mind. What to-day types beauty, is by her own voice to-morrow voted
indecent and absurd. Thus we find in the period extending from 1870 to
1875 an entirely new but none the less ridiculous or injurious extreme
prevails. The wonderful swinging cage, the diameter of which at the
base often equaled the height of the encased figure, has disappeared,
being no longer considered desirable or aesthetic, and in its place we
have prodigious bustles and immense trains, by which an astonishing
quantity of material is thrown behind the body, suggesting in some
instances a toboggan slide, in others the unseemly hump on the back of
a camel. This is the era of the enormous bustle and the train of
sweeping dimensions.[1]
[1] During this period the ingenuity of man came to woman's
rescue, by the invention of an interesting, and, judging by
its popularity, exceedingly serviceable contrivance known as
a dress elevator, which enabled ladies to instantly elevate
their enormous trains when they came to a particularly muddy
and filthy crossing.
When we examine the prevailing styles which marked this period, we are
struck with amazement at the power exerted by fashion over the
intellect and judgment of society. Imagine the shame and humiliation
of a woman of fashion, endowed by nature or afflicted by disease with
such an unsightly hump on the back as characterized the fashionable
toilet of this period!
[Illustration: 1870 to 1875: "Suggesting in some instances a toboggan
slide; in others, the unseemly hump on the back of a camel."]
Toward the end of the seventies, we find another extreme reached,
which if possible was more absurd and injurious than those which
marked the early days of this decade. This was the period of the
tie-back, or narrow skirts and enormous trains. As in 1860 fashion's
slaves vied with one another in their effort to cover the largest
possible circular space, now their ambitions lay in the direction of
the opposite extreme:[2] the skirts must be as narrow as possible even
though it greatly impeded walking, for as will be readily observed all
free use of the lower limbs was out of the question during the reign
of the "tie-back."
[2] It was in the midst of the period of the tie-backs that
_Harper's Bazar_ published two striking cartoons
illustrating the poem given below. One represented a poor
man's wife, "The slave of toil," and was pathetically
powerful in its fidelity to truth; the other, drawn by the
powerful Nast, represented a society lady of the day attired
in the reigning tie-back, measuring at the hips a little
more than double the width a short distance below the knees.
This slave was chained to fashion's column.
SISTER SLAVES.
You think there is little of kinship between them?
Perhaps not in blood, yet there's likeness of soul;
And in bondage 'tis patent to all who have seen them
That both are fast held under iron control.
The simpering girl, with her airs and her graces,
Is sister at heart to the hard-working drudge;
Two types of to-day, as they stand in their places;
Whose lot is the sadder I leave you to judge.
One chained to the block is the victim of Fashion;
Her object in life to be perfectly dressed;
Too silly for reason, too shallow for passion,
She passes her days 'neath a tyrant's behest.
Thus pinioned and fettered, and warily moving,
Lest looping should fail her, or band come apart:
What room is there left her for thinking or loving?
What noble ambition can enter her heart?
And one, the worn wife of a grizzled old farmer;
She kneads the great loaves for the "men-folks" to eat.
In the wheat-fields the green blades are springing like armor;
Afar in the forests the flowers are sweet.
She lifts not her eyes. Within kitchen walls narrow
Her life is pent up. The most hopeless of slaves,
Though weary and jaded in sinew and marrow,
She never complains. Women _rest_ in their graves.
Twin victims, for which have we tenderest pity--
For mother and wife toiling on till she dies,
Or the frivolous butterfly child of the city,
All blind to the glory of earth and of skies?
Is it fate, or ill fortune, hath woven about you
Strong meshes which ye are too helpless to break?
Shall we scornfully wonder, or angrily flout you,
Or strive from their torpor your minds to awake?
Yet, Venus of old, with your queenly derision,
How you would disdain the belle's tawdry array!
_Free footsteps untrammelled_, cool hand of decision,
Sweet laugh like bells pealing, were yours in the day
When you reigned over men by the might of your beauty;
No fetters were o'er you in body or brain;
The world would bow down in the gladness of duty
Could you but awake in your splendor again.
