The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-03-12
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, unknown
woman, he has two points on which he relies.
He alleges that the present outrageous fash
ions and changes in womans dress, and the
greater freedom in girls manners and lam
guage in their intercourse with men, are GER
tain indications of an inner deterioration of
character But what amazing ignorance of
past fashions and customs do these assertions
display Can any five consecutive years be
named during the present century in which
the revolutions in women's dress we're not as
rapid as foolish, as slavishly dictated by
milliners and dressmakers, and as productive
of ugliness, expense and Inconvenience as
they had been during the short time while
the girl of the period has been attain
ing her present growth? When one hears
people reprobate the indelicate dec0Letee style
of modern evening dress, one is tempted to
ask what such censors remember of the ball
dress in vogue when they themselves were
youngf We have caricatures enough of the
extravaganza of the costumes of to-day; has
no one any collection of the caricatures of
Cruikshank and otker satirists of the costumes
fashionable under George ~ and William
"? If we want to learn what was the amount
of personal charms displayed by the girls and
easily satisfy ourselves by the study of the
satirists who exhibited the "dress" and the
''undress" of that rigorous period. Remem-
bering what we were accustomed to in the
golden age of George ~, we shrug our
shoulders, just jas when we hear of Lord
Chamberlains complaints of the shortness of
ballet girls petticoats, and remember what
the goddesses of opera wore-or, rather, what
they did not wear-in that happy era of deli
cacy and dignity, when all the cardinal vir-
tues seemed spontaneous growth among the
gentry and aristocrscy of England.
AS to the change which has come over the
familiar talk of young ladies, it is simply q
consequence of that enlarged freedom in the
use of words which we have all of us delibe-
rately adopted. The old bigotry which for
bade the introduction of new phrases is now
treated as an extinct superstition, and our
new liberty of speech is a consequence of o
general shaking off the shackles of unmean-
ing tradition. If our young lady talk is now
furnished with terms which their mothers
would have been severely punished for utter
ing, 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 unlicensed
vocabulary is still as distinct as ever; and the
only reason why the fast and free-and-easy
girls of the past indulged in a less copious
phraseology of the masculine sort lay in the
fact that they had more limited choice ready
to their hands So, again, in the diminished
formality of intercourse between girls ant
their elders, and persons of the other sex
Formality of manner is nothing more than
fashion, and no more indicates true respec
and affection than stiff and padded coat i'm
plies well formed bodily figure. We have
ceased to 60 about in buckram, either in ou
clothes, our manners our thoughts; just a.
we have ceased to use the word sir, or madam
or my lord, as our grandfathers used them
Yet the disuse of these ancient modes of ad
dress is nothing more than a recurrence to
still other set of customs. Such formalitie
were unknown to Jewish and classical ant
Christian antiquity; and yet you may find olc
ladies and gentlemen by the score who de
plore the growing disregard of these "respect
full" phrases as piteously as the obscurantist
of a past generation groaned over the abol
tion of the Episcopal wiQ-IHe Gr1Dhic.