Jane G. Swisshelm, Letters to Country Girls (New York: J.C. Riker, 1853).

[Editorial Note: Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm (1815-1884) was born in Pittsburgh into strict Covenanter branch of the Presbyterian Church. Her father died in 1823, and she helped support the family (mother, brother, and sister) by teaching lace-making; she also painted on velvet. At fourteen she became a schoolteacher. She married James Swisshelm in 1836; he was a farmer's son and a devout Methodist who insisted she give up painting. He also sought to turn her into a Methodist and insisted upon wifely obedience. In 1839 she left him to nurse her mother who died the following year. Jane then turned to journalism. In 1842 her husband returned to Pittsburgh, and they resumed living together on his family farm. In 1848 she launched the Pittsburgh Visiter [her spelling] as an anti-slavery and, later, a woman's rights weekly. Within a few years national circulation topped 6,000 making it one of the most widely read reform papers. One of the paper's most popular features was Swisshelm's weekly "letter to country girls" which she collected in book form in 1853. She was an acerbic critic of the "Bloomer" costume, but a firm believer in dress reform which, as this letter makes clear, she linked to woman's health. She was not alone in making this connection. Many reformers of the day decried women's too tight clothing and, especially, the too tight lacing of corsets.]

NUMBER XXIV
Dressmaking and Health


A "Day Dress, c. 1845		P.160: Dear Girls,--It is a long time since I have written to you, and all this time you have been making your dresses just as you used to do, with a long straight seam under the arm. No; it is not straight, but in the form of an inclined plane, or what carpenters call a bevel, and presses your sides into the shape of a funnel.
You have all heard about the Greek Slave,[1] and know it is a marble statue to show a most perfect and beautiful form, and I wish you could all see it. The outsides of the sides are two hollow curves, as graceful as the undulation between two waves, or the bend in a willow wand. Every one has a shape more or less like this, according as she is more [P. 161] or less beautiful, graceful and natural; and is it not singular that after the Creator has given you a form of beauty--of undulating outlines and graceful, sweeping curves--you should set yourselves deliberately to work to manufacture yourselves into sharp angles and straight, stiff outlines, with no more pretensions to grace than the sides of an old Dutch churn? This you nearly all do, and you do it by the shape of the seam under your arm. You sew it in a regular slope from the armpit to the bottom of the waist, and that is as long as it can possibly be made. This makes the smallest part of your body below your ribs--that is, you squeeze in the muscles and flesh where there are no bones to resist the force, and so crowd your liver until it cannot act; and you grow yellow, bilious, nervous--ugly as sin, even in your faces. It is very strange you can be so foolish--that any one would deliberately ruin her own health for the privilege of looking ugly. It does make me nervous to see a woman on the street, with this tight place below her ribs; and her wag, wagging, like the limbs of a supple Jack. I have grown so desperately disgusted at this way of making dresses by seeing great, ugly, ignorant [P. 162] vulgar girls waddling among the pots and washtubs, with their apron strings drawn round below their ribs, until they looked by a wool-bag tied with a cord in the centre. It is very strange that any one having pretensions to gentility- to say nothing of good sense--would be caught dressed in a way that proclaims to every one her ignorance of the laws of physiology--of the rules of grace and symmetry, and of all taste for the painting and statuary of Greece and Rome. i never see a woman dressed so but the first thought is: "Wonder if that woman can read!" It is a sign of ignorance, and nothing else can be pleaded in extenuation of such folly.

I wish, girls, how I do wish I could impress this matter upon your minds. If you could gain the shadow of an idea of its importance, you would not dare disregard, as you do, the laws upon which depends you life's happiness, and life itself. You would not, for the sake of looking like the simpering figures in a fashion plate, throw away the exuberant delight of buoyant health, and the blessing promised to pious children, "Long life and prosperity." Health! health. How little you know its value; for as it has been entirely out of fashion, in this coun[P.163]try, for the last half century, not one in a dozen of you ever saw any one who was not more or less crippled or diseased. This want of health is our great national calamity, and in writing to you it is the centre around which my thoughts constantly revolve. Do not get tired, or blame me if I give you "line upon line, and precept upon precept,"[2] in hope that some one phase of the subject will awaken your attention to its importance.

Fashion plate from Godey's Ladies Book, April 1850: Morning dress of pink and white organdy, with four flounces scalloped and bound. The waist is folded very tastefully, from the band on the shoulder to the ribbon girdle, which is a pink centre with a broad white satin stripe on each side.		It is our habits of life which deprive us of the inestimable boon of health, and to no one, or two, or three of these false habits do we owe so much misery as to this accursed funnel-shaped bodice which is now crushing the vitality out of ninety-nine of every one hundred women in the United States. I have no patience with it, and sometimes feel as if Godey, Graham, Sartain, Peterson, and the Harpers should be tried for their lives, and suffer the extreme penalty of the law. If the ghosts of all whom their fashion plates have murdered, could be brought to the witness box, there would be no lack of evidence to show that their sisters' blood is crying from the ground against them; but their participation in the crime does not lessen the guilt of those who dare to [P. 164] go uncalled to the judgment bar of God, for sake of looking like those beflounced and befrumpled caricatures of humanity, yclept [called] "fashion plates."
True, the flounces and frumples are matters of no great importance in themselves, and would not be worth any great amount of condemnation or approbation if it were not that in order to set them off to the best advantage, the wearer must be, as nearly as possible, cut into two pieces. It might be a very innocent amusement to get up monthly pictures of variations in dress, provided these pictures would represent it as possible for a woman to live inside her personal adornments; but when the entrée can only be gained and kept at a sacrifice of one-half or two-thirds "her three score years and ten," it is rather a grave business.

