the best brains and most thoughtful women of our time are boldly
denouncing the bondage of fashion and bravely pleading for such
radical reforms in dress as will secure to womanhood health and
comfort, while being genuinely artistic and graceful, breathing true
refinement and conforming to aesthetic principles rather than the
caprice of fashion. To me there is something infinitely pathetic in
the brave protests that have from time to time flashed from the
outraged sensibilities of those who represent the very flower of
American womanhood, when discussing this subject, for running through
their almost every utterance is the plaintive note of helplessness,
mingled with the consciousness of the justice of the cause for which
they plead. The talented and universally respected Mrs. Abba Woolson
Gould some years ago thus gave expression to her feelings when writing
of the long, heavy, disease-producing skirts of women:

Do what we will with them, they still add enormously to the
weight of clothing, prevent cleanliness of attire about the
ankles, overheat by their tops the lower portion of the body,
impede locomotion, and invite accidents. In short, they are
uncomfortable, unhealthy, unsafe, and unmanageable. Convinced of
this fact by patient and almost fruitless attempts to remove
their objectionable qualities, the earnest dress-reformer is
loath to believe that skirts hanging below the knee are not
transitory features in woman's attire, as similar features have
been in the dress of men, and surely destined to disappear with
the tight hour-glass waists and other monstrosities of the
present costume.... Any changes the wisest of us can to-day
propose are only a mitigation of an evil which can never be done
away till women emerge from this vast swaying, undefined, and
indefinable mass of drapery into the shape God gave to His human
beings.

Mary A. Livermore voices a sad and terrible truth when she observes:

The invalidism of young girls is usually attributed to every
cause but the right one; to hard study--co-education--which, it
is said, compels overwork that the girl student may keep up with
the young men of her class; too much exercise, or lack of rest
and quiet at certain periods when nature demands it. All the
while the physician is silent concerning the glove-fitting,
steel-clasped corset, the heavy, dra