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IF I WERE ADVISER TO GIRLS
Thomas Arkle Clark, Dean of Men, University of Illinois
I find no fault with the conventional custom which in the home and in college sends the girl in personal matters to a woman for direction and advice. Such a custom is entirely proper and as it should be, for a woman is in such matters usually infinitely better suited to give such advice than is a man and is likely to give it with more tact and judgment. I have felt, however, that if in the juggling of events it should ever be my lot to be an adviser to girls, I should not be without a certain fitness. The ordinary advice which the young woman gets is from the point of view of the woman. There are many details, however, in which I think it would be helpful to the girl, if she could get the man’s viewpoint. For many years, through no choice or fault of my own, I have occupied a position which has constituted me a general adviser of young men. This position has brought me into personal contact with thousands of young men, and has brought to me for solution every problem which may come to young men in college. It has made me familiar with the thoughts and conduct of young men with every variety of training and every standard of living, and though I have never yet reached the point where there is nothing new or interesting, as I hope never to do, I have at least arrived at the situation where I am not easily surprised.
One of the first things, perhaps, which a college officer in my position will learn is that we shall not get far in the knowledge of the personal life of young men in college without soon coming to know a good deal about young women as individuals and in general. This information, gathered from the young men I have known, has usually been given me very frankly, sometimes quite unconsciously, sometimes it has been a matter of inference, and often I have woven together the scattered threads of conversation which I have picked up at one place and another, and of them formed the fabric of truth relative to the young man’s ideas and reactions. It is because of these experiences that I have come to realize how certain things in a girl’s dress,
iin her toilet artifices, in her personal relations with young men, affect these men, and it is concerning these things that I have felt often that I should like to have a quiet frank talk with girls.
A girl will be wise if she hesitates before making a confidant of a man, unless he be her father or her brother, no matter what the man’s age may be or the sincerity of his friendship. The proper confidant of a girl is her mother. “Men are so much more sympathetic,” I have heard girls say, “and they often understand girls better than women do”! I should not care to argue that point, but ordinarily I have found that the better understanding, if there were such, was of very little advantage in the developing of the girl’s character or in helping her out of her troubles.
As I was riding in a railway train not long ago I was forced to listen to a conversation going on between a middle aged traveling man and a young woman twenty years old, perhaps, who had taken a seat beside him. It was easy to infer from the talk that they had never before met, and to my relief it was quite as easy to draw the conclusion that he was a gentleman and that she was a girl well brought up but quite lacking in judgment. During the one hundred miles that they were together she told him of her ambitions, of her troubles at home, of her love affairs, of every personal thing in fact that had seemed to touch her. She left the train finally, and her companion after helping her off came back and dropped into the seat beside me. “She isn’t safe,” he said by way of explanation, and I agreed as I now agree that the girl who opens up her private affairs for the inspection of any man has by so doing broken down effectually one barrier of personal protection. She is shutting out a larger danger than she knows when she keeps her private and personal affairs to herself.
Though it is true that most men do not have the intuition usually attributed to young women, yet young men are quite likely to detect in the young woman with whom they associate subterfuge and deceit, and this knowledge or detection they are not likely to confess. I was interested lately in listening to the conversation of two young men with regard to a young woman
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• •of their common acquaintance. The first young man had invited her to a party and she had accepted. Later the second young man had asked her to accompany him to a dinner on the same evening. She preferred the dinner to the dance, so she pleaded illness as an excuse to break the first engagement and went to the dinner with the second young man. Neither respected her afterwards, and though they never explained to her, neither ever invited her again. Young men are usually too frank and open with each other for such conceit on the part of girls to be long concealed, and in the end the girl suffers.
The toilet artifices which a woman employs almost never deceive a man, and invariably tend to make her cheap and common in his estimation. He knows when she gets her complexion from a bottle or a box, and when she puts it on with a pencil or a chamois cloth. It has its effect upon him over and above the physical charm which it exerts, and if I could have a quiet talk with her, I should like to tell her that the effect is not quite what a modest sensible girl would wish. Just yesterday, accompanied by a junior, as I was walking to my office after lunch, I met a young college girl well known among the undergraduates. She is generally spoken of or addressed by a friendly nickname, she is discussed in detail on every occasion, and her cosmetics are analyzed daily at a dozen fireside laboratories. She was carefully, if not extremely dressed. One could not see her face without being impressed by it even if one did not turn, as most young fellows did, to look at it the second time. Her carefully penciled eyebrows stood out black and distinct, her bright red lips, her white neck revealed by the low cut blouse, and her cheeks beautifully soft and pink were as attractive as an artificial flower. “Polly has some skill with the brush,” remarked my companion admiringly. There was no deceit about her complexion; it was incontestably well made and securely put on, but there was not a young man in college who, seeing her a block away, would for a moment have imagined that it was her own. Such chemical tricks usually suggest to a man who sees them shallowness, instability, a lack of genuineness on the part of the young woman who resorts to them, and so to acertain degree a lack of character. With such a girl a man is likely to feel less restraint, freer of speech and action—he can take more liberties—and such a girl is less free from vulgar attention among strangers and less safe. It is true that some refined and cultivated women resort to these skilful artifices with the hope of thus enhancing their beauty, but it is also unfortunately true that all women of low character do so, and sometimes with even more consummate skill. And how is one to know to which class the woman in question belongs, the young fellow asks, and as a result his respect for all women who resort to these cosmetical tricks is, whether he is conscious of it or not, somewhat lowered. The fact that a young man will compliment a girl on the skill with which she has applied her artificial complexion counts for little. He realizes the purpose she had in mind and knows that it is up to him.
