Indian types of beauty

One of the most interesting studies in the entire range of the science of ethnology is the estimate of beauty arrived at by various peoples. It really seems that the lower the race in the scale of civilization the more fixed and restricted are their ideas in this direction; that is to say, the men among the lower races can see beauty in the women of their own tribe presenting certain characteristics, as the women of the same tribe see comeliness in certain of the men, but neither of them recognize any beauty in those considered beautiful or handsome by the members of other tribes. On the other hand, the majority of the men, at least among the Indo-Europeans, can often see beauty in women of the greatest variety of other countries than their own. Perhaps one of the best proofs of this is the fact that they sometimes marry them. Even here in the United States it is not difficult to find instances, and these, too, in any plane of society we may select, where men have married women of other races and nationalities. And as a wise philosopher and observer has said, “In civilized life man is largely, but by no means exclusively, influenced in the choice of his wife by external appearance,” it is fair to presume that the man in any case was attracted by what he considered to be the woman’s beauty. In my own personal experience, cases have been met with where those among us have married negro women, and negro women as black as ever graced the banks of the Congo of the West Coast. Others have married Chinese women, and a friend of mine has a very talented little Japanese wife. Nor is the Englishman Rolfe the only white man that ever married an Indian woman; one of the generals in our own army married such, and there is every reason to believe that he was influenced by her beauty alone.

With respect to the lower races, Mr. Darwin has said, quoting Mr. Winwood Reade’s observations upon the native Africans, that these “negroes do not like the color of our skin; they look on blue eyes with aversion, and they think our noses too long and our lips too thin.” He does not think it probable that negroes would ever prefer the most beautiful European woman, on the mere grounds of physical admiration, to a good-looking negress. And again, “A man of Cochin China spoke with contempt of the wife of the English ambassador, that she had white teeth like “a dog, and a rosy color like that of potato-flowers.”

We have seen that the Chinese dislike our white skin, and that the North Americans admire “a tawny hide.” In South America the Yuracaras, who inhabit the wooded, damp slopes of the Eastern Cordilleras, are remarkably pale-colored, as their name in their own language expresses; nevertheless they consider European women as inferior to their own.”

Who but a Hottentot man, may we ask, can admire one of their ridiculous-appearing steatopygous women? Yet the men of that race can see beauty in no other form, and the idea of a woman lacking any development in the gluteal region is, to them, absolutely loathsome. Thus we might proceed and furnish almost innumerable cases illustrating this interesting study, and comparing the various standards of taste in this particular among the many races of the world, but enough has been said to serve our purpose here. In general terms it may be stated, then, confining ourselves to the ideas of the men, that it will be found in some races that a woman with a black skin, black eyes, a broad face and flattened nose, and a head of coarse kinky hair, is admired; others see beauty in a thickset figure, a lighter skin and an enormous development of fat over the gluteals. Some admire the body rendered entirely devoid of hair; some a lithe form, others a ponderous one; while every variety of taste exists in reference to the color of the skin, the set of the eyes, and the form of every individual feature of the face. Nor do such other structures as the ears, the neck, the shoulders and the mammæ escape attention or consideration—for all of them and all of the forms they may assume, have not escaped the critical eye of men, and they have each contributed their share in forming his estimate of beauty. No doubt among the higher races intellectuality and the impress it makes upon the features has also had its weight. Indeed, whatever type of beauty may be chosen among women, that has its host of admirers among the men, we are pretty sure to find among the latter in some other quarter of the world, those that consider the same type as almost hideous; and these again have a very different standard of female beauty for their ideal, and see only ugliness in its opposite, the various shades of opinion among men as a whole wearing every degree of diversity, and being almost limitless in their expression.