Ellen G. White and Her Critics

A Threefold Indictment

Various vigorous writers in mid-nineteenth century indicted the current styles of women’s dress on three counts: (1) unhealthful, (2) impractical, (3) immodest. EGWC 138.6

They were unhealthful. Tight-fitting corsets restricted the breathing, and heavy skirts hung from the waist crowded the vital organs out of place. The hoop skirts kept the clothing away from the lower limbs, a custom which meant that they were chilled in winter. The trailing skirts gathered up the filth or the dampness of the streets. The dresses were impractical. It was only with great difficulty that a woman wearing a hoop skirt could enter a carriage or a streetcar or could ascend a staircase. And they were immodest, for the only way that a woman could negotiate certain entrances and exits, and ascents and descents of stairs, was by lifting one side of the hoop skirt in order to shorten its diameter at the base. EGWC 138.7

Listen to Mrs. M. Angeline Merritt, writing in 1852 of the unhealthfulness of the current style, particularly upon the mothers of men: EGWC 139.1

“The popular fashions of the present day are not only operating insidiously, but mechanically, to lower the standard, which it is the duty, and should be the pride, of every mother to attain, in presenting offspring to the world with perfect physical, mental and moral requisites, to make the future man. The most prominent of these which militate against the health, natural position, and vitality, of the maternal organs, located in the cavity under consideration, is the present debilitating, injurious mode of female dress, which not only affects prominently the individual herself, but exercises an almost illimitable influence upon the physical condition of her children.”—Dress Reform Practically and Physiologically Considered, pp. 48, 49. EGWC 139.2

Of the inconvenient character of the current styles, she wrote: EGWC 139.3

“Every lady who has any experience in domestic life, must understand the abundant inconvenience attendant upon a style of dress, the dimensions of whose superfluities may be adduced in yards and pounds. The utility of skirts for sweeping floors and sidewalks, and for mopping stairways and passages, has become a proverb.”—Testimonies for the Church 1:79. (Italics hers.) EGWC 139.4