It is part and parcel of the problem of the cost of living, of woman's wages, of wasteful industries, of the social evil itself.

It is a woman's most direct weapon against industrial abuses, her all-powerful weapon as a consumer.

At the time of the Lawrence strike, Miss Vida Scudder, of Wellesley College, is reported to have said in a talk to a group of women citizens in Lawrence:-- "I speak for thousands besides myself when I say that I would rather never again wear a thread of woolen than know my garments had been woven at the cost of such misery as I have seen and known, past the shadow of a doubt, to have existed in this town." Miss Scudder might have been more emphatic and still have been entirely within the limit of plain obligation; she might have said, "I will never again wear a thread of woolen woven at the cost of such misery as exists in this town." Women will not be doing their duty, as citizens in this country, until they recognize fully the obligations laid upon them by their control of consumption.
The very heart of the question of the dress is, then, economic and social.

It is one of those great everyday matters on which the moral and physical well-being of society rests.

One of those matters, which, rightly understood, fill the everyday life with big meanings, show it related to every great movement for the betterment of man.
Like all of the great interests in the Business of Being a Woman, it is primarily an individual problem, and every woman who solves it for herself, that is, arrives at what may be called a sound mode of dress, makes a real contribution to society.