Annie Laurie
San Francisco Examiner/October 1, 1907
Now the playwrights are getting after women for extravagance in dress. I wish I were Rachel Crothers or some other woman with brains enough to write a play myself.
I’d have an extravagant woman for a heroine, too and contrasted with her I’d have the nice, economical dowdy, whose husband neglects her to pay attention to the lady with the gorgeous clothes.
I’d make my heroine go to a party in her fine clothes for which she owed the merchants and the dressmakers and the jewelers and the bookmakers and I’d have her surrounded with a crowd of men who would spend the next morning at breakfast grumbling about the bills which their own particular wives had been doing their very best to keep down.
What was that old poem about the eagle which was shot by the arrow tipped with a feather plucked from his own breast, and who was it who used to moralize about the kid seethed in his own mother’s milk?
I never hear a man railing at the extravagant dress of woman without thinking of that poem and that story about the kid.
It’s all very well to preach, gentlemen.
We all know that economy is one of the first virtues, but oh, prithee, ye who prate so loud, remember that consistency is a jewel, too.
If you love to tell your wife or your sister or the little niece you’re trying to impress with your wisdom how naughty it is to spend too much money for good clothes, the next time you take her out to a party do not pick out for your marked and assiduous attentions the most extravagant and the most richly dressed woman in the room.
If you are fond of telling your wife that pink is too young for her anyway, and that the blue dress she wore last season will do just as well this year as a new one, don’t stare after the lady in pink the next time you take your wife to the theatre in her poor little shabby blue frock.
If you hate big hats and like to make fun of them, don’t sit in the streetcar and gaze enraptured at the person in a skyscraper with a pagoda for a trimming.
It isn’t conducive to the peace of mind of your feminine foe.
Now, I don’t care a snap for clothes myself. If I had my way I’d dress in a Mother Hubbard and a pair of slippers the year round, but somehow the men of my family wear a peculiar look of uneasy wonder if I present myself before their critical gaze in a frock that is the least bit different from the very latest thing worn by Mrs. Extravagance, who lives for her clothes.
Poor Mrs. Extravagance, we all have such a lovely time talking about her and her clothes.
I wonder who the particular man is for whom she goes into such disgraceful debt?
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