Sadly True | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Mar 28, 1878

Sadly True.

The average young woman expends enough inventive power, enough financial shrewdness, enough close foresight, enough pertubation of spirit, enough presence of mind, enough anguish of regret upon one season's outfit—I had almost said upon one single street suit—to make an excellent bank cashier or a comfortable graduate of a theological seminary.

If you doubt the truth of the statement, just take in for yourself, with the critic's eye, the first young girl you may meet down town. How fearfully and wonderfully made! How do you suppose those bias folds, and double box-plaits, and fluted ruffles, and corded bands, and shirred waists, and paniered skirts, and bowed, and flounced, and tied, and spangled, and fringed, and folded, and dotted, and hunched, and bunched, and horrible mysteries got together.

There was maneuvering enough expended upon the dressmaker to have elected a representative, and concentration of mind upon the seamstress enough to have withstood a Wall street panic, and headache enough put into the sewing-machine to have mastered "Porter's Human Intellect." And now it requires care enough to keep herself together to save a soul.

That few pure-minded women know or think, in donning the latest modes, that they have sprung from corrupt ingenuity of Parisian harlots only makes the matter worse. Good women ought to think. It is their duty to see, not to ignore, to exile, not to overlook an immodest style. The mischief and misery will never be remedied till they do. Bad women think, meanwhile, and society responds to the thinker, irrespective of moral quality.—Independent.