both instances a barbarous conception alike of beauty and of the function
of woman. The squeezed waist and the squeezed foot equally assume that
distortion of the human frame may be beautiful, and that helpless idleness
is the highest sphere of woman.

But the imperfection of our Western civilization shows itself in more
serious forms involving women. The promiscuous herding of men and women
prisoners in jails, the opposition to reformatories and penitentiaries
exclusively for women, and, in general, the failure to provide, as a matter
of course, women attendants and women nurses for all women prisoners and
patients, is a signal illustration of a low tone of civilization. The most
revolting instance of this abuse was the discovery during the summer that
the patients in a woman's insane hospital in New Orleans were bathed by
male attendants.

It should not need such outrages to apprise us of the worth of the general
principle that humanity and decency require that in all public institutions
women should be employed in the care of women. A wise proposition during
the year to provide women at the police-stations for the examination of
women who are arrested failed to become law. It is hard, upon the merits of
the proposal, to understand why. Women who are arrested may be criminals,
or drunkards, or vagabonds, or insane, or witless, or sick. But whatever
the reason of the arrest, there can be no good reason whatever, in a truly
civilized community, that a woman taken under such circumstances should be
abandoned to personal search and examination by the kind of men to whom
that business is usually allotted. The surest sign of the civilization
of any community is its treatment of women, and the progress of our
civilization is shown by the constant amelioration of that condition. But
the unreasonable and even revolting circumstances of much of the public
treatment of them may wisely modify ecstasies over our vast superiority.