Surely it is also possible for female teachers
to talk frankly to that class of girls who learn little of the demands
of health from uneducated or busy or careless mothers, and it would be
as easy, if school boards were what they should be, to insist on such
instruction, and to make sure that the claims of maturing womanhood are
considered and attended to. Should I be told that this is impracticable,
I reply that as high an authority as Samuel Eliot, of Massachusetts, has
shown in large schools that it is both possible and valuable. As
concerns the home life, it is also easy to get at the parents by annual
circulars enforcing good counsel as to some of the simplest hygienic
needs in the way of sleep, hours of study, light, and meals.
It were better not to educate girls at all between the ages of fourteen
and eighteen, unless it can be done with careful reference to their
bodily health. To-day, the American woman is, to speak plainly, too
often physically unfit for her duties as woman, and is perhaps of all
civilized females the least qualified to undertake those weightier tasks
which tax so heavily the nervous system of man. She is not fairly up to
what nature asks from her as wife and mother. How will she sustain
herself under the pressure of those yet more exacting duties which
nowadays she is eager to share with the man?
While making these stringent criticisms, I am anxious not to be
misunderstood.
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