The dress reform problem : a chapter for women / by E. Ward & Co.

  • E. Ward & Co.
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The dress reform problem : a chapter for women / by E. Ward & Co. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    is marked by the many almost indefinable combinations which evidence the cultured taste. Take, however, the bulk of our fashionable people, the women of our great middle classes. How rarely do we meet with one who can be said to be well-dressed from sanitary and artistic stand-points. In our streets and parks, w'here women most do congregate, it is painful to mark the incongruities of colour and form; the absurd anomalies which are displayed in such reckless profusion in the name of fashion ; and, perhaps the most painful sight of all is to note the genuine enjoyment which the deluded ones take in the utter disfigurement of every natural heauty with which beneficent Nature would so gladly have endowed them. Look at the mincing gait; the tiny feet tottering along upon high heels ; the pinched waist; the number- t less falsities of figure; the entire lack of graceful symmetry in the tout ensemble. No doubt about it—our dress is radically wrong, and each changeful fashion leaves it still wrong, for the roots of the evil are never reached. Foremost in any reform must be placed the demand for a higher education of ohr sex, which will educe an honest craving in our soute to become all that we might be—all that God means us to be. If it is right and necessary for women now-a-days to he Senior Wranglei's, B.Al’s., M.A’s., etc., etc., ad infinitum, surely it is fitting and requisite that they, the mothers of the race, should be educated to reject the false, and accept the true ; surely they should be taught that tile Almighty Maker fashioned our bodies upon a plan of perfect beauty and grace, upon which they cannot, if they would, improve. < L $•