Tidiness in Dress

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · May 4, 1876

Tidiness in Dress.

There are very few women who need any persuasion or argument to induce them to dress neatly and tastefully when they appear in public, on the street, or at church. The love of admiration and the fear of criticism operate effectively to influence all of us to make as good an appearance as possible when on dress-parade. But there are some who reserve all their fine clothes and manners for exhibition to visitors and strangers, leaving their own families to take what is left after the public is served. Any old dowdy dress is good enough for them to wear while doing the morning's work, and what matters it that their hair is all in papers, unkempt, and frowzy, that there is no collar about the neck, and a general untidiness wraps the whole person as with a garment? There is no one but “home folks” to see, and what is the use of putting on before home folks? The gist of the whole thing lies in those two words—putting on. As though the genuine woman, the inborn lady, saves her genuineness and her ladyhood for occasions, and can't afford to use them all the time. She must “let down” at home and be careless, untidy, unclean, in order that when company comes she can show off to advantage. This is mere sham and mockery, and works a vast deal of mischief in families. To be clean in person, in dress, in conversation, with little regard to the seeming—this is what we want. We may seem all pure to the careless eye without being so, but we cannot be all pure without seeming so. Vice may take the form of virtue, but virtue cannot take the form of vice. The mother who is habitually careless of her dress and her manners at home, and particular about them when she goes abroad, cannot fail to impress upon her family a sense of hollowness and hypocrisy in her character; and this will operate in one of two ways, either to make her children resemble her in these respects, or inspire them with more or less contempt for her weakness.

What strangers think of us is of the smallest possible consequence compared with the estimate placed upon us by our children and those with whom we are brought into intimate association. If they love and believe in us, and find in us all things worthy of admiration and imitation, of how little comparative value is the approval of strangers!

All true refinement in dress, in manner, in character, is the result of an interior worth and genuineness. A lady arrayed in simple calico is often more attractive and graceful and winning than another in silks and satins and velvets. These do not create refinement or taste in the wearer; they are only the merest framework of the picture, which may be a wretched daub, or a masterpiece. With pretty calico at six and ten cents a yard there is no excuse for untidiness in our women at home. Calicoes may be made with little work, and so as to be washed and ironed with very slight trouble. It is mere folly for a woman who expects to wear every day the calico dress she makes up, to make it in three stories—skirt, overskirt, and basque, with ruffles and puffs and trimmings. A plain wrapper or a sacque and skirt, with bias folds for trimming, is vastly prettier for calico fabrics than more elaborate styles of making. Every time it is washed it is as clean and sweet and fresh as when it was new, and, with a linen collar in the neck, such a dress is good enough for every-day wear, better far than a shabby, woolen dress with soiled and dragged flounces, with torn and tangled fringe, with dirty sleeves and dust grimed into it everywhere. We must live with ourselves all the time, as well when at home as when abroad, and she who really respects herself and would keep on good terms with herself morning, noon, and night, cannot, so far as she is honest and genuine and a hater of shams, neglect to keep her person and dress tidy without injury or suffering of some sort, either to herself or to those around her.

After all that may be said about it, tidiness is as much the result of training and habit as of interior necessity, and unless one is careful not to relax the sinews of determination in this respect, the exigencies of every-day life and the natural tendencies to lower the tone below concert pitch will, little by little, cause negligences to creep in, until, indifference to externals gradually increasing, untidy dress at home will be the rule and not the exception.—Ex.