The wise girl, and the one who will in the end win most respect and the greatest number of friends is the girl who stands firmly for social conventionalities. Some of these social forms, it is true, often seem foolish or unnecessary, but they are usually in the long run a test of character. The girl who attends a dance that is unchaperoned, who goes through an evening’s entertainment without speaking to the hostess or the reception committee, who allows the young man to stay a little later than the house rules permit, who permits familiarities or unconventionalities of any sort, has by so doing weakened her social fortress, and helped to undermine the respect for herself of the very young man who may have urged her to do the unconventional thing, and who may have lauded her afterwards for being a good sport. Most of the girls who were known in college as “good sports” or “good fellows” or “popular girls” are either not married at all, or are unhappily married. The sensible man usually knows enough to steer clear of this sort when it comes to matrimony.
If I were adviser to girls, I should caution young women against extremes of any sort in dress. The girl who by her ultra dressing attracts attention to herself as she walks across the campus, by that very act, in the minds of all young men, re-fleets upon her own character. Every healthy young woman naturally wants to be becomingly dressed, and so of course wants to be dressed in keeping with the latest style, but it is possible to be stylish without being freakish. The extremely short, or the painfully narrow skirt, the low cut bodice, and extremes of dress of all sorts that expose the wearer’s figure, all have their effects upon the characters of the young men with whom the girls who wear such costumes associate, and in turn these costumes all suggest to young men something not wholly complimentary concerning the characters of the young women who wear these extreme clothes. Only recently I was looking over the photographs submitted for publication in the so-called “beauty section” of a college annual. Many of the photographs showed the young women in dresses cut so low as to reach almost the limits of modesty. “If the girls only realized what the influence of such pictures and such dressing is upon us fellows,” one of the boys remarked to me, “I believe they would be more conservative and more careful.”
The girl who bids for attention is never popular. There is nothing that so palls upon a young man and so dampens his ardor as ease of conquest; there is nothing so stimulating of interest as indifference. This is the main reason why it is often so impossible for one young woman to understand why another one is popular; but the boy knows. The easily won girl is frequently and even chronically engaged, but she seldom marries. To the sensible clean fellow she seems usually uninteresting, a little shop worn, a little soiled from being tossed about.
A few months ago I had an opportunity to observe in a little country town in Italy two American girls who were attracting considerable attention. They were thoroughly artificial in manner, in speech, in complexion. They were dressed in the most extreme mode of an ultra style. Every foreigner, not to speak of every American, turned his head to look again as they passed. I have no doubt that on the whole they were modest well-meaning girls, but their whole makeup was a challenge to every they met to show them attention, and they received much 5
manthat was not pleasing. In contrast to these two was a group of young women from an Ohio college whom it was my pleasure to meet during the same summer in another Italian village. They were natural, genuine, unartificial, conservative in dress and manner. They had gone everywhere in a country sometimes thought dangerous for women to travel in alone, and had had no unpleasant experiences, because by their dress, and their reserve, and their quiet conventionality they had revealed their true character to every one they met.
If I were adviser to girls I think I should try to let girls see that the things which men often seem blind to, they ordinarily are quite well aware of; that the things they often seem most to admire they care the least for, that the convention against which they rail they do not really despise, and the indiscretions which they frequently advocate they would very much dislike to see en?aged in by the young women with whom they associate. Natural manners, natural speech, natural complexions, a quiet self-restraint, modesty in dress, a respect for conventionalities, a low laugh, constancy in friendship—all these I have learned from my contact with men are appealing in women and ultimately win respect and admiration. If I were giving advice to girls I should urge them to cultivate these qualities, and I should assure them that the average young fellow sees through subter-xUges, recognizes artificialities, and has little respect for that which is not genuine and conventional in girls.
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