MH page 291

The mother has no time to study the principles of physical development, that she may know how to care for the health of her children. She has no time for ministering to their mental or spiritual needs, no time to sympathize with them in their little disappointments and trials, or to share in their interests and pursuits.

Maternal preoccupation with clothing tasks prevents mothers from studying physical development, caring for child health, and supporting children's mental and spiritual needs. It describes the practical and developmental consequences of time-consuming domestic burdens on childcare and education.

Almost as soon as they come into the world the children are subjected to fashion's influence. They hear more of dress than of their Saviour. They see their mothers consulting the fashion plates more earnestly than the Bible. The display of dress is treated as of greater importance than the development of character. Parents and children are robbed of that which is best and sweetest and truest in life. For fashion's sake they are cheated out of a preparation for the life to come.

Children are exposed to fashion and worldly priorities over spiritual character development. The paragraph addresses moral and spiritual priorities regarding child upbringing and fashion rather than physiological mechanisms.

It was the adversary of all good who instigated the invention of the ever-changing fashions. He desires nothing so much as to bring grief and dishonor to God by working the misery and ruin of human beings. One of the means by which he most effectually accomplishes this is the devices of fashion that weaken the body as well as enfeeble the mind and belittle the soul.

Harmful fashions originate from spiritual opposition and result in physical, mental, and spiritual ruin. The statement attributes the origin of fashion to a spiritual adversary and is a religious assertion.

Women are subject to serious maladies, and their sufferings are greatly increased by their manner of dress. Instead of preserving their health for the trying emergencies that are sure to come, they by their wrong habits too often sacrifice not only health but life, and leave to their children a legacy of woe in a ruined constitution, perverted habits, and false ideas of life.

Improper dress increases women's maladies, damages health, and negatively affects children's constitutions. It combines a spiritual-ethical warning about life choices with empirical claims about health consequences and hereditary constitutions.

One of fashion's wasteful and mischievous devices is the skirt that sweeps the ground. Uncleanly, uncomfortable, inconvenient, unhealthful—all this and more is true of the trailing skirt. It is extravagant, both because of the superfluous material required and because of the needless wear on account of its length. And whoever has seen a woman in a trailing skirt, with hands filled with parcels, attempt to go up or down stairs, to enter a streetcar, to walk through a crowd, to walk in the rain or on a muddy road, needs no other proof of its inconvenience and discomfort.

Trailing skirts are uncleanly, extravagant, inconvenient, and unhealthful. The text presents observational judgments and practical inconveniences regarding garment design.