Personal hygiene and physical training for womenGalbraith, Anna M. (Anna Mary)
Science
Personal hygiene and physical training for women
Galbraith, Anna M. (Anna Mary)
Physical education and training; Women -- Health and hygiene
The first cause of the feeling of fatigue is due to the lack of
oxygen in the lungs and the impure air of the room. On going
out-of-doors, the woman will be surprised at how much stronger and
better she feels after an hour’s brisk walk than she did on starting
out.
“Fancy work” and lace-making, instead of being classed with
recreations, must be classed with fine hand-sewing of the most
taxing kind. It calls the same groups of muscles into play, and is
productive of the same evils, with a greater tendency to produce
eye-strain and a paralysis similar to writer’s cramp.
The proper avocation of the tired housewife, who has been on her
feet all the time and whose vocation is manual labor, will be the
diversion of the mind by reading a good book, while comfortably
pillowed on a veranda chair, a drive, a visit to some congenial
friend, a game of cards, or music.
Literary clubs for women should be more largely organized through the
country and in country towns. In the cities women have found these
clubs a great boon, not only to the health and happiness, but they
are in the highest degree educational.
Further, women have found that these literary clubs were profitable,
as a means of bringing their minds in contact with other educated
minds, and thus they had not only the additional stimulus to study,
but a broadening of their horizon, which the woman’s heretofore
shut-in household life had precluded. Courses in domestic science
would be a boon to the home.
The greater the number of interests which education and culture have
created, the greater will be the diversity of the recreations open
for the woman’s enjoyment.
Care must be taken that the avocation, which is at first an enjoyment
and relaxation, is not turned into hard labor. The moment that any
one strains every nerve, even to excel in a game, that moment it
ceases to be a relaxation.
History shows that the laws of all nations have always provided a
certain number of days of rest, or at least a change of occupation,
and that these days were fixed at more or less regular intervals.
This was partly from a religious and partly from a hygienic
standpoint. The necessity for the interruption of the regular routine
work has always been recognized, and one day out of every seven has
been set aside for this purpose.
The custom that is so frequently adopted by city folk of going out of
town over Sunday might very well be imitated by country folk by going
into the town or city over Sunday. For not only is the too continuous
application to one’s employment fraught with danger, but it has been
conclusively shown that a monotonous routine of occupation, such as
lived by the average farmer’s wife, is a severe tax on the sanity of
the mind. Statistics show that the heaviest percentage of insanity
falls on farmer’s wives, and the supposed cause of this is the
monotony of their lives.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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