The Story of our Health Message

Dress Reform Principles Prevailed

Because the popular agitation over dress reform was carried forward for only two or three decades, and because the costumes they designed and advocated were later discontinued, it might seem that the cause of these reformers was lost. But the principles for which they valiantly contended have prevailed. This is well set forth in an editorial in a popular journal, from which we quote: SHM 118.2

“The cause for which the early dress reformers labored and suffered martyrdom has triumphed in almost all points, but in a very different way than they anticipated. They considered only health and convenience. They cared little for beauty, knew nothing of art. Their attempts to introduce the bloomer and other costumes of equal ugliness fortunately failed, but their efforts were not altogether wasted. ... SHM 118.3

“The chief points in the indictment of woman’s dress of former times were that the figure was dissected like a wasp’s, that the hips were overloaded with heavy skirts, and that the skirts dragged upon the ground and swept up the dirt. Nowadays the weight of a woman’s clothing as a whole is only half or a third of what it used to be. Four dresses can be packed in the space formerly filled by one. In the one-piece dresses now in vogue the weight is borne from the shoulders, and the hips are relieved by reducing the skirts in weight, length, and number. The skirt no longer trails upon the street.... The women who, for conscientious reasons, refused to squeeze their waists, and in consequence suffered the scorn of their sex, now find themselves on the fashionable side. A thirty-two-inch waist is regarded as permissible, where formerly a twenty-inch waist was thought proper. A fashionably gowned woman of the present day can stoop to pick up a pin at her feet.”—New York Independent, October 23, 1913. SHM 118.4

It is possible for womanhood today to be clothed neatly, modestly, inexpensively, and healthfully without the necessity of a wide divergence from accepted styles. SHM 119.1