eria, an advertisement,
an insult offered by wealth to poverty, a degradation of women's
qualities which carries its own penalty in the form of growing mental
baseness.

5

Well, what shall we do? Women must wear a uniform. Strictly, they
already do wear a uniform, for what is a fashion but a uniform? Some
years ago when musquash coats (and cheaper velveteen) were "in", and
hats were very small, there were in London scores of thousands of young
women so exactly alike that considerable confusion was caused at tube
stations and such other places where lovers meet; this simplifies the
problem of choosing the new uniform. Let it not be thought that I wish
women to dress in sackcloth, though they will certainly dress in
sackcloth if ever sackcloth comes in; I do not care what they wear,
provided they do not continually alter its form, and provided it is not
too dear. The way in which old and young, tall and short, fat and thin,
force themselves into the same color and the same shape is sheer
socialism; I merely want to carry the uniform idea a little further, to
make it a _permanent_ uniform.

We already have uniforms for women, apart from the fashions, uniforms
which never change: those of the nurse, the nun, the parlor-maid, the
tea-girl. We have national costumes, Dutch, Swiss, Irish, Japanese,
Italian; we have drill suits and sports dresses. And they are not ugly.
All these uniformed women have as good a chance of marriage as any
others, and her ladyship gains as many proposals on the golf links as at
night on the terrace. I would suggest that women should have two or
three uniforms of a kind to be decided, which would never change, and, I
repeat, they need not be ugly uniforms.

Men's uniforms are not ugly; I would any day exchange my lounge suit for
the uniform of a guardsman--if I might wear it. In this "if" is the
essence of the whole idea, the whole practicability of it. Men wear
uniform, that is to say lounge suits in certain circumstances, morning
coats in others, evening clothes in yet others. They never vary. We are
told that they vary. Tailors show new suitings, the papers print
articles about men's fashions, and perhaps a button is added or a lapel
is lengthened, and that is all. Nobody cares. Men follow no fashions so
far as the fable of men's fashions is true; they dare not do so, because
to do so serves them ill in society. A man who dares to break through
the uniform idea of his sex is generally dub