Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women. G. S. Weaver
from the winter's cold, from wind and wet at all points, as you should be? Can you breathe freely and easily the proper amount of air to oxygenate your blood and give you health and strength? If so, what mean the languid faces, the sallow countenances, the pale cheeks, the wasp-like forms, the rounded shoulders, the bent spines, the feeble lungs, the short breathings, the cold feet, the hampered step, the neuralgic pains, the hysteric nervousness, the weak sides, the frailty, weakness, and painfulness so prevalent among women? What mean the head-aches, and liver-complaints, and consumptions, and neuralgias, and the troublesome ailments of your sex from which scarcely a woman of you is free? Those strings which bind so closely your chests, do they not impede your breathing, and thus weaken your lungs and corrupt your systems? Those dresses hooked so closely that every seam in them gapes as in agony, giving you so much the appearance of convicts in strait jackets, are they not in the way when you want to breathe a full breath, and do they permit the exercise of all the muscles that strive for life within them? That enormous weight of skirts that you hang over portions of your bodies that should be choicely protected instead of burdened, how they hang down like so many dead weights on your vitality, weakening and diseasing the most delicate economy of your fearfully and wonderfully made systems! and how your whole frames are taxed every day of your lives with this wrongly placed and worse than useless burden. This alone is enough to bring premature disease and death to any ordinary woman. The law of health demands that the extremities of our bodies should be kept warm and well protected, while the parts containing our vital economy should be only comfortably clothed and left free to the most natural and easy action, well ventilated or exposed to the ingress and egress of the atmosphere, without any local pressures or means for unnatural warmth. Only think of wearing a thick, heavy girdle of many pounds' weight around the whole zone of the abdominal region—a sort of engirdling poultice, heating and pressing like a girdle of hot lava, day after day and year after year! Is it a wonder that you have so many weaknesses and pains and saddening afflictions upon you? And then your feet treading these cold pavements, this damp earth, these frozen or wet walks, in slippers and silk or cotton stockings! The very part of your bodies of all others you should keep most warm and dry, you expose to every wind and frost, water-pool and snow-storm, in the year; sit through the whole winter with them on cold floors, where every door-crack and floor-crack is breathing in upon them cold, damp breaths from cellars or streets while perhaps your heads are hot in a dry stove air, and your lungs are breathing an atmosphere so hot and close that it has scarcely a breath of life in it, and all the while you say you are comfortably dressed!
And then, to make the matter still worse, you trail your bedrabbled dress into all the mud and water and tobacco filth on the yard's width you occupy in walking, exhibiting the strangest spectacle of civilized humanity that can well be imagined, a woman claiming good sense, sweeping the streets all about her to make cold and wet her already almost bare feet and ankles!
Nor is this all. These damp winter winds bathe many a bare arm, kiss wantonly many an unprotected neck, and visit rudely many a bosom only veiled with a gossamer gauze. To say nothing of such an exposure to every lewd eye that roves the street, and the unwomanly impudence it offers to every modest gaze, it is a hazardous, wicked, criminal exposure of health, and a total neglect of all the ends and uses of Dress. And then, to crown all, you go out in all weathers with your heads exposed to the fiercest blasts, all unbonneted; for Webster says a bonnet is a covering for the head; but few are the women's heads we have seen covered this season—and then wonder why you should have such terrible colds, such troublesome coughs, such griping pleurisies, such burning fevers, and so many ailments!
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