Dress : Part 2

Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women
by George S. Weaver

(Page 4 of 17)

Those dresses hooked so closely that every seam in them gapes as in agony, giving you so much the appearance of convicts in strait jackets, are they not in the way when you want to breathe a full breath, and do they permit the exercise of all the muscles that strive for life within them? That enormous weight of skirts that you hang over portions of your bodies that should be choicely protected instead of burdened, how they hang down like so many dead weights on your vitality, weakening and diseasing the most delicate economy of your fearfully and wonderfully made systems! and how your whole frames are taxed every day of your lives with this wrongly placed and worse than useless burden. This alone is enough to bring premature disease and death to any ordinary woman. The law of health demands that the extremities of our bodies should be kept warm and well protected, while the parts containing our vital economy should be only comfortably clothed and left free to the most natural and easy action, well ventilated or exposed to the ingress and egress of the atmosphere, without any local pressures or means for unnatural warmth.

Only think of wearing a thick, heavy girdle of many pounds' weight around the whole zone of the abdominal region - a sort of engirdling poultice, heating and pressing like a girdle of hot lava, day after day and year after year! Is it a wonder that you have so many weaknesses and pains and saddening afflictions upon you? And then your feet treading these cold pavements, this damp earth, these frozen or wet walks, in slippers and silk or cotton stockings!

The very part of your bodies of all others you should keep most warm and dry, you expose to every wind and frost, water-pool and snow-storm, in the year; sit through the whole winter with them on cold floors, where every door-crack and floor-crack is breathing in upon them cold, damp breaths from cellars or streets while perhaps your heads are hot in a dry stove air, and your lungs are breathing an atmosphere so hot and close that it has scarcely a breath of life in it, and all the while you say you are comfortably dressed!

And then, to make the matter still worse, you trail your bedrabbled dress into all the mud and water and tobacco filth on the yard's width you occupy in walking, exhibiting the strangest spectacle of civilized humanity that can well be imagined, a woman claiming good sense, sweeping the streets all about her to make cold and wet her already almost bare feet and ankles!

Nor is this all. These damp winter winds bathe many a bare arm, kiss wantonly many an unprotected neck, and visit rudely many a bosom only veiled with a gossamer gauze. To say nothing of such an exposure to every lewd eye that roves the street, and the unwomanly impudence it offers to every modest gaze, it is a hazardous, wicked, criminal exposure of health, and a total neglect of all the ends and uses of Dress. And then, to crown all, you go out in all weathers with your heads exposed to the fiercest blasts, all unbonneted; for Webster says a bonnet is a covering for the head; but few are the women's heads we have seen covered this season - and then wonder why you should have such terrible colds, such troublesome coughs, such griping pleurisies, such burning fevers, and so many ailments!

Now, I ask again, and you shall be judges, young women, if your modes of Dress do not injure your bodies? Do they answer the ends of Dress? Any one who has given the subject a moment's judicious consideration must see that there has been and still is a fearful departure from the real uses of Dress. The primary object of Dress is to clothe and make comfortable the body, so that it may be the peaceful and happy dwelling-place of the spirit in its earthly pilgrimage. But filling it with disease is not making it comfortable. Hampering it in fetters is not making it comfortable.

I have referred to a few of the most prominent evils of our present mode of female Dress. Now, let me ask, if our women would dress warmly and securely from wind and wet, yet not in too close confinement, their feet and limbs; if they would shorten their skirts so they would swing clear of wet, mud, filth, and passing obstacles; diminish their number and dimensions, so that their weight would not be burdensome, and suspend them from the shoulders, instead of girting them around the abdominal and spinal regions; would give their chests a free and easy play; would cover their heads, arms, and necks whenever exposed to cold and damp weather or night air, and would always seek to be clothed easily and comfortably, giving always a sufficiently free circulation of air between their dresses and bodies, to carry off the constant exhalations going out from every living body; if they would thus dress, would they not be far more healthy, happy, and useful? Would the roses not return to their cheeks, the full, swelling beauties of woman's strength to their forms?

This subject has weighty moral and religious considerations connected with it. Have we any moral right thus to abuse our bodies, thus to commit a snail-working suicide? What matters it, so far as the guilt is concerned, whether we kill ourselves in a minute or a year, a year or an age? We have more suicides among us than we sometimes imagine. The young miss goes out in a cold night, with bare arms and head and neck, and wafer-like slippers on her feet, with her waist engirded in cords and whalebones, and her load of burdensome skirts, and dances in high glee two thirds of the night; then, with a vail on her head and her under-garments not yet dry from the recent perspiration, she goes to her cold chamber and bed, to get a troubled sleep, and awaken in a fever which carries her to her grave. Then round her mutilated body gather her mourning friends to bid it a long farewell and hear her minister talk of the inscrutable ways of God's providence.

Call it by what name you will, to me it is suicide. Another, by daily exposures in wet and cold and change of climate in the common woman-dress, takes cold after cold, till a consumption fastens upon her lungs and she slowly passes away. Another circle of mourners weep, and another minister talks of the inscrutable ways of God; but to me it is still another case of suicide. Another passes through the common lot of girlhood, with the common succession of colds and coughs, fevers and pains; in due time marries, with her chest cramped into half its proper dimensions, her lungs small and weak, her female economy all diseased and weakened by the abuses of dress and exposure. At length the period of maternity approaches. Too weak to sustain its labors and burdens, she dies amid them. Friends come weeping again, and the minister condoles them with the sad old story of God's inscrutable ways. But to me it is not inscrutable. It is another case of suicide. Could the grave-yards all over the country speak, they would utter fearful tales of this suicidal abuse of Dress.

Fowler and Wells, Publishers, New York, 1856.