p. 11 | Untidy Habits

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 20, 1908

Untidy Habits

MANY women, otherwise scrupulously neat and cleanly, will come in from a long, hot, dusty trip, remove a warm, perspiration-soaked dress or coat, and hang it at once in a close, dark closet; or they will take off a skirt that has been gathering the filthy sweepings of the streets, street-car, and store floors, and hang it in the crowded wardrobe. Then they wonder that the closet or wardrobe gives out such a disagreeable smell when the door is opened. If, instead, the garment was hung in a current of air, when first taken from the body, this would not be so apt to happen. Dress-shields, the linings of dress collars, and the bindings of skirts should be often changed. Skirts, even though not allowed to sweep the pavements, can not fail to gather more or less of the dust mixed with disease-causing germs, and this is true of buttons, folds, and gathers, where dust can settle—not alone on women’s clothing, but on men’s as well. The garments should be well and often brushed, in every fold and wrinkle, around every button, buckle, or place where lint can gather, and the brushing should be done as we do our carpets—out of the house, the farther out, the better. There are many such habits indulged in by persons who would be greatly offended should you intimate that they were not neat.—Selected.