Lesbia Newman (1889)/Chapter 39
CHAPTER XXXIX.
Some Minor Effects of the British Revolution of 189—,— Ousebridge.
The distinctive character of Revolution, properly so called, as compared with constitutional reform, on the one hand, and with mere riot, on the other, is that society in revolution changes its principles of right and wrong. It is like a person turning on his heel; the objects which surround him may remain as they were, but his point of view is changed. Or, to take another simile, it resembles the situation of one revisiting at middle life the scenes of his early childhood. In one sense, they are the same scenes, but, in another sense, how completely altered! ‘Cari luoghi, io vi trovai; ma quei dî non trovo più.’ A sudden gust of popular passion, rising against a time-honoured institution on account of a particular incidental provocation, may jeopardise it for the moment; but when the fit has passed, the institution will be found standing in its place. It is otherwise where a conviction has grown that the institution is intrinsically worthless, and that the reverence paid to it was a mistake. This is revolutionary change.
But the crash and ruin of venerable buildings, whether in the material or the moral world, is a more or less painful subject into which it is not necessary for the purposes of this story to go far. It will answer better to select seemingly small indications of a reversal of heart and mind on the part of English society, than to describe the cataclysms by which they were accompanied.
Among the minor effects, there was no one which more strikingly affected the tone of society through all its grades, than the thoroughgoing dislocation of the old-fashioned modes of female attire, and the rapid substitution of costumes at once healthful, comfortable, and becoming. Our heroine was no longer a solitary pioneer, hewing her way bravely through a mass of obloquy; girls both younger and older than she were discarding their skirts and adopting, for everyday use, a knicker or tights costume, according to fancy, first for out-door exercises only, then for all exercises, in-door or out-door, then for evening as well as morning dress; and no remonstrances of old fogies of either sex could induce them to return, except for occasions of solemnity where the dignity of a robe was in place, to the condemned petticoats. This movement in the matter of dress quickly entailed another one, but of more limited application. Riding astride was encouraged by the institution of a ‘Ladies’ Bicycle Club’ and a ‘Ladies’ Reformed Horseback Association,’ which sprang into existence and flourished in the course of a single summer. Our heroine, and her friend Friga Hawknorbuzzard, here saw the fruits of an active propagandism at which they had worked with renewed zeal since the catastrophe of Queenstown; but their success might not have been so signal as it was, had their endeavours not been assisted by the recognised leaders of fashion, who had the wisdom to keep touch of the foremost innovations, and to lose no time in espousing the winning cause. Never did a fashion in dress spread more rapidly than this ‘anti-skirt movement,’ and a new impetus was given by it to every kind of healthy exercise. Lawns and fields presented scenes of feminine energy hitherto never witnessed unless in the artificial environment of the stage or circus, and which were transforming the life of women, root and branch, and through them affecting for the better the manners and ideas of men. The immemorial reign of the Weakervessel and the Dollymops was o’er; crinoline was unheard of, as was its bastard offspring, the hump or dress-spoiler; the chignon displayed not its massive coil; the wasp-waist and the stilt-heel were no longer admired, but were looked upon as horrid survivals of the mediæval torture-chamber; corset-makers had little custom but from the very aged or diseased, the classical Spanish sash supplying the place of stays, where required; the hollow modes of Paris were altogether beginning to find the solid modes of London too strong for them, and had begun to shape their course accordingly: in a word, the old-world fripperies and barbarisms were all drifting away like November leaves before the north-wester. And with the new, free, comfortable, and rational garments, and the vigorous enjoyments to which they gave scope, the tone of girls’ minds became braced, their tastes widened and raised, their interest in public concerns, apart from personalities, aroused; in short, their emancipation from the past completed, and their grasps of the future assured. Superficial thinkers said that the sexes were changing places; but those of deeper understanding saw that the elevation of woman to her proper place would never degrade man below his, which indeed he had never yet filled; they saw that within the area of the Revolution mankind was rising to a higher level, and getting a wider and truer view of the world.
One part only of the revolutionary programme will probably jar upon the feelings of the reader, as it did upon those whose unwelcome duty it was to carry it out. The recognition of women’s dignity made it imperative that personal outrages against it should be put down with no irresolute hand. A fearful invention, called the Red Girl—a bronze girl in red garments, with the joints moving as in a living human being—administered the lash to offenders in that direction, with a tremendous but impartial severity such as no arm of flesh could use. But, fortunately, the terror of the machine proved, as a rule, a sufficient warning; and society was spared having to inflict a penalty which, in days when the development of feminine influence was promoting general kindness and forbearance, went very much against the grain.
We may now turn from that disagreeable topic to the most important among the minor effects at home of the British Revolution of 189—. Already, under universal manhood and womanhood suffrage, a goodly sprinkling of the foremost women had gained seats in the legislature, where they threw their weight solidly into every measure tending directly to the emancipation of their sex. A pressing, practical question had arisen,—what should be done with the funds created by the lapse of several bishoprics and other benefices of the late Establishment. The new law, hereafter to be referred to again, which gave the widows the refusal of their deceased husbands’ ministration and emoluments, delayed the wholesale lapse; but even now there was a sufficient accumulation to start some national undertaking in consonance with modern views. After much debate, it was resolved to create a new and special national debt, to be paid off by the lapse of the church endowments. From ten to twelve millions sterling were to be devoted to founding a great university for women, where every profession and every trade could be thoroughly learnt at a moderate cost—in the case of girls on the foundation, free of cost. A commission was appointed to select and purchase a site, and eventually the midland town of Ousebridge, already much resorted to for educational purposes, was fixed upon as being a convenient distance from the metropolis, fairly central for the rest of England, and possessing a gravelly and sandy soil, a good river, and other advantages. Here, accordingly, was built a vast college, the nucleus of a future group destined to eclipse both Oxford and Cambridge in its influence on English society, destined to be the nursery of a new order, the order of women free at last, and lacking only the training to enter upon their inheritance and rule the world, rule it no longer indirectly by the fawning and cajolery and chicanery which are the instruments of an enslaved race, but directly and openly in their own right and—if need should ever arise—by those resources which Science was yearly more and more transferring from the, as yet, bigger frames of half-civilised men to those most intelligent in her ways.
A staff of thoroughly qualified teachers was drawn from the most cultivated grades of society, particular stress being laid on their personal character and circumstances; all the male professors being required to be married men living with their wives, in order that no favouritism, or suspicion of it, might interfere with their relations to the students. The girls who were to form the Foundation College of the university were selected exclusively from the well-born in straitened circumstances, and this not from any sentiments which might be described as snobbish, but in order that a tone of refined simplicity might be taken by the institution at its start; that the first impression made on the towns-people of Ousebridge by the novel experiment might be a favourable one; and that the new ideas and fashions might penetrate outer society with the greater force.
The Foundation College was to be free; the other colleges which in course of time would cluster round it, would bear their own expenses, like other educational establishments; it was important that the undertaking should set out with a class of students chosen only for their fitness to the ends in view, and unhampered by other considerations. It was a fair compact; the college to provide first-rate education, living, and healthy sports; the girls, on their part, to wear the college uniform during their resident membership, and to do their best to reform outside society on their own model. Thus for five years each student at Ousebridge had guaranteed to her a life of work and recreation such as girls have a right to expect—a right which was yielded to them now, probably for the first time in human history.
The colour chosen for the university was a rich crimson, as Oxford and Cambridge have their respective blues; the badge was an oval with a golden arrow in it, pointing upwards, and the word Deira below it. The uniform for Foundation College, which was filled mostly with younger girls, was a dark-blue serge knicker suit with crimson beretta cap and stockings, but other colleges could have their own colours; the gown, of course, was common to all, for the hours of study and lectures in school, and for walking about the town. University officers were, of course, appointed to see that the liberty of students to go almost where they pleased did not lead to abuses and scandal, which would have weakened the influence it was the main object of the institution to extend. We say the main object, because mere learning, of one sort and another, could be acquired elsewhere. Learned women who were learned and nothing more, would be no new thing; the object now was not only to make them learned and intelligent in their respective chosen callings, but also to eradicate from them what the world, but a few years back, had miscalled ‘womanliness,’—to harden them in character as in muscle,—to bruise out of them their frivolity and soft-headedness, and silly mannerisms and coquetry and mischievous thoughtlessness and all other pseudo-feminine habits, the heritage of prehistoric degradation, which had been the means of keeping eastern nations in barbarism, Europe in semi-barbarism, and, finally of bringing England—though the foremost country in recognising women’s rights—to Queenstown and the Revolution. So at last in Ousebridge our heroine saw that she would find a congenial society, the female society of a new era, whose members, whatever career they might choose, would at all events be prepared for it by the cultivation of a vigorous physical and moral constitution, unhampered by stolid prejudices and impossible compromises.
These minor effects of the Revolution, which have been selected for mention as pertinent to the story, if they were but little straws, showed at any rate that the wind had set in favour of making a tabula rasa of the old civilisation. The example soon proved contagious; the Spirit of the Revolution spread like a prairie fire among other nations. But space will not permit our following it abroad, nor even going far beyond this cursory glimpse of its work at home, which work, it need hardly be said, made a clean sweep, once for all, of women’s disabilities of every sort, social, political, professional, religious. They could now compete with men on a fair field and no favour, in every existing or possible walk of life.