It may be that very many of you never see a fashion plate, and think I am talking at random; but if you do not see for yourselves, others see them for you, and in copying "the fashions," as soon as you can learn what they are, you follow the lead, and dress after the plates just as truly as a metropolitan belle.

But how I talk; and you open your eyes in inno{P.165]cent wonder, for you are "not tight!" Not a bit of it. There, lay down the book and press you hands upon your sides! If I was there you could show me that your dress bulges out until you can take up a handful of the waist at each side. Call that tight! Why, you can thrust both hands up under the sides of your bodice, and you laugh to think how that woman does talk.

It is one remarkable fact in natural history, that water snakes are nearly as plentiful as pigs, and yet "the sea serpent" has never yet been captured; and a second equally wonderful truth that thousands of women die annually from compression of the chest, yet the woman who wears tight clothes has never been caught. When a man gets into the gutter he will sometimes acknowledge to being "tight", decidedly tight; but a woman will go to the grave without confession; for the very good reason that not one in a hundred can be made to feel the truth and understand the connection between the cause and effect.

When a man gets drunk he cannot help knowing it was his glass which makes his head reel and his limbs unsteady. The cause and effect are so in-[P.166]timately connected, and so apparent, that any fool can trace it; but if he had commenced in infancy to swallow as much rum as would keep him constantly drunk--suppose he had grown up without knowing what it was to be sober, do you think he would be conscious of the muddled state of his own brain? It is because a man is sometimes sober, that he knows when he is drunk; and it is because you never felt the play of full-formed, untrammelled lungs, that you do not know that you are only half alive. The fact that you can press in you ribs, like the sides of a pasteboard box, is itself sufficient evidence that your clothes have so long been too tight, that your poor worn muscles are too feeble to resist or cry out lustily when they are hurt. Like a nation long and cruelly oppressed, they have lost the power of resistance, and can only drag onward to decay.

If you only knew the diseases and miseries which unhealthy costume will bring upon you, and think who are, and will be dearest to you, you would take some pains to learn if your dress is healthful; and if you want to know, I think I can tell you how to find out.

If you have head-ache, or dizziness, shadows [P. 167] about your eyes, or a singing in your ears, a cold spot between your shoulders, an ache in your back, or a pain in your side--if you have cold feet, there is a strong probability that something is wrong with your dress.

Then, girls, if you only knew--if you only knew, the indelicate exposures, the miseries and mortifications you may be called upon to suffer from the continued effects of this wrong, I know you would try very earnestly to prevent them. These symptoms are premonitory of, or attendant upon diseases worse than sudden death. The only remedy is to remove the cause. This is so easy to do! No occasion for superhuman effort of moral courage. No reason you should make yourself ridiculous or remarkable. Just make a waist of drilling,[3] or some stout material, cut like the lining of a low necked bodice, and two or three inches longer than your dress waist, with "a spring," or slope outward, to come down over the hips, and two or three inches wider than your waist measures with a string when you are undressed. Make it to fasten up the back with buttons, and sew one of these to each one of your underskirts; have a strong button on each [P. 168] side, one before, and at the back, and work button-holes to correspond in the band of each of your other skirts. Then button on every skirt you wear! Have all your dress waists cut with a spring or slope outward, in the lower part of the side seam. have them so loose, that every time you raise your arm, all that side of your clothing will raise with it, without any more opposition than its own weight. Then all the internal machinery of your body has room to work, and yourself and friends will very soon become so accustomed to the grace and ease this will give your motions, that you will wonder how you ever could have borne to look into a mirror, while your sides were pressed down into long straight lines. Wear no more clothing than you feel necessary to keep you comfortable; and for working and walking dresses, have your dress and outside skirts some three or four inches too short to touch the floor when you stand straight--your underskirt several inches shorter to dispense with cumbrous drapery, without resigning the grace of flowing skirts. With these precautions you can wear any style of trimming or material, and never once appear awkwardly out of fashion, or subject your-[P. 169]self to the annoyance of a curious gaze. Your dress will then be no impediment to the recovery of perfect health, and by daily taking any kind of cold or tepid bath you find pleasant and convenient, taking care to have pure air to breathe, taking such exercise as you can bear, living on simple food, with no hot drinks, and keeping a cheerful temper, you may bring roses to sallow cheeks, and diamond light to leaden eyes. Try it, dear girls, do! It is well worth while to pay this little tax of attention for health and happiness. It is a duty you owe to yourselves, your friends, society, and your Creator.

NOTES
[1]Sculpted in 1847 by Hiram Powers (1805-1873), American neo classicist who studied in Rome. "The Greek Slave" is currently in the Newark Museum.
[2]A reference to Isaiah, 28:13 [King James Version] "But the word of the LORD was unto them precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little; that they might go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken.
[3]A heavy cotton fabric often used in work clothes.