Bok called upon the American woman to come out from under the yoke of the French couturiers, show her patriotism, and encourage American design.But it was of no use.He talked with women on every hand; his mail was full of letters commending him for his stand; but as for actual results, there were none.One of his most intelligent woman-friends finally summed up the situation for him:
"You can rail against the Paris domination all you like; you can expose it for the fraud that it is, and we know that it is; but it is all to no purpose, take my word.When it comes to the question of her personal adornment, a woman employs no reason; she knows no logic.She knows that the adornment of her body is all that she has to match the other woman and outdo her, and to attract the male, and nothing that you can say will influence her a particle.I know this all seems incomprehensible to you as a man, but that is the feminine nature.You are trying to fight something that is unfightable.""Has the American woman no instinct of patriotism, then?" asked Bok.
"Not the least," was the answer, "when it comes to her adornment.What Paris says, she will do, blindly and unintelligently if you will, but she will do it.She will sacrifice her patriotism; she will even justify a possible disregard of the decencies.Look at the present Parisian styles.They are absolutely indecent.Women know it, but they follow them just the same, and they will.It is all very unpleasant to say this, but it is the truth and you will find it out.Your effort, fine as it is, will bear no fruit."Wherever Bok went, women upon whose judgment he felt he could rely, told him, in effect, the same thing.They were all regretful, in some cases ashamed of their sex, universally apologetic; but one and all declared that such is "the feminine nature," and Bok would only have his trouble for nothing.
And so it proved.For a period, the retail shops were more careful in the number of genuine French models of gowns and hats which they exhibited, and the label firm confessed that its trade had fallen off.
But this was only temporary.Within a year after The Journal stopped the campaign, baffled and beaten, the trade in French labels was greater than ever, hundreds of French models were sold that had never crossed the ocean, the American woman was being hoodwinked on every hand, and the reign of the French couturier was once more supreme.
There was no disguising the fact that the case was hopeless, and Bok recognized and accepted the inevitable.He had, at least, the satisfaction of having made an intelligent effort to awaken the American woman to her unintelligent submission.But she refused to be awakened.
She preferred to be a tool: to be made a fool of.
Bok's probe into the feminine nature had been keenly disappointing.He had earnestly tried to serve the American woman, and he had failed.But he was destined to receive a still greater and deeper disappointment on his next excursion into the feminine nature, although, this time, he was to win.
During his investigations into women's fashions, he had unearthed the origin of the fashionable aigrette, the most desired of all the feathered possessions of womankind.He had been told of the cruel torture of the mother-heron, who produced the beautiful aigrette only in her period of maternity and who was cruelly slaughtered, usually left to die slowly rather than killed, leaving her whole nest of baby-birds to starve while they awaited the return of the mother-bird.
Bok was shown the most heart-rending photographs portraying the butchery of the mother and the starvation of her little ones.He collected all the photographs that he could secure, had the most graphic text written to them, and began their publication.He felt certain that the mere publication of the frightfully convincing photographs would be enough to arouse the mother-instinct in every woman and stop the wearing of the so-highly prized feather.But for the second time in his attempt to reform the feminine nature he reckoned beside the mark.
He published a succession of pages showing the frightful cost at which the aigrette was secured.There was no challenging the actual facts as shown by the photographic lens: the slaughter of the mother-bird, and the starving baby-birds; and the importers of the feather wisely remained quiet, not attempting to answer Bok's accusations.Letters poured in upon the editor from Audubon Society workers; from lovers of birds, and from women filled with the humanitarian instinct.But Bok knew that the answer was not with those few: the solution lay with the larger circle of American womanhood from which he did not hear.
He waited for results.They came.But they were not those for which he had striven.After four months of his campaign, he learned from the inside of the importing-houses which dealt in the largest stocks of aigrettes in the United States that the demand for the feather had more than quadrupled! Bok was dumbfounded! He made inquiries in certain channels from which he knew he could secure the most reliable information, and after all the importers had been interviewed, the conviction was unescapable that just in proportion as Bok had dwelt upon the desirability of the aigrette as the hallmark of wealth and fashion, upon its expense, and the fact that women regarded it as the last word in feminine adornment, he had by so much made these facts familiar to thousands of women who had never before known of them, and had created the desire to own one of the precious feathers.
