Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 December 1874 — The Question of Dress-Reform. [ARTICLE]

The Question of Dress-Reform.

Among the many letters which come to me on dres6-reform is one from a lady in this county, who says : 1 cannot refrain from telling you of the good yon have done me in yonr little book, “Letter* to 1 had it given me when I was eight or nine yean* old and wat* very much imprenred with the chanter on tight-lacing; I have never from that timrto this worn anything tight around my body. Of course 1 have always had a fight with dre**maker*, for they declared they never saw such a figure In their live*, etc., etc. llut I have alway* had vigorous health and have often walked eight and ten miles—once thirteen. And here a little result: lam now twenty-aix, married and have two children, and have had none ol the ail* of motherhood which women generally have. My nurse* have said I was more like a Dutch woman than an American, for which 1 have yon to think—at least for some oi it. What a vulgar ‘creature! says Mrs. Backache, as she lolls amid her cushions, wondering if tlie doctor never will give her anything to cure these terrible attacks of headache, and dyspepsia, and liver-complaint, and neuralgia, and nervousness, and sleeplessness and general debility, and all other ailments, while her Euny infant is in the arms of a nurse, ept at a cost of half her husband’s income, and draws its meager “ granum” gruel through a foul india-rubber tube! It is so horrid, you know, to be healthy! —so vulgar for a woman to be able to take care of her own child after the manner of God’s law! It, is so coarse not to keep one’s bed when one is not scraping streets with india-rubber scrapers and one’s body for a handle! Dear me! Why, it’s Dutch! and “ Dutch” is the crowning opprobrium, simply because it is the synonym of “ health.” In these latter days to be Dutch is to be dreadful! “German” is quite genteel; for we have German ladies who arealmost, if not quite, as useless and expensive as the American article. Do we with our hollow pretenses of Protestant civilization and civil liberty, bought with the blood of martyrs, forget that the Dutch held Holland through thirtwyears of the fiercest war in history; thatnt was the sturdy burghers of that most honored land who first taught the world that the common people, united on a point of conscience, with God for King and Coiii-mander-in-Chief, are more than a match for the proudest sovereigns, backed by the most ancient hereditary rights and the most unlimited command of treasure. It was the Dutch who first met Despotism face to face, and made a successful stand. __ As a descendant of the old Scotch Coys enanters, the Dutch are the only people to whom I can do mental obeisance, notwithstanding it is fashionable, since Germany has given us so large a voting population, and flogged France, for America to- be polite to the Germans. They are a very good class of folks, and have done the world some service. Without tlie German brain there would be a very large air-channel in the world’s cranium; and if German women only had the back-bone to retain in this country the beautiful and healthy costume of their native land they would be to us a Godsend indeed; but they have generally become about as much the bond-slaves of Mrs. Grundy, the supple tools of dressmakers and nurses, as the daughters of the once proud Pilgrim Fathers, who do not hesitate to confess themselves servants of servants, ruled out of their own kitchens by Biddy, fed on whatever she may please to give them, at a cost of whatever she may please to make it; ruled out of their own wardrobes by dressmakers, totally ignorant of the natural outlines of the bodies they dress, and whose principal qualification for their business is impudence; ruled out -of tlieir own nurseries by ignorant nurses, who live by the helplessness and disease they load with fulsome flatteries! Statesmen and statisticians tell us that foreigners are to take this country, because of the physical degeneracy of American women, and the small number of children reared by them; but they have not taken the dressmaker and nurse into their calculations. So long as these subjugate German and Irish women at the rate they are now doing, so long as none but “ the Dutch” - dSre to obey the most'imperative laws of life, for fear the dressmaker, nurse and Mrs. Grundy will curl their lips in scorn —so long there is little danger that o'Ur Irish, German, French. Scandinavian and Italian emigrants of to-day will long hold any supremacy over the descendants of those who came over two hundred years ago..’ Tlie American dressmaker and nurse have au iron bedstead, on which they promptly regulate all differences*of stature among the various people that compose our nation; and, by its rule, the maximum birth-rate of' the foreigner soon reaches the minimum of tlie nativeborn. —' ‘ The cook, the dressmaker and the nurse are the trinity which rules the eehsus of this country; for our ladies have generally been too lately lifted! from humble stations to have learned the art of governing households. The habit j of command only comes through genera- j tious of culture; and our aristocracy of ; wealth found yesterday live in a state of j chronic war with the servants wlic : hope to displace them to-morrow. So your American lady, weighed to the earth by the silks, velvets, laces and jewels' necessary to advertise her husband’s success in business, becomes the easy prey of Biddy, not yet broken on the wheel of line' ladyhood, and mistakes her dressmaker ‘ for the autocrat of destiny in dress and the nurse in general deportment! As these arbiters of fate are generally persons of narrow intellects and well-sharpened wits, and it is to their immediate interest to cultivate the dependence on which, they depend, our domestic history teems with repetitions of the old story of Queen Ann and Lady Churchill; of mistresses held in most degrading bondage by their own servants. As in that case, so in these, physical vigor Vas*the plus which overbalanced legitimate authority, wealth and social position in the sum'total of the problem. So long as servants can rule her through her physical disability, and increase this at will, so long she is their tool, instead of mistress or emplover.

The dressmaker who sneers at the feminine form as God made it, and as the greatest artists and poets the world has ever seen have delineated it, in marble, on canvas, and in immortal song, is sim j ply an impertinent ignoramus, and 1 should be treated as such. The nurse t who seeks to cultivate helplessness by making vigorous health a something of which the possessor should be ashamed is akin to the witches who plotted the destruction of Macbeth. They are deliberate impostors or self-deceived deceivers, of whom sensible women should beware. >' * There is nothing in which women more I need the aid of man than in seeking emancipation from the tyranny of dress- j makers and nurses—those subjugators t who make them the easy prey of cooks ! and chambermaids. Even I* have been unable to cope, single-handed, with the 1 dressmaker. True. I have never,, cm- i

ployed one for myself, and I would as soqn think of hiring an undertaker to make a coffin, and getting into it, as a dressmaker to make a dress, and then wearing it; but I found it hard to educate a daughter to contentment with the form God gaye and once yielded to her entreaties to employ a dressmaker, one of those raras ares one hears about, but. never sees, who will make a dress according to order. When it came home I was almost in despair on witnessing the delight inspired by its deformity but bided mjr time, and was no little relieved when her music-teacher came unhidden to my aid. When she 6at down to her next lesson he soon asked what the matter was, and, noticing the dress, exclaimed: “Oh, it is your dress! why, I thought your mother had some sense!” That dress underwent a thorough revision, and there never since has been a fashionably-made-up dress in our family. If male teachers would use this common sense, notewhen the life is being crushed out of their pupils—aye, and of their female assistants—and protest, they could do much. If every man would insist that the woman he loves —those on whom he depends for home and happiness, and those who depend on him — should never wear anything tight around any part of their body—should dress so as to have their muscles as free as his own —American homes would soon be the abodes of much health and happiness that are strangers to them now, and it would be an honor to be “ Dutch,” because that would be the fashion. —Jane 6. Swisshelm, in Chicago Tribune.