“Women and Pockets” (1885)

Please note that this post is from 2017. Evaluate with care and in light of later events.

I occasionally come across fun little writings as I go about my own research. Here’s one from the “Boston Beacon” (and republished in the San Francisco Chronicle) in 1885 (via Proquest):

The straights to which helpless woman has been subjected by the absence of pockets in her gowns have wrung from her many complaints that have availed her nothing. She has begged and pleaded for “more” in vain, and then taken to leather or silk hand-bags as a substitute, but now even these articles are denied her by fashion and the dressmaker, and she really knows not what to do for need of a place to keep her handkerchief and her purse. Any lawful possessor of pockets who has watched a woman struggling to get at her fare in a crowded horse car and noted her unavailing clutches at that evasive, abstruse problem where she keeps her purse, must appreciate her pockets ever after.

What year is it again? And still no pockets?