FEMALE ATTIRE AND INFLUENCE.

Auckland Star, Volume II, Issue 347, 18 February 1871, Page 2

FEMALE ATTIRE AND INFLUENCE.

There can be no doubt that if woman's kuOwledge of what really constitutes beauty were more cultivated, if her taste were higher, or, indeed, anything but the merest accident of feeling, our hideous upholstery, our abominable millinery portraits, the vulgar or vapid colouring of our drawing-rooms would improve. " Natural selections" would get rid of the monstrosities in our shops by the simple process of the bad not finding purchasers, as much as by any schools of design. Again, with regard to dress, wider interests]! would probably indirectly tend to cure the extravagance which constant change of fashion produces. For a woman to take care that her outward clothing makes her as pleasing as circumstances comport, is a r.al duty to her neighbours ; but this is not at all the aim of fashion. There is nothing which puzzles the male mind, and especially the artist mind, like its mystery—why every woman, short and tall, fat and thin, must wear* exactly tho same clothes ; why their heads must all bud out in aa enormous chignon one year, and their bodies expand into an immense bell in the next, under pain of doing something unpleasantly remarkable, by the edict of some irresponsible Vehrngericht which rules over us. The tyranny of opinion is such that no woman dreams of resisting beyoud a certain point; she has been taught that to be singular is in her almost a crime, and she accordingly undresses her poor old shoulders, or swells out her shoit body, and is intolerably ugly and unpleasant to look at to her male relations, but is satisfied with the internal conviction of right given by the feeling that at least she is in the fashion ! More knowledge of real art would show her that if certain lines are really becoming, their opposites cannot be so too ; that there is a real science of the beautiful, to contravene which is as painful to the instructed eye as notes out of tune in music to the instructed ear. The power wielded by woman is at present so enormous, that if men at all realised its extent, they would for their own purposes insist on her being better cpialified to use it. If any man will candidly confess to himself the amount of influence on his habits of thought and feeling throughout his life, first of his mother and sisters, of young ladyhood in general, and later of his wife, daughters, and female friends, the opinions modified, the incentives supplide by women, old and young, he will be almost appalled by the thought of the manner in which this potent being has been left to pick up what education she could from an ignorant governess or an indifferent school; while her ideas of right and wrong, her religion and morality, have generally been obtained by being carefully kept from hearing that there is another side to any question. The important and the trivial are generally strangely mixed up in her mind ; traditional rules—such as that though it is AUeked to read history on Sundays, you may ■make riddles out of the Bible ; that you may cut paper for patchwork on the Sabbath, but if you sew it is a sin—being not seldom considered almost as binding as the Gospel itself. A custom becomes in such a woman's eyes as sacred as morality, the inextricable confusion of the form with its meaning, which is so common, and which makes it so dangerous to touch or improve a symbol lest we damage the thing symbolised, may be greatly traced to the unreasoning traditional mode in which women, half the human race, regard everything. The sentimental part of their minds being stronger, their power of association more vivid than that of men, anything connected, however remotely, with their affections, is clung to more warmly, and makes it more difficult for them to part with the external shape which a thought has been in the habit of taking in their eyes. Accordingly, eveu in matters of politics, which have been supposed to be out of their line, " the party of the roses and nightingales" as Mr. Grant Duff once[enthusiatioally called it, has been a power in the State, a very sensible influence, [ which has often checked, and even prevented, useful reforms.—" The Powers of Women," I n t.hA C!m. te.mnnra.ri, Rrmie.m.