woman knows that it is utterly impossible to take even a short walk on a
rainy day, however well protected, without bringing into the house an
amount of wet clothing which necessitates almost an entire change? And
yet there is not the slightest chance of securing the physiologically
needed reform by demonstrating these facts, simply because, below all
this question of dress, there lies a deeper thing, of which dress is
only the index--the question of Sex, and the relations resulting from
it.

For whose admiration and attraction do our young women array themselves?
To please whom do they leave off their flannels and attend evening
entertainments in low-necked dresses, sweep the pavements with their
ornately trimmed skirts, and wear thin boots which shall display to
better advantage the well-turned foot? I desire not to have it
understood for one moment that I am speaking lightly, or in terms of
sweeping condemnation, of the underlying consciousness, of which the
external dress is only an outward sign. The underlying impulse is an
inevitable, is a true, pure, and womanly one; on it are based all
institutions of civilization, for from it spring marriage, the Family,
Society, and the State, and an evil tree cannot bring forth such fruit.
It may, however, be over-stimulated, and the extravagancies of dress and
manner which Broadway and Fifth Avenue, the opera, or any fashionable
assembly of young people display in America, are universally and justly
condemned by sober thought as falling only a few grades behind actual
immodesty.

But if we would produce any reform of any consequence on the subject of
external dress, we must do it, not by attacking the dress at all; it
will never be accomplished in this way. So long as it is considered that
woman's chief and only duty, the only object of her creation, in fact,
is to minister to the comfort and happiness of man; so long as it is
represented to her that she fulfills the ends of her being, only in the
fact that she does this; so long as it is not fully and freely allowed
that a woman owns herself, body and soul, in the same sense as that in
which a man owns himself--just so much and no more--women will dress to
please the taste of men, and will vie with each other to excite their
attention, and secure their admiration. Teach a girl that her only
destiny is to be only any kind of a wife and a mother, to preserve the
race physically strong--keep this idea before her daily, and