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
She must learn that she has a great soul, a great mission, a great duty,
and a great power, before she will break away from the bonds of the
toilet and be herself. Woman by nature is no more a toilet puppet than
man. Her mental and moral duties are equal to his. Her powers of mind
and heart are equal to his. Her field of labor it is wide as his. Her
time is as precious as his. It is as important that her soul should grow
as his. She has as much need of knowledge, wisdom, courage, strength of
mind and purpose, as much need of all the powers and beauties of a
cultured soul, as he. Why should she not adorn her mind, develop her
powers, live to a high purpose, act well a noble part, do and be
according to her capacity? Let young women elevate their aims; give less
time to the toilet, more to study, duty, and active employment; regard
themselves as something more than dolls, as something intelligent,
useful, to be improved, to grow wise and great. Let them dress their
minds in wisdom, adorn their hearts with virtue, clothe their souls with
strength, with the majesty of noble purposes and high resolutions, and
they will soon be something more than automatons on which the milliner
and mantua-maker hang their wares.
I have written plainly rather than flatteringly, and I have done so
because I believe the time has fully come when woman should be a woman,
and not a mere gaudy appendage to man; when her soul should wake up from
its long lethargy and put on the habiliments of wisdom and usefulness;
when she should live to a grander purpose than she has done, and should
make her power felt more sensibly in the morality and religion, business
and bosom, of the world. I am not a disregarder of the beauties and
proprieties of Dress. On the contrary, I admire appropriate Dress. It
speaks out the man or woman. But I would have everybody feel that the
man makes the Dress. Almost any thing looks well on a noble woman. The
plainest Dress becomes agreeable when worn by a person of grand purpose
and good-doing life. Real life when unadorned is most adorned. Noble
womanhood is always beautiful. The world always has and always will
admire it. The richest Dress is always worn on the soul. The adornments
that will not perish, and that all men most admire, shine from the heart
through this life. God has made it our highest, holiest duty to dress
the soul he has given us. It is wicked to waste it in frivolity. It is a
beautiful, undying, precious thing. If every young woman would think of
her soul when she looks in the glass, would hear the cry of her naked
mind when she dallies away her precious hours at her toilet, would
listen to the sad moaning of her hollow heart, as it wails through her
idle, useless life, something would be done for the elevation of
womanhood. I hope I address those who appreciate my words and my
feelings. Above almost every thing else do I desire woman's elevation in
the moral and intellectual scale of life. You may not see the mental or
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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