While it is undoubted true that the practice of tight lacing is regarded with growing disfavor, it is also true that the corsets in vogue, at present… - Mary Livermore

It is more than fifty years since Margaret Fuller, standing, as she said, “in the sunny noon of life,” wrote a little book, which she launched on the current of thought and society. It was entitled “Women in the Nineteenth Century”; and as the truths it proclaimed and the reforms it advocated were far in advance of public acceptance, its appearance was the signal for an immediate widespread newspaper controversy, that raged with great violence. I was young then, and as I took the book from the hands of the bookseller, wondering what the contents of the thin little volume could be, to provoke so wordy a strife, I opened the first page. My attention was immediately arrested, and a train of thought started

“Do you expect to train boys to the same standard of morality as girls?” I am asked. “It cannot be done. Boys will be boys, and young men will have their time of sewing wild oats.” And this is said as cavalierly, as if “wild oats,” when sowed, never come to harvest. As Gold lives, “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap,” — “wild oats,” or whatever else. It is possible to train boys to the same standard of purity that is upheld for their sisters. It is not safe, and it is indeed cruel, to ignore this, when we consider the physical consequences and the moral debasement of a dissipated life. Every boy should be trained to courtesy, self-possession, and a regard for the rights and wishes of others.

The old-time theory that “all men support all women” led to the enactment of laws which gave all the earnings of the married woman to her husband; in most instances gave him control of her property, always legal possession of her person, and legal ownership of her minor children; the righto decide the location of their joint domicile; the power, in short, the become the arbiter of her fate;