Page:The Woman Socialist - Snowden - 1907.djvu/88

 considered from the point of view of beauty, utility, comfort, and solidity. To be beautiful, it must be simple, reflecting nature as nearly as possible, in perfect harmony with its surroundings and its purpose and designed to suggest lovely thoughts and graceful images. Of superfluous, dust-catching, microbe-haunted draperies there will be none. Of vulgar ostentation there will be none; nothing but artistic loveliness conducing to fair thoughts and fine ambitions and the peace which is born of happiness in the home.

And the dress of a Socialist woman will be in harmony with her home. What ages of masculine hatred, callousness, and cruelty does the dress of a modern woman reveal. It was specially designed to be a clog upon her movements, that she might not, in her misery, run away from her lord and master. It is said that the high-born girl-babies of China have their feet distorted by reason of an order from one of the Emperors whose wife actually did try to run away from him.

To please men, whom they feel themselves bound to please, the most odious outrages upon nature are perpetrated by women.