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Show THE INTOXICATION OF DRESS. <br><br> With women's natural love of beauty and color, added to the astonishing premium placed upon "good clothes" by society and the press, we are not surprised that the horizon of so many women's lives is bounded by a dry-goods establishment, and the dictionary of their language contained in the bazaars of fashion. We have just tossed aside a recent number of one of the most influential journals of the East, twelve pages of which are filled with what purports to be a record of "American society, past and present." Long lists of names are given of women in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Cincinnati and Louisville, who are to be handed down to posterity as famous - for what? For their helpfulness to the age in which they lived? For patriotic endeavor? For earnest work for the future? For an unselfish hospitality? For having developed and consecrated to friends their best gifts of song or conversation? No! but for the quality of dry good they wore. <br><br> We have actually sacrificed an hour in looking through these twelve pages to see if we could discover the name of a single woman poet, actor or philanthropist singled out as worthy of mention because of such fact, but we fail to find one. Even Mrs. Aubrey H. Smith, one of the true nobility, is placed on record as the lady "who wore an imported dress, a dress of striped garnet and old-gold sating, with a court train of black damassc, (damask), trimmed with rich thread lace." <br><br> In every city the homes which have become true literary centers, the rare places where genuine manhood and womanhood are recognized despite the awkward setting of plain attire, are passed by in contempt in making up a social record to show the progress of the last century. <br><br> Twelve pages, and not a hint that one of these ladies gave utterance to a brilliant thought, a suggestive repartee, but this like a procession of wax figures they passed before the admiring world, habited as follows: <br><br> Mrs. --- appeared in many elegant robes. Her evening toilets were as follows, etc., etc. <br><br> In the name of womanhood we protest, and for the sake of American girlhood we beg the editors of our representative journals to put a premium upon something in the world besides dry goods. <br><br> Not much of a compliment to a beauty when the "soul-full eyes" even are surpassed by "a faultlessly artistic toilet of black satin, embroidered in rosebuds and pansies and sprays of filmy green, and a white opera bat, whose tints of color matched the flowers, and evening gloves complicated a toilet whose beauty attracted one like some rare picture." <br><br> So long as women are content to be judged only by the amount of expensive dry goods they wear, so long will they receive such criticism as the following, which appears in a recent popular book: "For is it not, let me ask you, to take, for instance, a man's sublime faculty of reasoning and logical comprehension, far more wonderful that a reasoning man should have the same parents as a woman, than that they should both had the same parents [unreadable line] And just so long as our women make no protest against thus being described and valued as so much lace, or so many yards of velvet, will thinking men dare to address them in the following strain. I quote from a recent publication. "In a girl, however pretty, what is there to interest a man, if he reads nothing in her face from night to night but that she is getting daily more worn and jaded in the search for a rich husband? Or even, to go a step higher, in the unthinking, uncultivated dirt, so common in every class of society - what is there in her that a man will not soon dis-discover (discover) to be insipid and wearying? But give her one genuine, one disinterested taste, and all is changed. If I had an audience about me of young ladies, whom it was not too late to advise - girls entering on the world, determined to run the worldly course, and to satisfy all the expectations of the most excellent and lowest-minded of chaperons, I would say this to them - I have no doubt you are all ignorant; of course you are all vain. That to make a brilliant match is your great object, you all avow. A certain sort of flirting, of which the less the said the better, is your most distinguished taste. I know all this (I should say), and I can't help it; nor do I ask you to alter one of these points for the better. But this I do ask you to do - try to add something else to them. Try to win for yourselves one taste of a truer and deeper sort. Study Wordsworth and some parts of Shelley; open out your sympathies, by their aid, in just one direction. Learn to love the sea, and the woods and the wild flowers, with all their infinite changes of scent and color and sound, the purple moor, the mountain stream, the rolling mists, the wild smell of the heather. Let these things grow to "haunt you like a passion, * * * and then, by and by, go and look in the looking glass, and study your own face. Hasn't some new look, child, come into your eyes and given them expression, a something they wanted before?" <br><br> Aye, more and more, dear girlfriends, to-day intoxicated, enervated by the strange passion for dress, begin to study humanity, determine to do some one thing toward making life brighter for other people, if it is nothing more than amusing a little, restless, disappointed child, and get in the habit of sometimes studying the old gold and crimson, the lovely rose and dreamy blue, or the pearl-tinted gray of God's sunset clouds; lift you eyes just above the shop windows, and honor the young woman whose conversation is filled with pearls of thought and rubies of wit and diamonds of suggestion, and then shall you have filed one claim to a place in the record of America's true women. -MRS. ELIZABETH BOYNTON HARDERT. |