Tilting Hoops | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 1, 1866

Tilting Hoops.

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.

From the Freedmen's Journal.

On last Sunday, walking home from church through many fashionable streets, we noticed women walking with tilting skirts from where they had been pretending to say their prayers, and, on all the corners, and hotel fronts, we saw rows of well dressed blackguards standing observing and laughing, and commenting on what these women were exhibiting.

Out on this indecency that would disgrace honest Pagans! Let every honest woman who has been tricked into getting these traps of the harlot as the latest "fashion," pull them off, and burn them! Let every parent see to it that his guiltless daughter is not disgraced by "following the fashion." Let masters of households do the charity to a servant maid that has kept up with the "fashion," to provide her with such as are modest, and forbid her, while in his house, to play the airs of a wanton!

Why, even in Pagan times, when the men abandoned themselves to the most vile practices, they tried to keep their women incorrupt. What are we coming to? It is not here a question of the existence of families and society. By the memories of our virtuous mothers, by our love for our wives and daughters, let us stop these public outrages, and put under the surveillance of the police impudic women.

From the New York Commercial Advertiser.

The hoop skirts now worn by fashionable females are a burning shame to society, and the wearers ought to be indicted by the civil authorities for willfully and knowingly exposing their persons. There is an extreme in everything, but of all the extremes the hoop skirts surpasses, and is one that has its penalty, which the indulgers will have to pay sooner or later. How any female, with any kind of pretension to modesty, can indulge in the scandalous exhibition, we do not see, and, what is still more wicked, many young girls of twelve or fourteen years of age are imitating, to their destruction, those followers of the fashion.

From the Fayette (Ohio) State Register.

Moral mammas, and proper papas, have probably been shocked beyond measure at observing the recent advent upon our streets of the new fashion in crinoline, from the East, styled "Tilting Hoops." The latter comprise a frame of immense circumference, that surrounds the form, and upon which hang the skirts of the owner. At almost every breath of air, and at every motion of the wearer, the hoops tilt up this way and that, affording a varied and pleasing exhibition to the crowds of insolent idlers that constantly lounge about street corners. The hoops are evidently intended to perform exactly as they do, and the conclusion is inevitable that ladies (?) wear them because of this peculiarity.

The sight of a lady going up Court street, the other day, in a high state of "tilting" excitement, set us to wondering whether female modesty wasn't a mere sham, after all. And we likewise wondered whether there was anything under the sun—no matter how immodest—that the fair sex would shrink from doing, if it was only fashionable.

Another exchange hits off the style as follows:

Few persons, we apprehend, are aware of the extent to which apparently modest ladies were willing to exhibit themselves, till the present style of hoops, small at the top and very large at the bottom, came in vogue. A lady was surprised, recently, on remarking to a gentleman friend that the "spring opening" was at hand, by his replying: "Yes, I suppose spring has come, for I see the ladies have taken off their flannel petticoats." And this sassy individual had no better chance for observation than every man on the street has.