this effect, she shrinks from contact, whatever her talent or charm!  And she is often not altogether wrong in thinking she will not be welcome if her dress is not that of the circle to which she aspires.  Many a woman indifferently gowned has been made to feel her difference from the elegant she found herself among.  If she is sure of herself and has a sense of humor, this may be an amusing experience.  To many, however, it is an embittering one!

Now these observations are not presented as discoveries!  They were true, at least, as far back as the Greeks.  In fact, there is nothing in the so-called woman’s movement, which in its essence did not exist then.  The stream of human aspirations, with its stretches of wisdom and of folly, has flowed steadily through the ages, and on its troubled surface men and women have always struggled together as they are struggling to-day.  These little comments simply seem to the writer worth making because for the moment the truths behind them are not getting as much attention as they deserve.  Certainly the tyranny dress exercises over the woman in this American democracy is an old enough theme.  Indeed, it has always formed a part of her program of emancipation.  Out of her revolt against its absurdities has come the most definite development in American costume which we have had, and that is the sensible street costume, which in spite of efforts to distort and displace it, a woman still may wear without differentiating herself from her fellows.

The short skirt and jacket, the shirt waist and stout boots, a woman is allowed to-day, are among the good things which the Woman’s Rights movement of the 40’s and 50’s helped secure for us.  When those able leaders made their attack on man, demanding that the world in which he moved be opened to them, they were quick enough to see that if they succeeded in their undertaking they would be hampered by their clothes.  They revolted!  True, they did not voice this revolt in their historic list of “injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.”  They did not say, “He has compelled her to hamper herself with skirts and stays, to decorate her head with rats and puffs, to paint her face with poisonous compounds, to walk the street in footwear which is neither suitable nor comfortable!”

This statement, however, would have had the same quality of truth as several which were included in the “List of Grievances”; the same as the declaration:  “He has compelled her to submit to laws in the formation of which she has had no voice,” or, “He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her.”

Dress reformers were admitted to the ranks of the agitators.  The initial revolt was thoroughgoing.  They discarded the corset, discarded it when it was still improper to speak the word!  They cut off their hair, cut it off in a day when every woman owned a chignon.  They discarded the corset, cut off their hair, and adopted bloomers!