archaic type that does not disown her hands and feet, nor, indeed, the
other gross material facts of her person. In the course of economic
development the ideal of beauty among the peoples of the Western culture
has shifted from the woman of physical presence to the lady, and it is
beginning to shift back again to the woman; and all in obedience to the
changing conditions of pecuniary emulation. The exigencies of emulation
at one time required lusty slaves; at another time they required a
conspicuous performance of vicarious leisure and consequently an obvious
disability; but the situation is now beginning to outgrow this last
requirement, since, under the higher efficiency of modern industry,
leisure in women is possible so far down the scale of reputability that
it will no longer serve as a definitive mark of the highest pecuniary
grade.
Apart from this general control exercised by the norm of conspicuous
waste over the ideal of feminine beauty, there are one or two details
which merit specific mention as showing how it may exercise an extreme
constraint in detail over men's sense of beauty in women. It has
already been noticed that at the stages of economic evolution at which
conspicuous leisure is much regarded as a means of good repute, the
ideal requires delicate and diminutive hands and feet and a slender
waist. These features, together with the other, related faults of
structure that commonly go with them, go to show that the person so
affected is incapable of useful effort and must therefore be supported
in idleness by her owner. She is useless and expensive, and she is
consequently valuable as evidence of pecuniary strength. It results that
at this cultural stage women take thought to alter their persons, so as
to conform more nearly to the requirements of the instructed taste of
the time; and under the guidance of the canon of pecuniary decency,
the men find the resulting artificially induced pathological features
attractive. So, for instance, the constricted waist which has had so
wide and persistent a vogue in the communities of the Western culture,
and so also the deformed foot of the Chinese. Both of these are
mutilations of unquestioned repulsiveness to the untrained sense. It
requires habituation to become reconciled to them. Yet there is no room
to question their attractiveness to men into whose scheme of life they
fit as honorific items sanctioned by the requirements of pecuniary
reputability. They are items of pecuniary and cultural beauty which have
come to do duty as elements of the ideal of womanliness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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