Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/553

Rh health. Much might be written on this subject; suffice it at present to state that the useless and insipid lives that most young ladies lead, the total want of an intelligent interest and occupation, and the unnatural and artificial existence pursued, are highly calculated to injuriously enhance that natural affectability with which she has been endowed. The system of fashionable boarding-schools, whose anxiety to render their pupils accomplished and fascinating at all costs results in a forced and at the same time imperfect training, combined with luxurious living, absence of exercise, and other healthy circumstances, tends to increase the irritability of the nervous system and to foster a precocious evolution of character. As this is increased, tone and energy are diminished. The girl returns from school a wayward, capricious, and hysterical young lady, weak and unstable in mind, habits, and pursuits. She enters into society, and there her whole mode of life further contributes to her unfortunate condition. The competitions, disappointed affection and vanity, the artificial excitements of balls, public entertainments, late hours, and all the frivolities and pleasures of fashion, tend in the same direction. The cultivation of music, poetry, novels, and other inflammatory literature nourish illusions contrary to the actual state of society. Her very dress seems made on purpose to interfere with the healthy function of her most vital organs, and to prevent the free play of muscular action essential to a sound constitution. Girls subjected to such a régime, when their minds and bodies should be guided in a totally opposite direction, have one order of faculties alone exercised, and these, predominating over the reasoning powers, cause a host of nervous, vaporous, hysterical, and hypochondriacal disorders. Thus women from their earliest days are constantly subjected to the yoke of prejudices, are under the necessity of a perpetual state of acting and deception, of dissembling their desires and real inclinations for the sake of propriety, of keeping to themselves the most powerful passions and the strongest propensities, and of feigning a calmness and indifference when they are devoured by a burning fire.

As to education, we have already pointed out the general unsatisfactory nature of the intellectual studies of most women. That idleness and the absence of suitable and substantial occupation for the mind which so commonly exists in the higher ranks of society are the sources of great evils no one will deny. For the frivolous and luxurious so-called duties of fashionable life, although exhausting and fatiguing, can not be said to constitute that healthy exercise of mind or body which is desirable for young women to stave off disease and maintain sound health. Study and occupation, at the same time positive, useful, and attractive, are the best correctives of an imagination ardent and disordered, of a nervous system susceptible and hypersensitive. These considerations being made patent, many women, with the impulse characteristic of their sex, have rushed to the opposite