The Langham Place Circle viewed dress-reform as both healthy and conducive to emancipation, and in the 1850s published a significant number of articles on dress and on travel. The bound feet of Chinese women became a common symbol of the repression of fashion, and many considered the tight corset a similar instrument of torture. For the Rational Dress Society the inferiority of women lay in their dress, and in the article about their annual meeting in Women's Penny Paper, Lady Harberton was reported as saying
'When men saw the way we mismanaged affairs in which we had free action and which were peculiarly our own, what wonder that they were against giving us the franchise and regarded us as inferior beings'.
The reformers were disappointed that whilst intellectual opportunities for women were greater than they had ever been before, notions of dress were relatively backward. They argued in The Rational Dress Society's Gazette that women should 'free their bodies and render them fit companions for their enlarged minds' (1888).
The majority of the mainstream press remained hostile to rational dress as a serious alternative to contemporary fashion, and the reformers were often lampooned for allegedly wishing to dress like men. An article in Women's Penny Paper (1889) asserted that the 'manly young lady' is quite different from:
