It is hard on industry, however, for the wage earner who can afford to take $6 or $8 helps pull down the wages of other thousands who support not only themselves, but others.

Moreover, to put in one’s days in hard labor simply to dress well, for that is the amount of it, is demoralizing.  It is this emphasis on the matter which impels a reckless girl sometimes to sell herself for money to buy clothes.  “I wanted the money,” I heard a girl, arrested for her first street soliciting, tell the judge.  “Had you no home?” “Yes.”  “A good home?” “Yes.”  “For what did you want money?” “Clothes.”

“Gee, but I felt as if I would give anything for one of them willow plumes,” a pretty sixteen-year-old girl told the police matron who had rescued her from a man with whom she had left home, because he promised her silk gowns and hats with feathers.

This ugly preoccupation with dress does not begin with the bottom of society.  It exists there because it exists at the top and filters down.  In each successive layer there are women to whom dress is as much of a vice as it was for the poor little girls I quote above.  It is a vice curiously parallel to that of gambling among men.  Women of great wealth not infrequently spend princely allowances and then run accounts which come into the courts by their inability or unwillingness to pay them.  It is curious comment on women in a democracy that it should be possible to mention them in the same breath with Josephine, Empress of the French.  Napoleon at the beginning of the Empire allowed Josephine $72,000 a year for her toilet; later he made it $90,000.  But there was never a year she did not far outstrip the allowance.  Masson declares that on an average she spent $220,000 a year, and the itemized accounts of the articles in her wardrobe give authority for the amount.

Josephine’s case is of course exceptional in history.  She was an untrained woman, generous and pleasure-loving, utterly without a sense of responsibility.  She had all the instincts and habits of a demi-mondaine; moreover, she had been thrust into a position where she was expected to live up to traditions of great magnificence.  Her passion for ornament had every temptation and excuse, for it was constantly excited by the hoards of greedy tradesmen and of no less greedy ladies-in-waiting who hung about her urging her to buy and give.  It is hard to believe that Josephine’s case could be even remotely suggested in our democracy; yet one woman in American society bought last summer in Europe a half-dozen nightgowns for which she paid a thousand dollars apiece.  There are women who will start on a journey with a hundred or a hundred and fifty pairs of shoes.  There are others who bring back from Europe forty or fifty new gowns for a season!  What can one think of a bill of $500 for stockings in one season, of $20,000 for a season’s gowns, coats and hats from one shop and as much more in the aggregate for the same articles in the same period from other shops; this showing was made in a recent divorce case.