Selected Lead Articles from The Dawn | Page 3

floor, nor throw a ball with any certainty that it will fall before us. The outdoor gait of a large proportion of women is certainly spoilt by lack of freedom, and the arms of the majority hang cylindrical and stiff like a bent stove-pipe. All these things make us sigh for a race of clear thinking women who are not afraid, whose own judgment is guidance enough and reason enough, and who will dress for health, decency, and comfort only. It would seem merely reasonable to wear garments which will leave our arms at least as much freedom as a doll's arm on a wire hinge, and to refrain from tying our ribs together, in a way which prevents respiration, and disturbs our anatomy, particularly as the only gain we achieve, is a counterfeit beauty of an unnatural model. We laugh at the Chinese women with their poor useless bandaged feet, and all the while we are tying up ourselves and laming much more important organs than feet, viz. lungs. For experiments prove that the average lung capacity, without corsets, is 167 cubic inches, but with the armour plating on, it is 134 inches only. Now, the first necessity of life is to breathe freely, for the blood collects poisons in its course, which can only be cleansed from the system by exposure to air in the lungs, and if anyone desires to feed her body on entirely pure and well-cleansed blood, it is essential that the action of the lungs should be untramelled. When we remember that every minute, a quantity of blood equal to the entire amount in the body is passed through the lungs for purification, and that it is from the blood that every part of the system from head to foot, draws its material of life, and replenishment and renewal, it is apparent that the least aid we can give to the capacity of inhaling pure air, is an aid to the health of every organ and tissue in the body, brain included. It is generally admitted, that, on the average, women are much weaker and much more subject to small ailments than men are, in spite of the fact that the anatomy of each is so alike as to require an expert to distinguish between them, and it is reasonable to suppose that part of this weakness is due to habitual constriction of the lungs through many generations, and habitual compression of the organs which lie below the diaphragm. Few people are aware that women who wear tight waist-bands breathe in a manner that is unnatural, and unlike all other human creatures. All natural men and women, whether civilised or savage, do, in the act of inspiration, expand both the upper and lower part of the chest, but the maximum expansion in all men, and in natural women, is abdominal. You inhale a full breath, the ribs rise slightly, the upper part of the chest dilates, the diaphragm contracts, and at the waist there should be, in healthy people, an expansion of from one to three inches, but there are few women whose habiliments allow an expansion of more than one-quarter or one half-an-inch. Thus the modern woman with a diminished lung-action, breathes mainly with the upper part of her chest, while all men, and all women who breathe freely, breathe almost entirely with the lower part. Even if this change were not injurious and we could afford to dispense with a full lung-action, the compression of the waist is necessarily hurtful, since it squeezes internal organs, and prevents the due contraction of the diaphragm, a contraction which materially assists the liver in the discharge of blood and bile. Tie a tight bandage round the waist of a man and the functions of the organs affected are impaired, he is unable to make more than two thirds of the mental and physical exertion of which he is capable. Is it not probable that women lose nearly the same proportion of their natural ability? But the idea of corsets on a man is ridiculed everywhere. Does it not strike you as possible, that the air of amused toleration with which men often regard women, is due to her pervading artificiality--this padding and strapping? If one man sees another using the smallest device to improve his features or figure, does he not instantly despise the intentional sham? And while men are expected to alter their standard of opinion for woman's benefit, and to concede to women the liberty to ingeniously alter and add to their natural figures, without the penalty of contempt--"because you know she is a woman"--how can we expect men to place women in their regard and respect on a real equality with any agreeable and wholly natural fellow-man? A writer in Scribner's magazine