And, Pallas and Venus, if now you were holding
A talk over womanhood, what would you say,
The words of wise counsel while you were unfolding,
If some one should show you these pictures to-day?
I dream of your faces: divinest compassion
Would yearn the poor toiler to pity and save;
And your largeness of scorn would descend on the fashion
Which binds, unresisting, the idler a slave.
[Illustration: 1878. The period of the tie-back, narrow skirts, and
enormous trains.]
The reaction in favor of a more sensible dress which followed was of
brief duration. During this time, however, the long trains were seldom
seen, and thoughtful women began to hope that the arbitrary rule of
fashion was over. It was not long, however, before the panier period
arrived, and what was popularly known as the pull-back was accepted as
the correct style in fashion's world. Of this latter conceit little
need be said, for it has so recently passed from view that all
remember its peculiarity, which to the ordinary observer seemed to be
a settled determination on the part of its originators to render
walking as difficult and fatiguing as possible, while fully exposing
the outline of the wearer's body below the waist at every step. What
in '60 or '70 would have been accounted the height of indecency, is in
the eighties perfectly proper in the fashionable world. During this
time it was not enough to have the skirts very narrow, they must at
every step give the outline of the limbs [or as our Minnesota solon
would put it, _nether_ limbs], hence we find the pull-backs in which
"two shy knees appeared clad in a single trouser."
[Illustration: The tie-backs of 1878 and 1879.]
[Illustration: The pull-back of 1886.]
[Illustration: Fashionable walking costume early in the seventies.
Woman appreciating the fact "that it is her mission to be beautiful."
See page 405.]
[Illustration: Fashionable walking costume in the early sixties. Woman
appreciating the fact "that it is her mission to be beautiful." See
page 405.]
Such have been the inconsistencies, incongruities, and absurdities of
fashion as illustrated in the past three decades, in view of which one
may well ask whether in fashion's eyes women are such paragons of
ugliness that these ever-varying styles (introduced, we are seriously
informed, to conserve to her beauty,) are absolutely essential, and by
what rule of art can we explain the fact that the ponderous hoopskirt
was the essential requirement of beauty in the sixties and the
enormous bustles demanded in the seventies. The truth is, fashion is
supremely indifferent alike to all laws of art and beauty, health and
life, decency and propriety--a fact that must be patent to any
thoughtful person who examines the prevailing styles of a generation.
I submit that the wildest extremes to which well-meaning but
injudicious dress reformers have gone in the past have been marked by
nothing more inartistic than the costume of the reigning belle in
1860. Each successive decade has been marked by an extreme which,
surveyed from the vantage ground of the present, is as ridiculously
absurd as it has been wanting in beauty Nowhere have the laws of true
art been so severely ignored as in the realm of fashion. Yet this view
of the problem palls into insignificance when we come to examine the
question from the standpoint of health and life.
One would think that after thousands of years of sickness and death,
with all the advantages of increased education and a broadening
intellectual horizon, we would have arrived at such an appreciation of
the value of health and the solemn duty we owe to posterity, as to
compel this consideration to enter into our thoughts when we adopted
styles of dress; yet nowhere is the weakness of our present
civilization more marked or its hollowness so visible, even to the
superficial thinker, as in the realm of fashion, _where every
consideration of health and even of life, and all sense of
responsibility to future generations are brushed aside as trivialities
not to be seriously considered_. In vain have physicians and
physiologists written, lectured, and demonstrated the fatal results of
yielding to fashion. The learned Doctor Trall in writing on this
subject wisely observes:
The evil effects of tight-lacing, or of lacing at all, and of
binding the clothing around the hips, instead of suspending it
from the shoulders, can never be fully realized without a
thorough education in anatomy and physiology. And if the
illustrations[3] here presented should effect the needed reform
in fashionable dress, the resulting health and happiness to the
human race would be incalculable; for the health of the mothers
of each generation determines, in a very large measure, the vital
stamina of the next. It is obvious that, if the diameter of the
chest, at its lower and broader part, is diminished by lacing, or
any other cause, to the extent of one fourth or one half, the
lungs B, B, are pressed in towards the heart, A, the lower ribs
are drawn together and press on the liver, C, and spleen, E,
while the abdominal organs are pressed downward on the pelvic
viscera. The stomach, D, is compressed in its transverse
diameter; both the stomach, upper intestines, and liver are
pressed downward on the kidneys, M, M, and on the lower portions
of the bowels [the intestinal tube is denoted by the letters f,
j, and k,] while the bowels are crowded down on the uterus, i,
and bladder, g. _Thus every vital organ is either functionally
obstructed or mechanically disordered_, and diseases more or less
aggravated, the condition of all. In post-mortem examinations the
liver has been found deeply indented by the constant and
prolonged pressure of the ribs, in consequence of tight-lacing.
