A WOMAN ON WOMAN’S DRESS.

Evening Star, Issue 3534, 20 June 1874, Page 3

A WOMAN ON WOMAN’S DRESS.

Miss Phelps, the author of “ Gates Ajar,” is doing her loyal best to prove her sisters wrong in the matter of dress. She asserts firstly, and with separate lines and capital letters, that “Woman’s Dress is in Bad Taste, Bad Hygiene, (Health law), and Bad Morals,” Let ns save our sisters in these islands by explaining the fact that women in America dress more foolishly and extravagantly than English woman do—and that is saying much. Miss Phelps describes an American woman in a brown alpaca dress bordering on the shades of “butternut oil,” cheap, flimsy, and coarse. On it were ten bright brown, cheap flimsy ruffles, twelve cheap flimsy, brown, bright bows, and folds which faded into the depths of the uncleanly straw of a street car, in which they dragged beyond the reach of her arithmetical calculation. Over this dress an upper one of “ bright green delaine fell cheerfully.” This last was furnished with four intricate black folds with irrelevant black buttons in buttonless locations, dotted hither and thither like “ spilled huckleberries.” A grey garment of the cloak genus surmounted this, and fitted so closely as to reveal every “ charm” (?) of a high-shouldered, long waisted, flatchested figure. We will spare our readers details of the bare, brown, bony wrists, tumbled lace, gutta percha bracelets, glass bead cross of the genus called “crystal,” gutta percha necklace and earrings, lace frill, velvet strings, false curls, false braids, and a stuffing of “rats” which«protruded through the thin hair. “ The whole was covered with a mansard roof of black velvet, blue ribbon, pink roses, grey raspberries, bead fringe, imitation lace, and green feathers.” Within this chaste combination of effects was a Yankee woman, long, lean, gaunt, red, and grave. She carried a muff and two yards of white cloud. “ When she rose she tripped upon her dress ; when'she left she tripped upon her cloud; her muff en-* gaged her hands, and her lace-bound shivering wrists; at the dooy she tripped again; and Sing, still tripping, a ghastly parody of en playfulness, she tripped herself out of sight.” And this kind of miserably dressed woman is common in America. “You will find my Gorgon at the next street corner, at every dry goods counter, at any railway station. “ Woman,” cries this female censor, must have undergone some long and subtle process of degradation before she sank so low or grovelled so serenely;” and again, “For myself I confess I never feel thoroughly ashamed of being a woman except in glancing over a large and promiscuous assembly, and Contrasting the comparative simplicity, solidity, good sense, and elegance of man’s apparel, with the affectation, the flimsiness, the tawdriness, the ugliness, and the imbecility of woman’s. For her mental and moral deficiencies my heart is filled with a great compassion and a prompt excuse. Over her physical inferiority I mourn ; as one without hope. When I consider the pass to which she has brought the sole science of which she is supposed to be yet mistress, my heart misgives me down to the very roots of every hope I cherish for her.” Pursuing her subject—we hope, by the way, thinking ladies will read and re-read the last sentence—the authoress declares that woman is verily dressed to kill, but it is to kill herself. The dress (Miss Phelps palls it the biassed dress) with a plain waist and a long skirt is enough, itself f onsidered, to make an invalid of her under favorable conditions, and is sure to do bq under disadvantageous ones. “ Six new diseases have come in since the introduction of multitudinous and heavy skirts.” There is more to this effect, while a grim kind of humor breaks through the only cheerful passage in the book. How women live under their, self-imposed burdens is a problem which only the doctrine of the “survival of the fittest ” can touch j and Miss Phelps delights to add: “We are of tougher stuff than our brothers, or we should have sunk under our shackles long ago.” She quotes a lady who says: “ Whenever I discuss this question of dress with the unawakened, I resort to the simply inquiry, ‘ Could your father or husband live in your clothes ? Could he walk down town on a rainy day in your skirts ? Could he conduct his business and support his family in your corsets ? Could ho support a course of study m your ohignou?’ the prompt and ringing no 1 is startling and suggestive. The man would have yielded and sunk where the woman would have struggled and climbed. And th« moral of it is-” Perhaps our own words will be shorter and better fitted for our readers than those of Miss Phelps, hold and courageous as they are. The moral is that vrornan dresses to attract man, Horace Smith

said, years ago, most wittily, of a gauzilydressed woman, "All tinder, sir, to catch a spark, kindle a flame, and light up a match.” As the female glow-worm, like another Hero, lights up her lamp to guide her Leander, so woman dresses to please man —and at present she does not quite succeed. She often, alas ! has done so immodestly. Miss Phelps declares that dress has now reached a pitch in the ball theatre, and concert-room, to which “ it is not morally right for a conscientious woman to conform.” Certainly it goes very far, when ladies are undressed below the shoulder-blades ! But enough of this; the bad taste is, of course, stupid, and prevents what it endeavors to achieve. But what is the remedy? Miss Phelps thinks that a modification of the Bloomer or the bathing costume, the abolition of stays, and the adoption of braces might do much good. But surely braces will never do for young mothers, or for robust, well-formed, beautiful English and German girls. What . . BU Bf> es ted is a modification of the rich citizeness’s dresses, as figured by Hollar, in the reign of James 1., with shorter skirts, something like those of the Swiss peasants, warm stockings or pretty gaiters, and thick, yet graceful, boots or shoes, not of the flimsy kind and prunella, which distort but never support the feet; even Venus, with bunions or dislocated toe-joints, is unendurable.