine ideal of their immediate descendants. Among Parisians at the present day, where there is almost no line drawn between the economic sphere of men and women, and where both husband and wife among the masses must work to make a liv ing, there is no marked difference between them in respect to emotional expression. The women of Paris have fought as savagely as men in the revolutions; and French men are notoriously as emotional as the typical American woman, and as unreasoning when carried beyond self-control.

There can be no doubt that the social behavior which is commonly described as typically femi

nine" is an over-development of characters not at all uncommon among men, and often lacking in women. When women have been more given to superficial talk and gayety than men, it is because men desired them to be so, and because it was, therefore, to their advantage. If they have been accustomed to use hysteria as their weapon of defense, instead of talking reason or using their fists, it was probably because they had never had either encouragement or opportunity to employ mind or brute force.

With the opening of all occupations to woman, and with nearly equal opportunities for intellectual training, there has been developed in a single generation a large number of American women who are less excitable than a Frenchman, less sentimental than a German, and less emotional than an Italian-in short, almost as reasonable and self-poised as the men of their own class and race.

CHAPTER VI

BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS

"There was no reason why woman should not labor in primitive society. The forces which withdrew her from labor were expressions of later social traditions. Speaking largely, these considerations were the desire of men to preserve the beauty of women, and their desire to withdraw them from association with other men. It is the connection in thought and fact between idle and beautiful women and wealth, indeed, which has frequently led to the keeping of a superfluous number of such women as a sign of wealth."-THOMAS-Sex and Society.

"Female selection . . . created a fantastic and extravagant male efflorescence. Male selection . . . produced a female etiolation, diminutive stature, beauty without utility."-LESTER F. WARD.

"The woman who is beautiful and vivacious, and not actu ally feeble-minded, will be endowed with all graces of mind and soul by three-fourths of all who see her on the street, while the most highly intellectual frump will often be set down as stupid and crabbed, purely on the strength of her appearance. "In fine, beauty, to a woman of average intelligence and character... is her most valuable asset from a worldly standpoint. . . . Beauty is the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace-health. . . . "-WOODS HUTCHINSON.

...

THE types of spurious and anemic beauty prevalent in the Nineteenth Century in this country may be accounted for historically by the conflicting ideas inherited, on the one hand from

108

ascetic religion, on the other through the sensual luxury of higher English society. Behind both, permeating and coercing the lives of women even down to the present time, was the idea left over from still older societies, that the bodies of women were owned by the men who espoused them, which carried with it the implication that the chief use of beauty is the satisfaction of sexual greed. One of the foremost modern sociologists tells us that, if we go back far enough, there was a long period of time when women had no need to be beautiful in order to attract their mates; a time, indeed, when males put on a temporary beauty in order that they might be chosen; and that it was not until the power of choice had been transferred from females to males that women in their turn began to cultivate those physical qualities which would most attract men. Even then relatively few women were beautiful in the modern sense, and they only for the short period of extreme youth.

For the ordinary woman, beauty as an aim and asset is quite a modern idea. In the earlier ages of mankind, strength, fertility, and skill in handicraft were the qualities most desired in wives, as in slaves. When King Solomon pictured the ideal domestic woman, he did not dwell upon the color of her eyes and hair, nor upon the symmetry of her form, but described in great detail

the things she could do, praising her indefatigable industry, and ending with these words:

"Favor is deceitful and beauty is vain; but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands and let her own works praise her in the gates."

Beauty in a wife or a slave was a rarity quite out of reach of the common man; a thing of great price, reserved for kings, princes, and the leaders of armies, and to be guarded, like treasure, in harems. The Greek hero, Paris, carried off women from Sidon, not for their beauty, but that they might weave purple cloth for Helen of Troy -a situation typical of the relative positions of the Beauty and the ordinary woman.

There was, in the ancient world, and even quite down to recent times, no economic surplus upon which society could fall back. War and waste, pestilence and the lack of mechanical inventions, made it necessary not only to breed great numbers of human beings, but that men, women, and children-all except a small upper class-should work incessantly. To the ordinary man, who could afford only one wife, strength and fertility were highly important; and though he might prefer the looks of one maid above another, his taste was likely to be overcome by his judgment or nullified by family and financial considerations.