and not for approval) the following remarks:  “The lady who asked the question whether women may be instructed in the modern system of botany, was accused of ridiculous prudery; nevertheless, if she had proposed the question to me, I should certainly have answered:  ‘They cannot!’” She further quotes from an educational book:  “It would be needless to caution you against putting your hand, by chance, under your neck-handkerchief; for a modest woman never did so.” (Mary Wollstonecraft, The Rights of Woman, 1792, pp. 277, 289.)

At the present time a knowledge of the physiology of plants is not usually considered inconsistent with modesty, but a knowledge of animal physiology is still so considered by many.  Dr. H.R.  Hopkins, of New York, wrote in 1895, regarding the teaching of physiology:  “How can we teach growing girls the functions of the various parts of the human body, and still leave them their modesty?  That is the practical question that has puzzled me for years.”

In England, the use of drawers was almost unknown among women half a century ago, and was considered immodest and unfeminine.  Tilt, a distinguished gynecologist of that period, advocated such garments, made of fine calico, and not to descend below the knee, on hygienic grounds.  “Thus understood,” he added, “the adoption of drawers will doubtless become more general in this country, as, being worn without the knowledge of the general observer, they will be robbed of the prejudice usually attached to an appendage deemed masculine.” (Tilt, Elements of Health, 1852, p. 193.) Drawers came into general use among women during the third quarter of the nineteenth century.

Drawers are an Oriental garment, and seem to have reached Europe through Venice, the great channel of communication with the East.  Like many other refinements of decency and cleanliness, they were at first chiefly cultivated by prostitutes, and, on this account, there was long a prejudice against them.  Even at the present day, it is said that in France, a young peasant girl will exclaim, if asked whether she wears drawers:  “I wear drawers, Madame?  A respectable girl!” Drawers, however, quickly became acclimatized in France, and Dufour (op. cit., vol. vi, p. 28) even regards them as essentially a French garment.  They were introduced at the Court towards the end of the fourteenth century, and in the sixteenth century were rendered almost necessary by the new fashion of the vertugale, or farthingale.  In 1615, a lady’s calecons are referred to as apparently an ordinary garment.  It is noteworthy that in London, in the middle of the same century, young Mrs. Pepys, who was the daughter of French parents, usually wore drawers, which were seemingly of the closed kind. (Diary of S. Pepys, ed.  Wheatley, May 15, 1663, vol. iii.) They were probably not worn by Englishwomen, and even in France, with the decay of the farthingale,