Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/332

316 proper light, and it would fill a book to treat of it exhaustively. Woman's slavery to fashion furnishes an appalling amount of matter for questions such as these.

Can a being who, without choice or will of her own allows her external appearance to be prescribed to her, have a sufficient independence of character to act, in serious matters, according to her own judgment and decision? Can a being be considered as intellectually responsible who is immediately reconciled to, and eager to adopt, the most senseless attire, as soon as Others set a bad example?

What inner worth can a being have, who is so anxiously and continually occupied with the external?

Can we still believe the feminine sex to have any of that aesthetic faculty, which we call good taste, when we see how stubbornly it adheres to the most unbecoming styles?

Is not the passion for fashionable and extravagant dress a chief source of moral ruin? Does not this passion supply prostitution with as many victims as want?

If one considers how infinitely much good women might do, if instead of spending hundreds of millions on the most trivial finery they would spend these sums for their children, for the needy, for social reforms, for intellectual culture, for the fine arts; in short, for all those purposes which are in accordance