WOMAN TORTURES HER BODY.
Here I want to group the outrages which woman perpetrates upon her beautiful body.
To begin at the top, she almost never permits her hair an opportunity to display its natural beauty. At the present moment, a mass of Japanese bark, or false hair, or some other foreign stuff, full of uncleanness, is piled upon the top of the head, while her own natural hair is twisted, and turned, and pinned, and broken, and ruined in doing subordinate, menial service to the dirty foreign intruder. Besides this, her hair is bedaubed with nameless and dirty greases and oils.
I asked one of the largest retail druggists in this city, "What one article, or line of goods, do you sell most of?"
He replied, without a moment's hesitation, "Preparations for the complexion." These preparations have for their bases three or four deadly poisons. Thousands upon thousands of bottles and boxes are used by the women of Boston every year.
Those glands which, in the economy of nature, are appointed to the most sacred and precious of maternal duties and privileges, are, by the pressure and heat of large artificial pads, almost uniformly ruined. A dressmaker assured me that she very rarely made a dress in which the bust was not padded. The heat and pressure soon spoil the glands.
She bores holes in her ears, and hangs in various trinkets.
In this place I shall not speak at length of that culminating outrage upon woman's body, known as lacing; (not in your case, dear reader, of course, but among your friends.) Look about you, and see what a hideous distortion of the beautiful Greek Slave you see in living figures.
Below the waist there are enormous paddings, which heat and injure the spine.
Below the knee, a ligature, seriously checking the circulation of the feet.
Reaching the feet, we find in the fashionable shoe an ingenious torture. What with the narrow soles and the high heels, the foot is rendered almost helpless, while the ankles are made so weak, that "turning the ankle" is a common occurrence.
In this category I have by no means included all the body tortures in which women indulge; but I have included all that can be properly spoken of in a work which is designed for general reading. Modesty forbids the mention of two or three methods of body torture, in which fashionable women very generally indulge.