FASHIONABLE FOLLY by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 27, 1881

FASHIONABLE FOLLY.

By Editor

The Mendocino Beacon has a San Francisco correspondent who is not afraid to speak right out and call things by their right names, and he has a faculty for doing it. We have read several strictures from his pen on the society manners of the city, both secular and religious. The following is an extract from his description of what he saw of a Saturday night at the fair in Mechanics' Pavilion:—

“I never saw such ill-bred staring in my life, but it is a gauntlet the average female San Franciscan admires. Strangers to us and our city could find no better place to study our characteristics than right here; old men and young men, women and girls, are found in one grand whole; it is a carnival of dress and fashion; a vortex of beauty and show; a whirlpool of excitement; elegant costumes meet the eye constantly, and men of fine physique and presence, are not at all averse to a promenade; and the gallant mashers are constantly presenting themselves. It is a sad, sorry spectacle to see the extent to which our respectable women paint and powder. We are accustomed to place the painted eye-brows, and carmined lips and cheeks, the powdered face and pencilings, with the demi-monde, but here, in this Saturday night show, our most respectable women outrival, in this shallow ornamentation, the most blasé and fallen of their sisters. Natural features are almost obliterated. Young girls are almost disguised by their paint and powder; mothers ape their daughter’s youth

by the aid of such devices, and they in turn imitate the abandoned and dissolute, who conceal the ravages of sin beneath the apothecary’s magie. It is a sea of shame to the honest thinker; no line to mark the gulf between virtue and sin. San Francisco ladies are beside themselves, and the whole theory is so transparent as to be ridiculous. Who does not know that it is all a mockery, and that beneath the wealth of puff box does not lie features the garish light of day would laugh at, in comparison with what we see them now. Who believes in this gas-light beauty, for a moment? Ah, woman, what strange fancies you will pursue!”