| <The Saturday Review March 14, 1868>
| <pb n="339">
| <The Girl of the Period>
| Time was when the stereotyped phrase, <p> "a fair young 
| English girl," </p> meant the ideal of womanhood; to be, 
| at least, of home birth and breeding. It meant a creature 
| generous, capable, and modest; something franker than a 
| French woman, more to be trusted than a Italian, as brave 
| as an American but more refined, as domestic as a 
| German and more graceful. It meant a girl who could be 
| trusted alone if need be, because of the innate purity and 
| dignity of her nature, but who was neither bold in bearing 
| nor masculine in mind; a girl who, when she married, 
| would be her husband's friend and companion, but never 
| his rival; one who would consider their interests identical, 
| and not hold him as just so much fair game for spoil; who 
| would make his house his true home and place of rest, not 
| a mere passing place for vanity and ostentation to go 
| through; a tender mother, an industrious house-keeper, a 
| judicious mistress. We prided ourselves as a nation on 
| our women. We thought we had the pick of creation in 
| this fair young English girl of ours, and envied no other 
| men their own. We admired the languid grace and subtle 
| fare of the South; the docility and childlike 
| affectionateness of the East seemed to us sweet and 
| simple and restful; the vivacious sparkle of the trim and 
| sprightly Parisienne was a pleasant little excitement when 
| we met with it in its own domain; but our allegiance 
| never wandered from our brown-haired girls at home, and 
| our hearts were less vagrant than our fancies. This was in 
| the old time, and when English girls were content to be 
| what God and nature
| <pb n="340">
| had made them. Of late years we have changed the 
| pattern, and have given to the world a race of women as 
| utterly unlike the old Insular Ideal as if we had created 
| another nation altogether. The girl of the period, and the 
| fair young English girl of the past, have nothing in 
| common save ancestry and their mother-tongue; and even 
| of this last the modern version makes almost a new 
| language, through the copious additions it has received 
| from the current slang of the day.
| The girl of the period is a creature who dyes her hair and 
| paints her face, as the first articles of her personal 
| religion; whose sole idea of life is plenty of fun and 
| luxury; and whose dress is the object of such thought and 
| intellect as she possesses. Her main endeavour in this is 
| to outvie her neighbours in the extravagance of fashion. 
| No matter whether, as in the time of crinolines, she 
| sacrificed decency, or, as now, in the time of trains, she 
| sacrifices cleanliness; no matter either, whether she 
| makes herself a nuisance and an inconvenience to
| <reg orig="every one"> everyone </reg> she meets. The girl 
| of the period has done away with such moral muffishness 
| as consideration for others, or regard for counsel and 
| rebuke. It was all very well in old-fashioned times, when 
| fathers and mothers had some authority and were treated 
| with respect, to be tutored and made to obey, but she is 
| far too fast and flourishing to be stopped in mid-career by 
| those slow old morals; and as she dresses to please 
| herself, she does not care if she displeases 
| <reg orig="every one"> everyone </reg> else. Nothing is too 
| extraordinary and nothing too exaggerated for her vitiated 
| taste; and things which in themselves would be useful 
| reforms if let alone become monstrosities worse than 
| those which they have displaced so soon as she begins to 
| manipulate and improve. If a sensible fashion lifts the 
| gown out of the mud, she raises hers midway to her knee. 
| If the absurd structure of wire and buckram, once called a 
| bonnet, is modified to something that shall protect the 
| wearer's face without putting out the eyes of her 
| companion, she cuts hers down to four straws and a 
| rosebud, or a tag of lace and bunch of glass beads. If 
| there is a reaction against an excess of Rowland's 
| Mascassar, and hair shiny and sticky with grease is 
| thought less nice than if left clean and healthily crisp, she 
| dries and frizzes and sticks hers out on end like certain 
| savages in Africa, or lets it wander down her back like 
| Madge Wildfire's and thinks herself all the more beautiful 
| the nearer she approaches in look to a maniac or negress. 
| With purity of taste she has lost also that far more 
| precious purity and delicacy of perception which 
| sometimes mean more than appears on the surface. What 
| the <hi> demi-monde </hi> does in its frantic efforts to 
| excite attention, she also does in imitation. If some 
| fashionable <hi> devergonde en evidence </hi> is 
| reported to have come out with her dress below her 
| shoulders, and a gold strap for all the sleeve thought 
| necessary, the girl of the period follows suit next day; and 
| then wonders that men sometimes mistake her for her 
| prototype, or that mothers of girls not quite so far gone as 
| herself refuse her as a companion for their daughters. She 
| has blunted the fine edges of feeling so much that she 
| cannot understand why she does not include imitation of 
| fact; she cannot be made to see that modesty of 
| appearance and virtue ought to be inseparable, and that 
| no good girl can afford to appear bad, under penalty of 
| receiving the contempt awarded to the bad. 
