CLOTHING
Next in importance to the food of the infant is its clothing. The usual style of dressing babies the first three months of their lives is positively barbaric; not that it imitates uncivilized people, but because it evidences the grossest ignorance and cruelest vanity. The mother seems to have no way of expressing her pride in her child except by bedecking it with elaborate garments. These usually consist of three long skirts, two of them attached to bands which are fastened around the body. The weight of this clothing prevents the free use of the baby's feet and legs, putting it into a kind of civilized strait-jacket, thus preventing it from exercising the only part of its anatomy that it can freely move.
It is nothing uncommon to see a beautiful baby sore, irritated, and broken out with heat all over its little body by being heavily enveloped in barbaric rags. The child, therefore, is made to suffer merely that it may please a proud mother, and conform to an ignorant custom a thousand years old.
The only purpose clothing should serve is that of bodily warmth. When it is made the instrument of painful adornment it is serving the same purpose as "rings in the ears and bells on the toes," and the mind of the mother who thus afflicts her child is in the same class as that of the ignorant barbarian whom she imitates.