The brain-organ, protected by a bony inclosure, has not yet been
distorted externally by the contrivances of milliners and
mantuamakers; but, lacing the chest, by interrupting the
circulation of the blood, prevents its free return from the
vessel of the brain, and so permanent congestion of that organ,
with constant liability to headache, vertigo, or worse
affections, becomes a "second nature." The vital resources of
every person, and all available powers of mind and body, are
measurable by the respiration. Precisely as the breathing is
lessened, the length of life is shortened; not only this, but
life is rendered correspondingly useless and miserable while it
does exist. It is impossible for any child, whose mother has
diminished her breathing capacity by lacing, to have a sound and
vigorous organization. If girls will persist in ruining their
vital organs as they grow up to womanhood, and if women will
continue this destructive habit, the race must inevitably
deteriorate. It may be asserted, therefore, without exaggeration,
that not only the welfare of the future generations, but the
salvation of the race depends on the correction of this evil
habit. The pathological consequences of continued and prolonged
pressure on any vital structure are innutrition, congestion,
inflammation, and ulceration, resulting in weakness, waste of
substance, and destruction of tissue. The normal sensibility of
the part is also destroyed. No woman can ever forget the pain she
endured when she first applied the corsets; but in time the
compressed organs become torpid; the muscles lose their
contractile power, and she feels dependent on the mechanical
support of the corset. But the mischief is not limited to local
weakness and insensibility. The general strength and general
sensibility correspond with the breathing capacity. If she has
diminished her "breath of life," she has just to that extent
destroyed all normal sensibility. She can neither feel nor think
normally. But in place of pleasurable sensations and ennobling
thoughts, are an indescribable array of aches, pains, weaknesses,
irritations, and nameless distresses of body, with dreamy
vagaries, fitful impulses, and morbid sentimentalities of mind.
And yet another evil is to be mentioned to render the catalogue
complete. Every particle of food must be aerated in the lungs
before it can be assimilated. It follows, therefore, that no one
can be well nourished who has not a full, free, and unimpeded
action of the lungs. In the contracted chest, the external
measurement is reduced one half; but as the upper portions of the
lungs cannot be fully inflated until the lower portions are fully
expanded, it follows that the breathing capacity is diminished
more than one half. It is wonderful how anyone can endure
existence, or long survive, in this devitalized condition; yet,
thousands do, and with careful nursing, manage to bring into the
world several sickly children. The spinal distortion is one of
the ordinary consequences of lacing. No one who laces habitually
can have a straight or strong back. The muscles being unbalanced
become flabby or contracted, unable to support the trunk of the
body erect, and a curvature, usually a double curvature, of the
spine is the consequence. And if anything were needed to
aggravate the spinal curvature, intensify the compression of the
internal viscera, and add to the general deformity, it is found
in the modern contrivance of stilted gaiters. These are made with
heels so high and narrow that locomotion is awkward and painful,
the centre of gravity is shifted "to parts unknown," and the head
is thrown forwards and the hips projected backwards to maintain
perpendicularity.
