MISS WILLARD ON DRESS by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Dec 23, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 49.

MISS WILLARD ON DRESS.

By Editor

THE following words from Miss Frances Willard, at the recent convention of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, at Chicago, have been denounced as strong and extravagant, but we believe that the facts will warrant the expressions:—

But woman's everlasting befrilled, bedizened, and bedraggled style of dress is to-day doing more harm to children unborn, born, and dying, than all other causes that compel public attention. With ligatured lungs and liver as our past inheritance and present slavery, the wonder is that such small heads can carry all we know! Catch Edison and constrict him inside a wasp waistcoat, and be assured you'll get no more inventions; bind a bustle upon Bismarck, and farewell to German unity; coerce Robert Browning into corsets, and you'll have no more epics; put Parnell into petticoats, and home rule is a lost cause; treat Powderly in the same fashion, and the powder mine of failure will blow up the labor movement. Niggardly waists and niggardly brains go together. The emancipation of one will always keep pace with the other; a ligature around the vital organs at the smallest diameter of the womanly figure, means an impoverished blood supply in the brain, and may explain why women scream when they see a mouse, and why they are so terribly afraid of a term which should be their glory, as it is of their brothers, viz., strong-minded.

Our degradation in the line of bandaging the waist has reached such a point that Helen Campbell says it is a requisite in fashionable London stores to have the woman clerks not larger around than twenty inches, "and eighteen-inch waists are preferred." Look at the monstrous deformity produced by constrictive surgery as applied to the average fashion-plate; and think what belittlement of power and happiness it means to the poor creatures who will wear these waists, and to their children! We shall, I hope, see something less humiliating in Harper's Bazar than its immemorial abominations of "fashionable style," now that so true a Christian woman as Margaret Sangster edits that otherwise excellent paper. Colonel Higginson's keen, progressive articles are horribly neutralized by the first page effigies it foists upon us.

Bonneted women are not in normal conditions for thought; high-heeled women are not in normal conditions for motion; corseted women are not in normal conditions for motherhood. Each of the constrictions and contortions involved by these crimes in dress is a distinct violation of loving laws given by our heavenly Father for our highest happiness and growth.