Page:May Walden - Socialism and the Home (1900).pdf/10

 10 adopted by the ladies of the upper classes. We have many of these badges of supposed superiority existing and changing from season to season.

Accept the mark of your class, dear worker, and refuse to follow a fashion which is unhealthful, ungraceful and a badge of indolence. It is not possible for any woman to be thoroughly healthy unless her body in all its parts is fully developed and so clothed that she may get about with the same freedom as a man. She might as well have one arm if she must hold up her skirt all the time. She might as well have consumption as to cramp up her lungs in a tight-fitting corset—and as a matter of fact many women die of consumption because they cannot use their lungs properly. She might as well be born a cripple as to make herself one by wearing shoes three sizes too small. A woman who has not freed herself from these marks of indolence and frivolity can have no idea of the independence, exhilaration and energy of mind and body that come from adopting a rational mode of dress. We workers, men and women, must join ourselves together to rid the world of this system which gives a few rich people so much leisure and many poor ones too much hard work; and which makes it necessary for the rich class, whether willingly or not, to own another class by owning the things they must use to earn a living. As you go about on the street cars, or in a crowd, study the pinched, care-worn faces about you, made unbeautiful by want and drudgery. Listen to the remarks their owners make about the things they would like and cannot afford, then try to believe if you can that there is "prosperity enough to go around" and that "the working people of the United States produce two thousand millions of dollars more each year than they can consume." So long as a child has to stay out of school because its clothes are not warm enough or whole enough to comfort its little body, it is not true that we make more than we can consume. So