Year: 1871




Gail Hamilton writes in Harper's Ba9ar


Fly swiftly round, We wheels of time,
and bring the day when society shall have
settled upon some general street dress, sim
pie, graceful, convenient and unchanging,
and shall leave TO individual taste only choice
of material cclor, and subordinate details
Then YOU shall not have to alter except to
freshen. Then you shall be pointed or round
ed or squared according TO your own liking,
and shall stay so. Then you shall not spend
your time in pulling off last years satin, OF
spend your money in putting on this year s
velvet. but satin-to borrow PUnch'S wit
shall be sat in till it Is faycd out of existence


But even things are we are very COM
Portable. | have thought, indeed, that we
were verging towards the millennium OF
dress Barring the excess of trimming, it
seems to me there never could have been a
time when dress was more favorable to women
than it is now. With rubber boots and
waterproof for storms, with light pictur-
esque hats, with small, short skirts. and
sleeved over-garments and breath permitting
bodices, and STYLES so various that scarcely
anything Is strikiDgly questionable, what
doth hinder that woman should eat and
drink, and walk and be merry? Newspaper
people, indeed, talk of dress reform but
there shall no reform be given them save the
gradual reform have suggested, and that
will come imperceptibly, and only as we
slowly gain more cultivation and higher
and finer life. Our dress now is fully up to
our social life


- And here come the consumers, and
flaunt long skirts in our faces once more. Do
| blame the consumers Not |. They have
their living to get, and must invent or select
continually. But if the women of this coun-
try, having once tasted the freedom of short
dresses, shall be mean spirited enough to go
into long ones again at the dictate of any
consumer uRder the sun, they have them
selves and nobody else to blame. 4 pretty
thing it will be for them TO talk about max
ing laws, if they have not sense and spirit
enough to keep out of the mud A fine thing
TO be republican sovereign when you have
not independence enough to resist the fiat of
foreign tyrant as to the cut of your gown
For there is no question of thinking or not
thinking about your dress. You can walk
just as well with three founces as with none
but long dress interferes with the energies,
the activities, the safety and the health of
every day. long dress in the street means
inconvenience, untidiness, discomfort, waste
Incidence, repression, cramped muscles, sub
ordination and slavery.


- Ii women reinvest themselves in trailing
skirts they deserve all the evils which may
betall them If women relinquish their
o1Oib eulte, may tutiE Hueudnus JYTdQnlZe
over them and abuse them forever May
the women's rights women be forever forced
to see men leglslate and women sit still
May the ant-women srights women be forced
to vote at the polls and to serve in the Jury
box, May husbands ever control all the in
comes OF their wives, and may wives be for
ever disabled from disposing of their own
property May the courts always have the
poHer of dispossessing mother of her child,
and imposing upon it a guardianship foreign
to her will May Bridget in the kitchen
forever prick the pics with her hair pin, and
John Chinaman moisten the pie-crust from
his mouth May Mr.. Thomas Mast portray
the Coming Woman doing general house
work, and DR.. Nathan Allen continue to
publish in the religious newspapers cheerful
statistical articles on the decrease of the pop
ulation in New England May Laura ever
be obliged to pave the way to Frederick's
purse with toothsome viands, and never know
what 1t is to be joint sovereign of the woman's
kingdom, and never know that there is any