Page:May Walden - Socialism and the Home (1900).pdf/9

 Rh here and hollowed there until it is tortured into any shape except the one nature intended it to be! Go to the art galleries on a day when they are free to our class and look at the beautiful forms shown in the sculptures and paintings there. Realize if you can that people once lived in a free state who had perfect bodies like those, then look around the rooms at your fellow creatures and notice the cramped, ill-shapen, ungraceful figures, and know that they are made so from being the slaves of the classes above them!

Strange as it may seem, there is a reason for these fashionable deformities which change from year to year. They are marks that show to which class the wearer belongs. In China among the upper classes the feet of the girl babies are bandaged in such a way that they cannot grow, and when they are women the feet are from 2½ to 5 inches long. They cannot walk except with the help of a servant on each side. The lower classes, on the other hand, have well-developed feet because it is necessary that they work. The Chinese show in this way that their ladies are high born, and do not have to earn their living. Among the Thlinkects, all the FREE-BORN female children have a slit cut in the upper lip in which a wire, piece of shell or wood is placed to distend the lip. The older she grows the larger the lip block is made and the more important is her place in society. But the female SLAVES are not allowed to wear a lip ornament.

The flat heads of American Indians and of other tribes are considered by them a sign of nobility, or social caste, and if through sickness or any other reason the head is not flattened in infancy these children can never become influential in the tribe and are often sold as slaves.

Trailing skirts, pointed shoes, a pinched-up waist, and anything else that keeps a woman from doing free, active, healthy work is a sign of leisure, dependence and inactivity; hence these are