Modern dress-reform crusades have ever been allied with womanly revolts against man’s authority. They proceeded originally from that fount of vulgarity, that never-failing source of offence--America. In the United States, that ineffable land of wooden nutmegs and timber hams, of strange religions, of jerrymandering and unscrupulous log-rollery, the Prophet Bloomer first arose, and, discarding the feminine skirt, stood forth, unashamed and blatant, in trousers! The wrath of the Bloomers (as the followers of the Prophet were termed) was calculated to disestablish at once and for ever the skirts and frocks, the gowns and miscellaneous feminine fripperies, that had obtained throughout the centuries; and they conceived that with the abolishment of skirts the long-sustained supremacy of man was also to disappear, even as the walls of Jericho fell before the trumpet-sound of the Lord’s own people. For these enthusiasts were no cooing doves, but rather shrieking cats, and they were both abusive and overweening. No more should ‘tempestuous petticoats’ inspire a Herrick to dainty verse, but the woman of the immediate future should move majestically through the wondering continents of the Old World and the New with mannish strides in place of the feminine mincing gait induced by clinging draperies. Away Erato and your sister Muses--if, indeed, your susceptibilities would have allowed your remaining to behold the spectacle! For really, that must have been a ‘sight for sore eyes’-- to adopt the expression of the period--the too-convincing vision of a middle-aged woman, proof against ridicule, consumed with all seriousness and an ineffable zeal for converting all and sundry to her peculiar views in the matter of a becoming and convenient attire. And never was prophet less justified of his country than the Bloomer seer of hers; for nakedness, even to undraped piano-legs, was then a reproach in the country of the Stars and Stripes, where legs are not legs, an’t please you, but ‘extremities’ or ‘limbs;’ where trousers are neither more than ‘pantaloons’ nor less than ‘continuations.’ In that Land of Freedom, where one would have outraged all modesty by the merest mention of legs or feet--these last indispensable adjuncts being generally known as ‘pedal extremities’--it surely was illogical in the highest degree that women should wear a species of trouser, and thereby proclaim the indelicate(!) fact to all the world of their possession of legs. Truly Pudicitia is as American a goddess as Mammon is a god!