New Hampshire Statesman

Society in San Francisco—How the Gentlemen, Ladies, and Servant Girls Dress.

Woman here occupies, and has always occupied, an anomalous position. She enjoys every facility to become a spoilt creature—spoilt with petting and indulgence. Her vanities are hypertrophied; her best impulses slumber. That there are many, many women in California as gentle, true, honest, and noble as exist in the world, I firmly and gladly believe, but there is an undue multiplicity of adventuresses, and worse. The region is crude, and of such is their kingdom of plunder and paradise.

Whatever the past may have been, and whatever injury it may have done the present, society in San Francisco is growing more decisively wholesome every year. The early license is frowned upon. Fewer are triply tempted as of old. The exterior of society is even more gay than in New-York. The women dress in the extremest fashion, and spend more on their raiment than any other creatures in the world.

They promenade along the arbitrary side of Montgomery street (especially of Saturday afternoons) and furnish a panorama of cosmopolitan fabrics, that can hardly be matched outside the flashing capitals of the world. There is no need of rouge in San Francisco. The chill, snappish sea breeze fetches the blood to the cheek of even the brunette; and it imparts, too, a little buoyancy to the gait that is associated with our ideas of "walking down Broadway." The fashions barely blossom in Paris, you know, before they bloom in New-York; and ere they are dead ripe on Fifth avenue the sympathetic flower has opened in San Francisco,—with this special difference, however, that, strictly speaking, this city has no summer fashions. It is never winter here, they say. I can swear that it is never summer.

The most absurd thing I see in the prevailing fashions are the shoe-heels. The ladies (whose feet are small and daintily shaped enough when sensibly shod) wear gaiters, the thimble heels of which are nearly two inches high, and placed almost directly under the hollow of the foot. The "Grecian bend," which I notice all the Eastern journals are scribbling, has not yet crossed the continent. It will come, no doubt, yet these ridiculous heels produce a "bend" that may be akin to the Grecian, but has nothing Corinthian about it. They compel careful poising during a walk, a constant struggle to keep the center of gravity (why not levity?) from falling outside the base, and the result is an ambitious, grotesque, dignified, indescribable cross between a mincing strut and a hobble.

The male elegantes are no better off. Their boot heels are after the same stilted pattern; and even the mechanic and provincial farmer wears enormously high, inward-sloping heels. "It's the style," and the conscientious shoe-maker would starve in striving to amend it.

The most distinguished part of the ladies' attire here is the superb furs brought down from Alaska and other Northern latitudes. A suit of noble furs is cheaper than in New-York; but staple dry goods are much higher than is warrantable; and the cost of fashionable millinery and dress-making is fairly staggering. This dearness of clothing for men and women is absurd, considering the prevailing cheap freights and convenience of transportation. It was late on the 21st of August that I arrived in San Francisco, and my first experience on the 22d was paying nearly twice as much for an imperatively demanded overcoat as the same would cost in New-York or Cincinnati.

To write a paragraph about fashion in San Francisco, and omit to mention the elaborate and regal toilets of the servant girls, would be like playing "Toodles" with the omission of the estimable gentleman whose chief omission it is to get picturesquely tight. The servant girls, the majority of whom are Irish, receive from twenty to thirty dollars per month, gold, and their board, of course. Some of the prudent ones are abundantly clothed from the finery thrown aside by their mistresses, and, as such can lay up all their wages, it is not uncommon to find them with little fortunes of $4,000 or $5,000 in the bank.

Traveling in a stage-coach lately, I heard one of the passengers describe the recent wedding of two sisters, who, for sixteen years, had been servant girls in a wealthy family at San Francisco. In all that time neither had bought one hundred dollars' worth of clothing. Their mistress had grown daughters, and from their discarded garments they were neatly and even richly clad. Each of the brides had saved over five thousand dollars in gold, and, bringing such dowries, they had been enabled to choose from a whole platoon of likely suitors. The savings banks of San Francisco hold on deposit not less than $20,000,000 in coin, belonging almost exclusively to the so-called working classes—I say so-called, because it is unsound to make such a distinction between the miller and his man. But to the point. The thrifty servant girls here are not numerous. The majority give themselves stupendous airs, array their robust forms in velvets, moire antique, aristocratic laces, kid gloves of aggressive hue, and jewelry whose chief merit is flaring prodigality of gold.

They succeed perfectly in maintaining a self-conviction that they are the very counterpart of elegant young heiresses and only daughters. They flaunt into the street cars with the assumed tranquil self-possession of fine ladies, spread their costly silks over a yard or two of seat with high-toned forgetfulness of the human race, twitter haughtily as they adjust their skirts, and then turn their bold, bolt, criticizing glare upon the creatures of their own sex on the opposite side. The way to detect the breeding and quality of the women that people the salons in the French stereoscopic pictures, is to look at their hands. To judge of the station of these pretenders in San Francisco needs no such nice discrimination. In spite of their finery, costing as much as that of their mistresses, it lacks "the hang," or, as the French say, la ligne.

The prevailing atmosphere of their toilets is dish-watery; and instead of earning admiration, or inspiring dumb respect, they excite only an amused contempt. As the wages of servant girls are higher here than anywhere else in the world, in just that degree are their presumption and pretension more aggressive and intolerable. Family life in San Francisco has no other such exasperating thorn, and when the wives get together to tell over their troubles, the imperial Biddies are the most fruitful and legitimate of topics. The fact that the Chinaman has been pressed into nursery, kitchen and chamber-work is an evidence of how galling is the tyranny of California "servantgalism."