Dress for Housewives by Dinah Sturgis

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 19, 1911

Dress for Housewives

By Dinah Sturgis

DINAH STURGIS

For a woman to dress in her home so she can do her work, from cooking to cleaning, and be presentable at all times in the eyes of her family and those chance callers at the front as well as at the back door, is really quite a problem. Yet it can be solved, because it has been solved. A house dress of inexpensive print, neatly made and scrupulously clean, is always presentable. The old cloth dress, strained in the seams, frayed at the wrists and about the feet, worn under the arms, and often, alas, repulsively stained by perspiration, and spotted from top to bottom, is not only unpresentable, but inexcusable. It looks truly inexcusable when put down in cold black and white, does it not? It would seem unnecessary to describe such attire if it were not that many genuinely good women wear just such a garb when “about the house.”

Women who do housework should wear wash dresses until after the cooking is done for the day. All other materials absorb odors. To make cotton dresses warm enough for cold weather, it is only necessary to wear warm undergarments, which can go into the laundry with impunity often enough to keep them clean and sweet.

Cotton dresses can be and should be very attractive. It takes no more time to make a pleasing dress than to make a hideous one. It takes no longer to wash and iron a dress that is attractively made than to wash and iron an ugly one. The housekeeper’s house dress should clear the floor easily all around. It

should never be necessary to lift it in walking over a freshly washed or oiled floor to keep the skirt clean. It ought not to be necessary to say that the women of nice instincts can not bear the thought of wearing a dress bedraggled about the bottom. The sleeves of a housekeeper’s dress should be short enough so they need not be turned up, no matter what the kind of work; or they should be made to button down the inside of the arm, or to gather at the wrist over an elastic, so they can be turned up out of the way without straining them about the wrists. The sleeve that ends just below the elbow and is not so full at the lower edge that it can get in the way is so convenient that the woman who once tries it, never goes back to the long sleeve for working use.