e disease and death to any
ordinary woman. The law of health demands that the extremities of our
bodies should be kept warm and well protected, while the parts
containing our vital economy should be only comfortably clothed and left
free to the most natural and easy action, well ventilated or exposed to
the ingress and egress of the atmosphere, without any local pressures or
means for unnatural warmth. Only think of wearing a thick, heavy girdle
of many pounds' weight around the whole zone of the abdominal region--a
sort of engirdling poultice, heating and pressing like a girdle of hot
lava, day after day and year after year! Is it a wonder that you have so
many weaknesses and pains and saddening afflictions upon you? And then
your feet treading these cold pavements, this damp earth, these frozen
or wet walks, in slippers and silk or cotton stockings! The very part of
your bodies of all others you should keep most warm and dry, you expose
to every wind and frost, water-pool and snow-storm, in the year; sit
through the whole winter with them on cold floors, where every
door-crack and floor-crack is breathing in upon them cold, damp breaths
from cellars or streets while perhaps your heads are hot in a dry stove
air, and your lungs are breathing an atmosphere so hot and close that it
has scarcely a breath of life in it, and all the while you say you are
comfortably dressed!

And then, to make the matter still worse, you trail your bedrabbled
dress into all the mud and water and tobacco filth on the yard's width
you occupy in walking, exhibiting the strangest spectacle of civilized
humanity that can well be imagined, a woman claiming good sense,
sweeping the streets all about her to make cold and wet her already
almost bare feet and ankles!

Nor is this all. These damp winter winds bathe many a bare arm, kiss
wantonly many an unprotected neck, and visit rudely many a bosom only
veiled with a gossamer gauze. To say nothing of such an exposure to
every lewd eye that roves the street, and the unwomanly impudence it
offers to every modest gaze, it is a hazardous, wicked, criminal
exposure of health, and a total neglect of all the ends and uses of
Dress. And then, to crown all, you go out in all weathers with your
heads exposed to the fiercest blasts, all unbonneted; for Webster says a
bonnet is a _covering_ for the head; but few are the women's heads we
have seen covered this season--and then wonder why you should have such
t