| This imitation of the <hi> demi-monde </hi> in dress 
| leads to something in manner and feeling, not quite so 
| pronounced perhaps, but far too like to be honourable to 
| herself or satisfactory to her friends. It leads to slang, 
| bold talk, and fastness; to the love of pleasure and 
| indifference to duty; to the desire of money before either 
| love or happiness; to uselessness at home, dissatisfaction 
| with the monotony of ordinary life, and horror of all 
| useful work; in a word, to the worst forms of luxury and 
| selfishness, to the most fatal effects arising from want of 
| high principle and absence of tender feeling. The girl of 
| the period envies the queens of the <hi> demi-monde 
| </hi> far more than she abhors them. She sees them 
| gorgeously attired and sumptuously appointed, and she 
| knows them to be flattered, feted, and courted with a 
| certain disdainful admiration of which she catches only 
| the admiration while she ignores the disdain. They have 
| all for which her soul is hungering, and she never stops to 
| reflect at what a price they have bought their gains, and 
| what a fearful moral penalties they pay for their sensuous 
| pleasures. She sees only the coarse gilding on the base 
| token, and shuts her eyes to the hideous figure in the 
| midst, and the foul legend written round the edge. It is the 
| envy of the pleasures, and indifference to the sins of these 
| women of the <hi> demi-monde </hi> which is doing 
| such infinite mischief to the modern girl. They brush too 
| closely by each other, if not in actual deeds, yet in aims 
| and feelings; for the luxury which is bought by vice with 
| the one is the thing of all in life most passionately desired 
| by the other, though she is not yet prepared to pay quite 
| the same price. Unfortunately, she has already paid too 
| much ~~ all that once gave her distinctive national 
| character. <reg orig="No one"> No-one </reg> can say 
| of the modern English girl that she is tender, loving, 
| retiring or domestic. The old fault so often found by 
| keen-sighted Frenchwomen, that she was so fatally <hi> 
| romanesque, </hi> so prone to sacrifice appearances and 
| social advantages for love, will never be set down to the 
| girl of the period. Love indeed is the last thing she thinks 
| of, and the least of the dangers besetting her. Love in a 
| cottage, that seductive charm which used to vex the heart 
| and disturb the calculations of prudent mothers, is now a 
| myth of past ages. The legal barter of herself for so much 
| money, representing so much dash, so much luxury and 
| pleasure ~~ that is her idea of marriage; the only idea 
| worth entertaining. For all seriousness of thought 
| respecting the duties or the consequences of marriage, she 
| has not a trace. If children come, they had but a 
| stepmother's cold welcome from her; and if her husband 
| thinks that he has married anything that is to belong to 
| him ~~ a <hi> tacens et placens uxor </hi> never pledged 
| to make him happy ~~ the sooner he wakes from his 
| hallucination and understands that he has simply married 
| <reg orig="some one"> someone </reg> who will 
| condescend to spend his money on herself, and who will 
| shelter her indiscretions behind the shield of his name, 
| the less severe will be his disappointment. She has 
| married his house, his carriage, his balance at the 
| banker's, his title; and he himself is just the inevitable 
| condition clogging the wheel of her fortune; at best an 
| adjunct to be tolerated with more or less patience as may 
| chance. For it is only the old-fashioned sort, not girls of 
| the period <hi> pur sang </hi> that marry for love, or put 
| the husband before the banker. But she does not marry 
| easily. Men are afraid of her; and with reason. They may 
| amuse themselves with her for an evening, but they do 
| not readily take her for life. Besides, after all her efforts, 
| she is only a poor copy of the real thing; and the real 
| thing is far more amusing than the copy, because it is 
| real. Men can get that whenever they like; and when they 
| go into their mothers' drawing-rooms, to see their sisters 
| and their sisters' friends, they want something of quite 
| different flavour. <hi> Toujours perdrix </hi> is bad 
| providing all the world over; but a continual weak 
| imitation of <hi> toujours perdrix </hi> is worse. If we 
| need have only one kind of thing, let us have it genuine; 
| and the queens of St. John's Wood in their unblushing 
| honesty, rather than their imitators and make-believes in 
| Bayswater and Belgravia. For, at whatever cost of 
| shocked self-love or pained modesty it may be, it cannot 
| be too plainly told to the modern English girl that the 
| result of her present manner of life is to assimilate her as 
| nearly as possible to a class of women whom we must not 
| call by their proper ~~ or improper ~~ name. And we are 
| willing to believe that she has still some modesty of soul 
| left hidden under all this effrontery of fashion, and that, 
| if she could be made to see herself as she appears to the 
| eyes of men, she would mend her ways before too late.
| It is terribly significant of the present state of things when 
| men are free to write as they do of the women of their 
| own nation. Every word of censure flung against them is 
| two-edged and wounds those who condemn as much as 
| those who are condemned; for surely it need hardly be 
| said that men hold nothing so dear as the honour of their 
| women, and that <reg orig="no one"> no-one </reg> 
| living would willingly lower the repute of his mother or 
| his sisters. It is only when these have placed themselves 
| beyond the pale of masculine respect that such things 
| could be written as are written now; when they become 
| again what they were once, they will gather round them 
| the love and homage and chivalrous devotion which were 
| then an Englishwoman's natural inheritance. The marvel, 
| in the present fashion of life among women, is how it 
| holds its ground in spite of the disapprobation of men. It 
| used to be an old-time notion that the sexes were made 
| for each other, and that it was only natural for them to 
| please each other, and to set themselves out for that end. 
| But the girl of the period does not please men. She 
| pleases them as little as she elevates them; and how little 
| she does that, the class of women she has taken as her 
| model of itself testifies. All men whose opinion is worth 
| having prefer the simple and genuine girl of the past, with 
| her tender little ways and pretty bashful modesties, to this 
| loud and rampant modernization, with her false red hair 
| and paleted skin, talking slang as glibly as a man, and by 
| preference leading the conversation to doubtful subjects. 
| She thinks she is piquante and exciting when she thus 
| makes herself the bad copy of a worse original; and she 
| will not see that though men laugh with her they do not 
| respect her, though they flirt with her they do not marry 
| her; she will not believe that she is not the kind of thing 
| they want, and that she is acting against nature and her 
| own interests when she disregards their advice and 
| offends their taste. We do not see how she makes out her 
| account, viewing her life from any side, but all we can do 
| is to wait patiently until the national madness has passed, 
| and our women have come back again to the old English 
| ideal once the most beautiful, the most modest, the most 
| essentially womanly in the world.