"LEGS TIED UP"

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 95, 23 April 1931, Page 17

"LEGS TIED UP"

EFFECT ON CHARACTER

(From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, 20th March. Long skirts wore condemned by a largo majority at a meeting in London of tho National Union of Socioties for Equal Citizenship. Tho resolution, ivliieh was moved by Mrs. M. Stocks, of Manchester, deplored tho return of long skirts as a reaction against Uio personal comforts and physical liberty of- women, reminiscent of tho years of their political disonfranchiscment. It called npon. all women who valued such liberty to resist this reaction by refusing to allow the arbitrary decrees of fashion. She maintained that a. person's actions and mentality were affected by the clothes she worn, aud tho coincidence between tho freeing of women from hampering dress and tho freeing of women in politics was really no coincidence at all. "When'our clothes got long again and our legs arc tied up, our minds will suffer," sho declared. "When I road of women, whose skirls are like creamy

foam ruunrl their ankles, I iilwnys think i they must havo creamy foam'in their j lieiuls, loo." "A SUPERIORITY COMPLEX." Mrs. Stocks recalled the "dreadful1 stays" which her mother bought for her when she wenf, to school, but she refused to wear them. ""Where,'" she continued, "'do you think your figure will bo when you are forty/ asked her mother. Well, I am ■JO, and I do not know whore it is. I only know it is not where my mother thought it would be. To-day, when I go about I havo a superiority complex when I compare my clothes with men's clothes. In hot weather I can take off nearly all my clothes, while men cannot even remove their coats without being turned out of restaurants. "Wo should do our best to keep that superiority complex. What annoys mo is to see adult politically enfranchised women wearing clothes they do not like just because other women are wearing them. I for one am not going to wear long skirts, if everybody else in tho world does. The kind of porson who should take tho lead on this question is tho Duchess of York or Lady Diana Cooper. There is at leaat one lady in this country who chooses her own fashions and sticks to them, and that is the Queen." (Cheers.) Miss Eleanor Bathbono, M.P., saifl: "What we dislike is the humbug of I having to treat as important things what men have said are important in setting our fashions. A woman's life is very largely eondiV 1101 l by her clothing', and this question is worthy of being regarded quite as seriously as any other on our agenda." .