an appearance of the masculine instincts of self-expression
and display. Alone among all female things do women decorate and preen
themselves and exhibit their borrowed plumage (literally!) to attract
the favor of the male. This ignominy is forced upon them by their
position of economic dependence; and their general helplessness. As all
broader life is made to depend, for them, on whom they marry, indeed as
even the necessities of life so often depend on their marrying someone,
they have been driven into this form of competition, so alien to the
true female attitude.

The result is enough to make angels weep--and laugh. Perhaps no step in
the evolution of beauty went farther than our human power of making
a continuous fabric; soft and mobile, showing any color and texture
desired. The beauty of the human body is supreme, and when we add to it
the flow of color, the ripple of fluent motion, that comes of a soft,
light garment over free limbs--it is a new field of loveliness and
delight. Naturally this should have filled the whole world with a new
pleasure. Our garments, first under right natural selection developing
perfect use, under right sex selection developing beauty; and further,
as our human aesthetic sense progresses, showing a noble symbolism,
would have been an added strength and glory, a ceaseless joy.

What is the case?

Men, under a too strictly inter-masculine environment, have evolved the
mainly useful but beautiless costume common to-day; and women--?

Women wear beautiful garments when they happen to be the fashion; and
ugly garments when they are the fashion, and show no signs of knowing
the difference. They show no added pride in the beautiful, no hint
of mortification in the hideous, and are not even sensitive under
criticism, or open to any persuasion or argument. Why should they be?

Their condition, physical and mental, is largely abnormal, their whole
passionate absorption in dress and decoration is abnormal, and they have
never looked, from a frankly human standpoint, at their position and its
peculiarities, until the present age.

In the effect of our wrong relation on the world's health, we have
spoken of the check to vigor and growth due to the housebound state
of women and their burdensome clothes. There follow other influences,
similar in origin, even more evil in result. To roughly and briefly
classify we may distinguish the diseases due to bad air, to bad
food, and that field of cru