Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/203

Rh the pressure may be sustained, the corset itself acting as a kind of shield between the body and the bands, and acting also in some way like a shoulder for supporting the bands. When the dresses which are thus sustained are short and of light texture, the weight and incumbrance are considerable; but when the dresses are long, when they trail on the ground, and when they are made of heavy material, the weight and incumbrance are drags on the life, which I suspect the strongest man could not sustain while engaged in his ordinary avocations.

I am rejoiced to see that ladies themselves, who are writing intelligently on this topic, are earnestly teaching in respect to it what is both common sense and common humanity. I agree with these that the tax of carrying clothes from the waist is utterly unjustifiable, and that the parts that should bear the burden are the shoulders and none other. In this regard women ought to be placed under just the same favorable conditions for movement of the body as men, and the greatest emancipation that woman will ever have achieved will have arrived when she has discovered and carried out this practical improvement.

In saying this I do not for a moment wish to suggest that the outward appearance of the feminine dress should be like that of the masculine dress. To the woman, the flowing robe which even trespasses a little on the ground is most graceful, and is signally characteristic of feminine beauty. I would, therefore, that it should remain in all its gracefulness, but in so far as everything else is concerned, for every circumstance in which health is involved, for warmth, for freedom of movement, for mode by which the dress is carried from the shoulders, I would say, Let the women have all the advantages which now belong to men.

For any one who will for a moment think candidly must admit that the dress of men, however bad it may be in taste, or in whatever bad taste it may have been conceived, is, in respect to health, infinitely superior to that of women. In the dress of the man every part of the body is equally covered. The middle of the body is not enveloped in a number of close layers, while the lower limbs are left without close clothing altogether. The center of the body is not strained with a weight which almost drags down the lower limbs and back. The chest is not exposed to every wind that blows, and the feet are not bewildered with heavy garments which they have to kick forward or drag from behind with every advancing step. The body is clothed equally. The clothing is borne by the shoulders; it gives free motion to breathing; it gives freedom of motion to the circulation; it makes no undue pressure on the digestive organs; it leaves the limbs free; it is easily put on and off; and it allows of ready change in vicissitudes of weather. These are the advantages of modern attire for the man, and all I claim is that they should, by faithful copy, be extended to the