Health: How to get it and keep it.: The hygiene of dress, food, exercise, rest, bathing, breathing, and ventilation.Woods, Walter V.
Science
Health: How to get it and keep it.: The hygiene of dress, food, exercise, rest, bathing, breathing, and ventilation.
Woods, Walter V.
Health; Hygiene
=Need of Exercise for Girls.=--If it be conceded that there is need
of physical exercise for boys, what must be said of the need of it
for girls? Observe the young girls of cities and towns as they pass
to and from school. Instead of the high chests, plump arms, comely
figures, and graceful and handsome carriage, what do we constantly
see? Flat chests, angular and warped shoulders, scrawny necks, slender
arms and waists, and a weak and tired gait. Scarcely one in a dozen is
thoroughly erect, whether walking, standing, or sitting. There is no
elasticity in their steps, and a fresh, blooming complexion is so rare
as to attract attention.
The girls of the most favored families often show the poorest physical
development. The tyranny of fashion begins at a very early period in
life. The quality and fit of the clothing worn by girls from ten to
thirteen years of age prevent them from engaging in active, hearty
play. The nurse or governess finds a large share of her duty in
repressing that superabundance of spirits which should belong to every
healthy girl.
As the years increase, the studies multiply, and by the time she
is ready to leave school and assume the duties of life, we find
a brain-weary, nerve-exhausted, pale creature, with no physical
development, no power of endurance, and no ambition to undertake her
share of life’s duties.
When the importance of physical culture is as well understood as it
should be, there will be a course of training for pupils of all ages
in every girls’ school in the land. In the larger cities and towns,
provision is now made for physical instruction in many of the High
Schools, but in the middle and lower grades, where the foundation
should be laid and the work begun, the subject is almost wholly
neglected. Bad habits of sitting, standing, walking, and breathing are
acquired, and many forms of structural weakness developed which not
only unfit the mind for the best work, but which later either become
ineradicably fixed, or require much time and labor to correct. The
schoolgirl, if systematically trained from early childhood, would show
similar fruits of drill, and would develop into a shapely, graceful,
well rounded, healthy girl, and would escape much of the weakness and
suffering so common to women.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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