A MAN’S VIEW OF WOMEN'S DRESS.

Southern Cross, Volume 2, Issue 19, 4 August 1894, Page 11

A MAN’S VIEW OF WOMEN'S DRESS.

“ ... But my terrors proved to be all delusions. lam now quite convinced that English ladies can travel and endure hardships just as well as English men. Please to understand that this assertion is applied exclusively to the ladies themselves, and by no means to their luggage. It is not the natural weakness of woman but the intolerable encumbrance of her ridiculous costume that cripples her physical energies. Imagine a regiment of cavalry in petticoats, or, better still, a whole army marching to battle in long skirts and several underlying strata of petticoats, each man being prohibited from showing his ankles under penalty of immediate degradation. Of what avail would he the muscular* strength, the powers of endurance, the courage, and every other element of energy in an army loaded with such impediments, and encountered by men in manly costume, or even by women in tunics or short skirts ? What has been the fate of the petticoated men of the East and other regions of the earth ? They have been run down and overwhelmed by bare-legged barbarians and trousered Anglo-Saxons. If any member of the Alpine or other athletic club is disposed to underrate the physical powers of the fair sex, let him try to ascend a difficult “ col,” to run a hurdle race, display on the horizontal bar, or play a cricket or football match in a lady’s fashionable walking dress of the period, and he will then be able to estimate the extent to which his sisters are handicapped, why they are so averse to wholesome out-of-door exercise, and consequently enfeebled both in mind and body. I have very strong opinions on this subject, and am quite satisfied that all who agitate for the social elevation ©f women have hitherto wa'sted their efforts, haying failed to strike at the root of the evils they deplore. It is a gross fallacy to assert that woman is subject to the despotic rule of the male sex. The fact is exactly the reverse of this. But woman is the abject slave of a crushing, grinding, pulverising, morally, annihilating despotism —that of the obscure, nameless, unknown humbugs who, inspired by the demon of ugliness, draw, paint, print, and publish those hideous caricatures, those foul libels of the human form divine, those pictorial atrocities which periodically emerge from an unknown somewhere, and represent the “Modes de Paris.” The worship of this hideous fetish is the principal source of female degradation.— “Through Horway with Ladies,” by W. Mattieu Williams.