[3] I have reproduced the admirable cuts found in Dr.
Trall's physiology, as they were essential to the
understanding of the text quoted, and also because they
convey more vividly than words the injury necessarily
sustained by those who persist in outraging nature and
violating the laws of their being by improper dress.
[Illustration: The internal viscera.]
[Illustration: Anterior view of thorax in the Venus of Medicis.]
[Illustration: The same in a fashionable corset-wearing lady of
to-day.]
In speaking of the destructiveness to health caused by woman's dress,
Prof. Oscar B. Moss, M. D., declares:
Although the corset is the chief source of constraint to the
kidneys, liver, stomach, pancreas, and spleen, forcing them
upward to encroach upon the diaphragm and compressing the lungs
and heart, its evils are rivalled by those resulting from
suspending the skirts from the waist and hips, by which means the
pelvic organs are forced downward and often permanently
displaced. Now, add to these errors a belt drawn snugly around
the waist, and we have before us a combination of the most
malignant elements of dress which it would be possible to invent.
The waist belt enforces the evils which the corset and skirts
inaugurate. Every proposition of anatomy and physiology bearing
upon this subject appeals to reason. Did the abdominal organs
require for their well-being less room than we find in the
economy of nature, less room would have been provided. Nature
bestows not grudgingly, neither does she lavish beyond the
requirements of perfect health.
The same laws which govern the nutrition of muscles, apply also
to the vital organs. Pressure that impedes circulation of blood
through them must suppress their functions proportionally. With
the lungs, heart, and digestive organs impaired by external
devices, which force them into abnormal relations, health is
impossible. Every other part of the body--nay, life
itself--depends upon the perfection of these organs. The ancients
fittingly called them the tripod of life.
Consumption, heart disease, dyspepsia, and the multiform phases
of uterine and ovarian diseases are among the natural and
frequent consequences of compressing the internal organs. Men
could not endure such physical indignities as women inflict upon
themselves. Should they attempt to do so, they would not long
hold the proud position of "bread winners," which is now theirs
by virtue of their more robust qualities.
[Illustration: Street costume. Spring, 1884.]
[Illustration: Street costume. Summer, 1891. (Compare waist with
anterior view of thorax of corset-wearing lady of to-day.) See page
412.]
It is difficult to imagine a slavery more senseless, cruel, or
far-reaching in its injurious consequences than that imposed by
fashion on civilized womanhood during the past generation. Her health
has been sacrificed, and in countless instances her life has paid the
penalty; while posterity has been dwarfed, maimed, and enervated, and
in body, mind, and soul deformed at its behests. In turn every part of
her body has been tortured. On her head at fashion's caprice the hair
of the dead has been piled. Hats and bonnets, wraps and gowns laden
with heavy beads and jet have as seriously impaired her health as they
have rendered her miserable; the tight lacing required by the wasp
waists has produced generations of invalids and bequeathed to
posterity suffering that will not vanish for many decades. By it, as
has been pointed out by the authorities cited, every vital organ in
the body has been seriously affected. The heart and lungs, by nature
protected by a cage of bone, have been abnormally crushed in a space
so contracted as to absolutely prohibit the free action upon which
health depended; while the downward pressure was necessarily equally
injurious to her delicate organism. The tightly drawn corset has
proved an unmitigated curse to the living and a legacy of misery and
disease to posterity. And this cruel deforming of the most beautiful
of God's creations was said to be beautiful simply because fashion
willed it. Nor was this all; enormous bustles and skirts of prodigious
dimension have borne their weight largely upon that part of her body
which above all else should be absolutely free from pressure. By this
means the most sensitive organs have been ruthlessly subjected to down
pressing weights which for exquisite torture and for the absolute
certainty of the long train of agony that must result, rival the
heartless ingenuity of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages. Beyond this
generation of debilitated and invalided mothers, rises a countless
posterity robbed of its birthright of health while yet unborn.[4] A
possible genius deformed and dwarfed by the weight of a fashionable
dress; a brain which might have been brilliant rendered idiotic by the
constant pressure of a corset, and the wearisome weight of a "stylish"
dress pressing about the hips; a child whose natural capacity might
have carried him to the seat of a Webster or into the laboratory of an
Edison, condemned to drag a weakly, diseased, or deformed body through
life, with mind ever chained to the flesh, through the heartless
imposition which fashion imposed on his mother! What thought can be
more appalling to a conscientious woman? Yet until a revolution is
accomplished and a reign of reason and common sense inaugurated, this
crime against the unborn will continue. But some argue the days of
these extremes are past.
[4] In discussing the solemn duty mothers owe to their
offspring, Mrs. Annie Jenness Miller sensibly observes:--
Are women ignorant of the mischief they do to their
offspring, or are they indifferent to consequences? Has the
true maternal love become extinct, in this age of advanced
civilization, that women ignore all the laws of nature while
anticipating the glory of motherhood? We know not; yet we
often see what causes a thrill of pity in our soul for the
future of the child yet unborn: a mother laced within stiff
bones and steel, while the very instincts of being cry out
against the sin of it. Surely every child has a right to be
well born! Wealth may be a grand inheritance, but health is
a better one, as any poor suffering creature will testify,
whose misery the most expensive doctors have been called
upon to alleviate without avail. And how can a child be well
born unless its parents observe the laws of life bearing
upon the birth and rearing of children? It is impossible. If
a mother will so clothe herself that the vitality which
properly belongs to her baby becomes exhausted and
destroyed, the child is robbed, as a natural consequence,
and perhaps the weakened, puny, distorted, fretful little
creature, who is innocent of the cause of its own
sufferings, will live to become a curse to the world instead
of the blessing that it would have been had rational
conditions been observed before its birth.
* * * * *
Tight corsets grudgingly loosened a quarter of an inch at a
time, heavy skirts, and all the evil conditions we are so
familiar with, are still retained as the months pass,
bringing ever nearer what should be the very happiest hour
of woman's existence--that in which she is to be intrusted
with the keeping, training, and guidance of a new human
soul. Perhaps her baby comes into the world dead or
deformed, perhaps deprived of certain of its faculties; or
it may be that it possesses life and all of its special
senses and organs in such a diminished degree that the whole
of its future becomes a pain rather than a joy, while its
miserable, puny structure remains a lasting reproach to its
parents as long as they live.
[Illustration: VAGARIES OF FASHION. PREVAILING STYLES IN WALKING
COSTUMES DURING THE PAST THIRTY YEARS. (Four images for the years
1860, 1872, 1878, and 1886.)]
I answer not past, but they are assuming other forms. Since 1890
dawned, the evils in some respects have been aggravated; for it must
not be forgotten that the daughters of the present decade have, in
order to be fashionable, compressed beyond all healthful bounds the
flesh of their arms, retarding circulation and inviting pneumonia and
other ills. And in order to look stylish, thousands of women wear
dress waists so tight that no free movement of the upper body is
possible; indeed in numbers of instances ladies are compelled to put
their bonnets on before attempting the painful ordeal of getting into
their glove-fitting dress waists. Many young women to-day, yielding to
the spell of fashion, place the corset next to their flesh, while a
still greater number have merely the thinnest possible undershirt
between the flesh and the corset, after which they tightly draw the
dress waist until it meets. This seems incredible, but it is vouched
for by several ladies of my acquaintance, among whom are physicians
whose large practice among their sisters gives them peculiar
facilities for knowing the absolute facts. Health, posterity, and all
the instincts of the higher self are ruthlessly sacrificed to the
fickle folly of fashion's criminal caprice. And we must not forget
that even now the sweeping train is coming in vogue and correctly
attired ladies must consent to carry the germs of death with
quantities of filth from the streets of our metropolitan cities into
their homes of wealth and refinement. The corset and high-heeled
shoes, the two most deadly foes to maternity and posterity, are also
seen at the present time, on every hand.