Fancy Work an Uncanny Thing.
By Eliza Archard
FANCY work is the small vice of the female sex. It is to women what smoking is to men. In some respects it is worse indeed, for man can read or write and smoke at the same time. Fancy work, on the contrary, is so absorbing as an intellectual exercise that it is not possible for a woman to make the Kensington stitch and do anything else, unless it be to gossip. In brief, we arraign female fancy work as a waster of time, a destroyer of eyesight and health, a deadener to all nobler ambitions, and a promoter of scandal besides. We shall prove it. Fancy work is an uncanny thing. There is some strange fascination in the miserable darning and knitting that blinds their eyes to the nobler achievements that lie all about them. In the summer hotels, and winter hotels, groups of fair young matrons sit, hour after hour, their bright eyes bent over some queer, fuzzy-looking, contemptible little stuff, as though the salvation of the world depended on banding the equator with a girdle of knot-fringe before tomorrow morning. Now they cover ghostly pillow-shams with weird chain-stitch. Now it is ric-rac, and again it is crazy quilts. At this point it may be remarked that of all contrivances that are ugly enough to scorch one's eye-balls, the crazy-quilt goes up head. Anon, the fancy-work madness drives them to the production of tapestry pictures that make your hair stand on end. Or may be it is "darned net." This is the head-fiend of fancy work. It is safe to say that on the average, darned net drives 1,000 American women a day to premature spectacles. "Pretty? Yes, it ought to be pretty. It nearly put my eyes out." She had made her little daughter a robe of this demonish, woman-killing fabric. Her eyes were red and swollen, her nerves were all unstrung so that she kept springing like a jumping-jack at every little sound. She had got herself in such a state over the pesky stuff that she hadn't slept for two nights. "I'm just ready to cry!" she said. No wonder. The time and labor she had spent on that execrable gown would have made her an accomplished student in microscopy, and not hurt her eyes either. Then she would have had a peep into the fairy land of science, and at least learned enough to make her a charming and entertaining companion for a month. And a month is a long time when it comes to entertaining anybody, especially one's husband. We arraign fancy work because it dwarfs women's intellects. It gives them just occupation enough to make them believe they are doing something. They sit and moon over their one, two, three cross-stitch till the practical interests of life fade from their mental horizon. They are the true hasheesh eaters. Fancy work is a genuine deadening drug, cheating ladies into a fool's paradise. While they delude themselves with thinking they are at work, they are doing absolutely nothing at all that is worth while. It is worse than nothing. It ought to be relegated wholly to very aged women, so old that they have lost all interest in active affairs, and have nothing to do but snooze through the days like placid old tabbies. "Aw—American women don't get out-doors enough to give them a decent complexion, you know," says the Englishman. Trimming is the wretch that is to blame. Show us a lively, healthy, practical, intelligent woman who is a confirmed trimming maker, and we will find you an honest politician.—Eliza Archard, in N. Y. World.