Victorian “Don’ts”: Advice to Women | Meredith Sweetpea

Miss Meredith Sweetpea came across a charming and poetic list of Victorian “don’ts” listed as “Advice to women in the 1890s.” I wonder how many of these apply today?

Advice to Women in the 1890s

• Don’t adopt the latest mode.
• Don’t trail your dress upon the road.
• Don’t ever lace your waist too tightly.
• Don’t wear a glove or boot unsightly.

• Don’t wear a thing that needs repair.
• Don’t, please, forget to brush your hair.
• Don’t ever wear too large a check.
• Don’t show too much of snowy neck.

• Don’t paint the lilies and roses on your face, fair maiden.
• Don’t have windows in your gloves and stockings where they were never intended to be.
• Don’t think the love your tiny waist wins will wash; because it won’t.
• Don’t think because your neighbor’s bonnet is becoming to her, it will necessarily be becoming to yourself.

• Don’t go in for quantity so much as quality in dress. One well-made gown is worth half a dozen ill-fitting ones.
• Don’t neglect the accessories of dress; untidy gloves, unshapely shoes, will destroy the effect of the most charming toilette.
• Don’t, above all things, forget you are a woman; she is far more attractive when seen in the flowing draperies that centuries of use have made their own, than when masquerading as a man.
• Don’t buy hats at the expense of boots.

• Don’t buy in haste and repent at leisure.
• Don’t ignore the conventional, and torture your friends with “a style of my own.”
• Don’t wear dead rats round your throat, though it be the fashion.
• Don’t neglect the neat tying of a veil.
• Don’t put your gloves on in the street.