The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays: 1909Bierce, Ambrose
Philosophy
The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays: 1909
Bierce, Ambrose
Essays
In the last forty years, in this country, they have entered a hundred
avenues of activity from which they were previously debarred by an
unwritten law. They are found in the offices, the shops, the factories.
Like Charles Lamb's fugitive pigs, they have run up all manner of
streets. Does any one think that in that time there has been an advance
in professional, commercial and industrial morality? Are lawyers
more scrupulous, tradesmen more honest? When one has been served by a
"saleslady" does one leave the shop with a feebler sense of injury
than was formerly inspired by a transaction at the counter--a duller
consciousness of being oneself the commodity that has changed hands?
Have actresses elevated the stage to a moral altitude congenial to the
colder virtues? In studios of the artists is the "sound of revelry by
night" invariably a deep, masculine bass? In literature are the immoral
books--the books "dealing" with questionable "questions"--always, or
even commonly, written by men?
There is one direction in which "emancipation of woman" and enlargement
of her "sphere" have wrought a reform: they have elevated the
_personnel_ of the little dinner party in the "private room." Formerly,
as any veteran man-about-town can testify, if he will, the female
contingent of the party was composed of persons altogether unspeakable.
That element now remains upon its reservation; among the superior
advantages enjoyed by the man-about-town of today is that of the
companionship, at his dinner _in camera_, of ladies having an honorable
vocation. In the corridors of the "French restaurant" the swish of
Pseudonyma's skirt is no longer heard; she has been superseded by the
Princess Tap-tap (with Truckle & Cinch), by my lady Snip-snip (from the
"emporium" of Boltwhack & Co.), by Miss Chink-chink, who sits at the
receipt of customs in that severely un-French restaurant, the Maison
Hash. That the man-about-town has been morally elevated by this
Emancipation of Girl from the seclusion of home to that of the "private
room" is too obvious for denial. Nothing so uplifts Tyrant Man as the
table talk of good young women who earn their own living.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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