hysicians dare take a stand
against the abuse, accurately informed though they are on the
injuriousness of her dress. The fear of displeasing the patient often
causes them to hold their tongues, if they do not even flatter her
insane notions. Modern dress hinders woman in the free use of her limbs,
it injures her physical growth, and awakens in her a sense of impotence
and weakness. Moreover, modern dress is a positive danger to her own and
the health of those who surround her: in the house and on the street,
woman is a walking raiser of dust. And likewise is the development of
woman hampered by the strict separation of the sexes, both in social
intercourse and at school--a method of education wholly in keeping with
the spiritual ideas that Christianity has deeply implanted in us on all
matters that regard the nature of man.

The woman who does not reach the development of her faculties, who is
crippled in her powers, who is held imprisoned in the narrowest circle
of thought, and who comes into contact with hardly any but her own
female relatives,--such a woman can not possibly raise herself above the
routine of daily life and habits. Her intellectual horizon revolves only
around the happenings in her own immediate surroundings, family affairs
and what thereby hangs. Extensive conversations on utter trifles, the
bent for gossip, are promoted with all might; of course her latent
intellectual qualities strain after activity and exercise;--whereupon
the husband, often involved thereby in trouble, and driven to
desperation, utters imprecations upon qualities that he, the "chief of
creation," has mainly upon his own conscience.

With woman--whose face all our social and sexual relations turn toward
marriage with every fibre of her being--marriage and matrimonial matters
constitute, quite naturally, a leading portion of her conversation and
aspirations. Moreover, to the physically weaker woman, subjected as she
is to man by custom and laws, the tongue is her principal weapon against
him, and, as a matter of course, she makes use thereof. Similarly with
regard to her severely censured passion for dress and desire to please,
which reach their frightful acme in the insanities of fashion, and often
throw fathers and husbands into great straits and embarrassments. The
explanation lies at hand. To man, woman is, first of all, an object of
enjoyment. Economically and socially unfree, she is bound to see in
marriage her means of sup