Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/34

 on which this theory was based has been readily exposed. Never in the history of the globe did woman have the political and social power she holds today, and suffrage cannot increase it.

2. Bodily proportions. In modern civilization there has grown up an immodesty which was lacking in more ancient cultures. We are ashamed of our bodies. Whether the practice of concealing the body is the cause of our uncleanness of mind, or whether our obscenity is rather the cause of the concealment, is a debated question. Whatever may be my general estimate of the Japanese, I cannot but admire their wonderful cleanness of mind, which makes for them clothing a detail which has no bearing on modesty.

Among the Greeks, who, as you know, were in many respects more pure-minded than we are, bodily conformation was an important detail in beauty. And, in fact, it is today amongst us, both in a shame-faced way in daily life, and more creditably when we throw off our prudishness in the presence of plastic and pictorial art, and in the theater. We are skirting here a vital and pressing problem of the present moment, on which I should like to take the time to make you face some problems we all tend to ignore, but I must not digress further.

Our standards of bodily development are still, in the main, Greek. There are certain proportions