Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/336

320 dollars — back into her dressing stable. I call her shameless, and would like to use a still stronger expression, for I do not consider anyone who can abuse good taste and common sense so cruelly before all the world, capable of true morality. A sense of the beautiful and a moral sense belong together. I consider a woman with a "Grecian bend" capable of anything but what is reasonable and humane. There is no expression of public opinion that a being can dread who has stood the test of exposing herself to the criticism of the "Grecian bend."

Among the present fashions there is a third which might be called a heinous offense against good taste, and the ladies who adopt it can justly be compared to inverted cabbages, on account of the manyleaved character of their attire. To wear a simple dress would be shocking to these ladies. Indeed, nobody can tell what is the real dress, there are nothing but dress fragments, piled one upon the other, each successive one shaped and draped more idiotically than the other, and, perhaps, of a different color, so that the ideal costume seems to be the one made up of the most senseless accumulation and mixture of rags and colors imaginable.

I confess I am ashamed of my sex, when I see thousands of women parading in the streets and places of meeting, day after day, as if their entire occupation and aim in life consisted in placing themselves on exhibition, loaded down with all sorts of rags and absurd finery and in defying the criticism