“In this, as in all other reforms, persecution and opposition strengthen the cause they would crush. The result of the anti-slavery movement should convince all that any God-ordained progressive movement, though it may be stayed for a time, cannot be killed and buried because men will it so.”
PETTICOAT PRESENTATION.
Some ladies of Quincy having presented a petticoat to some obnoxious individual, Mrs. Bloomer wrote as follows:
“It has long been customary for men, when they wish to express great contempt for the action of an individual, or to hold him up to the scorn and ridicule of the world, to present him with a petticoat. No matter whether the action be one of meanness and cowardice, or one of heroism in defense of a good cause, the man so acting must be degraded in the eyes of the world by the offer of a woman’s garment—no other being found sufficiently expressive of the disgust of its contemners. It has always seemed strange to me that men were willing to dishonor the mothers who bore them and the wives they have chosen for life-companions by thus selecting one of their garments as the most fitting badge of cowardice, of meanness, of treachery, of weakness, of littleness of soul; and I have never heard of an instance of the kind but my cheek has tingled with shame and indignation—shame that men could thus unblushingly offer insult to woman, indignation that woman must receive and submit tamely to the insult.
“But if such action on the part of men has been painful to me, much more so is the action of the women of Quincy as given in last week’s Chronotype. It is bad enough for men thus to dishonor and insult us; but when woman imitates them in wrongdoing and desecrates her own garment to so bad a use, it is doubly to be deplored, for it is an admission that we are guilty of all the weakness and meanness they attribute to us and that our garment is chosen to represent. It should rather be woman’s part to frown down all such acts with any part of her costume, and ever stand ready to defend it from dishonor.
“I by no means wish to condemn the ladies of Quincy for showing their contempt of the ‘gallant soldier of Kansas.’ Far from it, I admit their spirit and glory in their womanly courage; for I hold it to be the right and duty of woman to mark the slanderer, to speak out against wrong, to defend the injured and innocent, and to drive out and put down immorality and crime, by the power of her own might if need be. I only differ with them in the manner of punishing the coward and would have counseled a more womanly course. Had they waited upon the ‘slanderer’ and ‘coward,’ expressed in strong terms their scorn and contempt for his actions, and warned him to leave the town, it would have been more creditable to them and to the sex than was the presentation of the ‘red flannel garment’—a woman’s garment—as a badge of all that is most despicable in man. I am too jealous of the good name of woman, and hold in too much respect a woman’s petticoat to see it disgraced by any ‘slanderer,’ ‘coward’ or ‘whipped puppy,’ and I would to the last defend it from such disgrace.
“If that garment is in reality the badge of cowardice and inferiority that men would make it to be, then the sooner it is abandoned by woman and one more appropriate to her true character substituted the better. But it is not so. On the contrary it is honored by having been worn by the good, the great, the noble, the heroic, the virtuous, the honorable, the gifted, the most highly praised and exalted among women; and so long as it continues to be so worn it is entitled to respect from both men and women, and he who dares treat it with disrespect should receive the censures of men and the scorn of women.
“The error of the Quincy women was one of the head and not of the heart. Women are sometimes led into error by unthinkingly imitating the follies and vices of men, or by acting under their direction. In the ‘good time coming,’ when women learn to do their own thinking and to rely more on their own judgments, they will rarely be led into wrong or unwise action. May the day hasten speedily on when woman’s dormant powers shall be so developed by education that she will stand forth before the world in all the nobleness and excellence of her being! Then no longer will men revile her garments or taunt her as they now too often do, directly or indirectly, with cowardice, inferiority and weakness of intellect.
“A. B.”