The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-12-29
The Girl Of the Present and the
Past.

When you press an assailant of the girls
Of the period for the definite grounds on
which he attacks them, and repudiate his
vague generalities against mysterious, un-
known women, he has two points on which
he relies. He alleges that the present out
rageous fashions and changes in womens
dress, and the greater freedom in girls man
ners and language in their intercourse with
men, are certain indications of an inner de-
terioration of character. But what amazing
ignorance of past fashions and customs do
these assertions display! Can any five con-
secutive years be named during the present
century in which the revolutions in womens
dress we're not as rapid, as foolish, as
slavishly dictated by milliners and dress
makers, and as productive of ugliness, ex-
pense, and inconvenience as they have been
during the short time while the girl of the
period has been attaining her present
growth? When one hears people reprobate
the indelicate dec0lL6t6 style of modern even
ing dress, one is tempted to ask what such
censors remember of the ball dresses in vogue
when they themselves were young? We have
caricatures enough of the extravaganza of
the costumes of to-day; has no one any collec-
ton of the caricatures of Cruikshank and
| other satirists of the costumes fashionable
under George ~ and William "? If we
want to learn what was the amount of perso-
nal charms displayed by the girls and the
mothers of those good old days, we may easily
| satisfy ourselves by study of the satirists
| who exhibited the dress and the 'undress'
of that rigorous period. Remembering what
we were accustomed to in the golden age of
| George ", we shrug our shoulders, just as
when we hear of Lord Chamberlain's COM
plants of the shortness of ballet girls petit
| coats, and remember what the goddesses of
the opera wore-or, rather, what they did not
wear-in that happy era of delicacy and dig
| nifty, when all the cardinal virtues seemed
| spontaneous growth among the gentry and
| aristocracy Of England.
AS to the change which has come over the
daily familiar talk of young ladies, it is SIM
| ply consequence of that enlarged freedom
| in the use of words which we have all of us
deliberately adopted. The old bigotry which
forbade the introduction of new phrases is
| now treated as an extinct superstition; and
our new liberty of speech is a consequence of
a general shaking off of the shackles of un-
| meaning tradition. If our young-lady talk
is now furnished with terms which their
mothers would have been severely punished
for uttering, this fact indicates no fondness
for slang, as such, or any want of delicacy of
idea. Such terms have ceased to be low, or
vulgar, or to imply coarse freedom of ideas
The line between the licensed and the unli-
censed vocabulary is still as distinct as ever;
and the only reason why the fast and free
and-easy girls of the past INDUCED in a less
copious phraseology of the masculine sort,
lay in the fact that they had a far more
limited choice ready to their hands So,
again. in the diminished formality of inter
course between girls and their elders and
persons of the other sex. Formality Of man
ner is nothing more than a fashion, and no
more indicates true respect and affection than
a stiff and padded coat implies a well-formed
bodily figure. We have ceased to go about
in buckram, either in our clothes, our man
ners, or our thought; just as we have ceased
to use the words Sir, or Madam, or my Lord,
as our grandfathers used them. Yet the dis
use of there ancient modes of address is
nothing more than a recurrence to still
older set of customs. Such formalihes were
unknown to Jewish and classical and Chris
tian antiquity; and yet you may find old
ladies and gentlemen by the score who de-
plore the growing disregard of these ''re-
spectful" phrases as piteously as the obscu-
rantists of past generation groaned over the
abolition of the episcopal wig.-7he Grashic.