Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women: On the Various Duties of Life, Physical, Intellectual, And; Moral Development; Self-Culture, Improvement, Dress, Beauty,; Fashion, Employment, Education, The Home Relations, Their; Duties To Young Men, Marriage, Womanhood And Happiness.Weaver, G. S. (George Sumner)
Science
Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women: On the Various Duties of Life, Physical, Intellectual, And; Moral Development; Self-Culture, Improvement, Dress, Beauty,; Fashion, Employment, Education, The Home Relations, Their; Duties To Young Men, Marriage, Womanhood And Happiness.
Weaver, G. S. (George Sumner)
Conduct of life; Young women
First: Do our modes of Dress injure our bodies? In this, young women,
you may be judges. Are your forms permitted to expand as God designed
them? Are your organs and limbs and muscles permitted their full and
proper play? Is your blood in no way impeded in its life-mission through
your bodies? Are you protected from the winter's cold, from wind and wet
at all points, as you should be? Can you breathe freely and easily the
proper amount of air to oxygenate your blood and give you health and
strength? If so, what mean the languid faces, the sallow countenances,
the pale cheeks, the wasp-like forms, the rounded shoulders, the bent
spines, the feeble lungs, the short breathings, the cold feet, the
hampered step, the neuralgic pains, the hysteric nervousness, the weak
sides, the frailty, weakness, and painfulness so prevalent among women?
What mean the head-aches, and liver-complaints, and consumptions, and
neuralgias, and the troublesome ailments of your sex from which scarcely
a woman of you is free? Those strings which bind so closely your chests,
do they not impede your breathing, and thus weaken your lungs and
corrupt your systems? Those dresses hooked so closely that every seam in
them gapes as in agony, giving you so much the appearance of convicts in
strait jackets, are they not in the way when you want to breathe a full
breath, and do they permit the exercise of all the muscles that strive
for life within them? That enormous weight of skirts that you hang over
portions of your bodies that should be choicely protected instead of
burdened, how they hang down like so many dead weights on your vitality,
weakening and diseasing the most delicate economy of your fearfully and
wonderfully made systems! and how your whole frames are taxed every day
of your lives with this wrongly placed and worse than useless burden.
This alone is enough to bring premature disease and death to any
ordinary woman. The law of health demands that the extremities of our
bodies should be kept warm and well protected, while the parts
containing our vital economy should be only comfortably clothed and left
free to the most natural and easy action, well ventilated or exposed to
the ingress and egress of the atmosphere, without any local pressures or
means for unnatural warmth. Only think of wearing a thick, heavy girdle
of many pounds' weight around the whole zone of the abdominal region--a
sort of engirdling poultice, heating and pressing like a girdle of hot
lava, day after day and year after year! Is it a wonder that you have so
many weaknesses and pains and saddening afflictions upon you? And then
your feet treading these cold pavements, this damp earth, these frozen
or wet walks, in slippers and silk or cotton stockings! The very part of
your bodies of all others you should keep most warm and dry, you expose
to every wind and frost, water-pool and snow-storm, in the year; sit
through the whole winter with them on cold floors, where every
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account