FOR THE LADIES.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume X, Issue 1060, 13 April 1882, Page 4

FOR THE LADIES.

TIGHT-LACING TO-DAY IS VULGAR. Health with its immense possibilities of usefulness is at once the most beautiful and enjoyable possession life has to offer. It sweetens hard work and hard fare ; it is a perpetual song of gladness whose music lives in the heart with such native grace as to make its every pulsation a h ob of joy ; earth, air, and water and all things therein eagerly vicing with this radiant Queen io express the harmony of being and doing which constitute life in all its fulness|of bliss. Yet health has no sentiment; it is too grandly imperious I to brook the many insults offered to | its benignant sway in the form of excessive eating and drinking; .of each reckless exposure to heat, cold, and ’ damp ; of enervating indolence, as also I of the crowning stupidity of tightlacing : of each and all of which barbarities it will avenge itself right speedily. We know not how much stronger, handsomer, and more perfectly developed the human race would have become but for the accursed evils of tight-lacing, together with the enforced ignorance of women which has made such stupidity possible. For it is as true of fashion’s devotees as of the supporters of all the wrongs that curse humanity, that “they know not what they do.” Give to woman —what, indeed, ought never to have been withheld—a knowledge of physiology for practical uses, and she will quickly discontinue this suicidal habit, how ever much silly men may pretend toadmire the slender waist. The waist of the infant both male and female is square with the shoulders, and whatever difference may appear in after life is due wholly and solely to the pernicious habit of tight-lacing ; notwithstanding that the ready lie is ever on the lips of women of the wasp-waist hideousness, “ 1 do not lace tight.” Man’s figure is more symmetrical, therefore more graceful than is woman’s of cramped proportions. Until the laws of health and of the human frame arc understood by women, all sensible men and women should persistently denounce the slender waist as vulgar—hideously vulgar, and it will soon become the distinctive badge of “ servantgal istn ” only. It is, however, but one of the tens of thousands of ills men tolerate because they will not think of what they are doing; they give all their energies to money-making ; and when they have made it what are they ? For the sake of health and its consequent happiness; for the sake of the innocent, the unborn of both sexes; / unhesitatingly declare a compressed figure to be a monstrosity of exercise to good taste and a breach of good style because it destroys all grace of form, of motion, and of manners, substituting its very antipodes—stiffness; than which nothing can be uglier.