Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/232

222 garment and bent into the form of hooks. Buckles, and finally buttons, took the place of the primitive pins and hooks. But women still use the metal pins, and the primitive lack of definite correspondence between the dress and the body is seen, for instance, in the hat or bonnet, which does not fit the head and must be fastened on with strings or pins. This retarded development and absence of differentiation in woman's dress is curiously illustrated in the case of shoes. Only a few decades ago girls' and women's shoes were made straight and worn indiscriminately on either foot, while men's shoes were uniformly made rights and lefts. In many country stores old women's shoes may still be found made straight, while women's overshoes and rubbers are commonly so made at present, and are worn on either foot.

But the most striking case of retarded development in woman's dress is seen in the persistence of the idea that dress is not so much a protection for the body as a symbol of the wealth of the wearer or the wearer's family. In the more civilized societies now it is no longer possible to judge of a man's wealth by his attire; but to the same extent this can not be said of his wife and daughters. In the case of the latter the two primitive purposes of dress—ornamentation and expenditure—are still ascendant. We see the same display of rare and costly furs and feathers, of gold and diamonds, of velvets, laces, and silks, and of harmony of colors, and a somewhat constant relation between the cost of such display and the wealth of the owner. In her emancipation from the tyranny of fashion in dress woman has made less progress than man. In slave-like obedience thereto she submits to frequent and expensive changes in style, to heavy and cumbersome garments involving the sacrifice of comfort, health, and economy.

In justice to the above principles it is only fair to state that it is not urged by those who bring them forward that the dress of man is perfect or free from savage elements, or that the aesthetic motive common to the dress of the primitive man and of civilized woman is not a worthy one, but only that in the evolution of dress there is a definite progressive movement from the primitive conception of display and expenditure to the modern conception of utility and comfort, and that in this movement woman's dress has been retarded or arrested at a primitive stage.

Certain other facts than those of dress point, it is said, to woman's arrested development. The division of labor which marks the progress of civilization has reached no such extent in the work of woman as in that of man. In fact, it may be said that there is in woman's work hardly any division of labor, except in so far as, in recent years, she has entered upon pursuits formerly followed only by men. As we have seen that women