Women to Go Undressed if They Desire
January 7, 1917
A. M. Fairfield asks assemblyman Mathews to introduce bill freeing women from interference. The women of the warmer portion of the state were covered with blushes and the fair sex living in this part of the state were covered with goose flesh at the announcement printed broadcast last Sunday that A. M. Fairfield of Susanville had asked Assemblyman A. J. Mathews to introduce in the legislature a bill “To permit any women of known respectability to appear in public naked or as nearly so as she pleases without police interference.”
Mathews is getting the bill in shape and it will probably be dumped in the legislative hopper before the adjournment today.
As the result of our observations we would say that women will dress or undress about as they please without regards to laws that may be passed by that portion of the human race that is most nearly related to the brute, Mathews is young and inexperienced and we are not surprised that he does not know this but Fairfield is old enough to know better than to attempt to regulate such thing as by law, and he should not have attempted to thus mislead Artie.
His long years of blessed singleness have given him unlimited opportunities for observation. A married man is kept so darn busy trying to find money to pay for women’s dresses that he does not have time to notice what they look like.
Maybe this is a revolt on the part of Mr. Fairfield against the high cost of living and he thus thinks to eliminate one of the principal items of expense. But if he were a close observer, he would know that thought a woman wears only a fig leaf that fig leaf would have to be the latest Parisian model and be imported.
Had he ever paid for any of those slit skirts and diaphanous gowns he would know that the less goods they contain the more they cost.
Mr. Fairfield concludes his letter to Mathews with the statement that “Woman has been under they tyranny of men long enough.” That is where Fairfield shows his inexperience.
Although Art may be young we will bet that he does not fall for any of that “tyranny” bunk. He knows where the seat of “tyranny” is in the modern American household.
Fairfield is the historian of Lassen County, all right, and he has written a book that is not only true to historical facts but is mighty interesting reading as well, but when he attempts to assume the role of a female dress regulator we are afraid he is getting out of his class and fear that his fair fame as a historian will become obscured in the meshes of clouds of lace that he asks the ladies to discard.
