Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: Selected Tales, Essays, and Poems

Selections from “Woman’s Dress (In Four Parts)”

177 Selections from “Woman’s Dress (In Four Parts)” II. Is It Healthful?* The enormities of a woman’s dress, having done their best to deform her body, will very naturally do their bravest to destroy it. So far and so fast has this work proceeded, that the scholarly physician invited to address the New England Club upon woman’s physical fitness to be,¹ to do, or to suffer, can find, in the realm of his cultivated thought, no more grateful or graceful thing to tell you, educated, thinking ladies, known to be hopeful of woman’s future, trustfully anxious for her higher development, and absorbed in elevating her actual condition , than that your hopes are moonbeams, your anxious trust the diversion of overwrought credulity, your absorption in your work the blind enthusiasm of ignorance—that woman’s constitution, being subject to peculiar conditions, must forever forbid her keeping pace with her brother or her husband in intellectual culture and entirely negative the question of her industrial success or existence. So low has the clinical ideal of woman fallen! So dark are the Doctor’s spectacles! So great and growing the physical disability at least of American women! If there were no other cause to account for the feeble physiques and prevailing ailments of the present generation of women (and their name is legion)² I believe that their present modes of dress alone would explain the mystery nearly all. That a woman wears a biased dress and a long skirt is enough,³ in itself considered, to make an invalid of her under favorable conditions, and sure to do so under disadvantageous ones. I put this assertion strongly because I feel and believe it in the strongest manner. You will remind her of our grandmothers—the fabulous grandmothers , the healthy, wealthy, and wise,—they who scrubbed floors, did the 178 Essays family washing, wove carpets, spun their husbands’ coats, and brought up fourteen children, in biased waists and long skirts. I reply that it is because they scrubbed floors, did the washing, wove the carpets, spun the coats, and because they brought up fourteen children, and because they did this, and the time faileth me to tell what else, in long skirts and biased dresses that American girls are what they are to-day—pallid, puny, undersized, undersouled, devoured by the backache, the headache, the heartache, a dark puzzle to the physiologist who undertakes their present relief, a sad problem to the political economist who looks to the future ideal society, the mothers of which they will be. “Six new diseases,”we are told,“have come into existence with the styles of dress which require the wearing of multitudinous and heavy skirts.”4 Indeed, I wonder that there are not sixty. I wonder that women sustain, in even the wretched and disheartening fashion that they do, the strain and burden of their clothing. I wonder that any of us are left with unimpaired vitality for the pursuance of self-culture, for the prosecution of our business, for the rearing, care, and support of our families, for the whirling of the wheels within wheels of social duties which devolves dizzily upon us, till “the whip of the sky”has ceased to lash us into the struggle for existence.5 No doctrine but the doctrine of the “Survival of the Fittest ” will touch the problem.6 We are of tougher stuff than our brothers , or we should have sunk in our shackles long ago. It was well said by one of your own members:7 “Whenever I discuss this subject with the ‘unawakened’ I resort to the simple inquiry: Could your father or your husband live in your clothes? Could he walk down-town on a rainy day in your skirts? Could he conduct his business and support his family in your corsets? Could he prosecute ‘a course of study’in your chignon?” The prompt and ringing No! of the only possible answer is startling and suggestive.The muscular masculine physique could not endure the conventional burdens which the nervous feminine organization supports . The man would have yielded and sunk, where the woman has struggled and climbed. I lay especial stress upon the close waist and long skirt as blunders in the methods of attire incumbent upon women, because when I consider the smoothness of surface which a fitted waist involves, thereby 179 Selections from “Woman’s Dress (In Four Parts...