Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 February 1910 — WOMAN THE MODERN MARTYR. [ARTICLE]

WOMAN THE MODERN MARTYR.

Clothe* Are Horribly Uncomfortable, bat She Smile* Bravely. The common opinion is that real heroines are something unusual and rare. When a woman saveß a human being from drowning at the risk of her own life she is lauded as a heroine, and society gives her medals, by way of distinguishing her from the rest of womankind. But what she iid wasn’t really as brave as what thousands of her sisters are doing every day. The true heroine is she who wears clothes as they are ordained by the little tin goddess of fashion. The woman of fashion, or she who aspires to be a woman of fashion, going forth in her tight corsets, her enormous hat which won’t allow her to lean back comfortably in a car or closed carriage, her high heels that are always catching in something or other, skirts which make it impossible for her to take a normal step, silly little wrist bag that must be clutched constantly or n will get lost, and a head weighed down with pads, rats and false hairship under airship hat —this woman is truly brave, the Detroit Journal says. She wears all that toggery, in which she must be exceedingly uncomfortable, and she wears it so placidly, so smilingly, that man thinks —but what does man think when he beholds a fashionably dressed woman? Perhaps he doesn’t know that her clothes are uncomfortable, for he has never worn them, and no -woman would ever confess to him how she feels in them. She is braver than the martyrs of old, for the martyrs recanted sometimes, and what woman ever wavered in her smile in the ballroom, no matter how her dress was hurting her? If women accomplish great things in the future it will be because of their careful training in discomfort.