The Education of American Girls. Anna C. Brackett
every instant,” he would have expressed it more exactly. It is only by continual death that we live at all. But continual death calls for continual creation, the continual destruction for continual repair, and this is rendered possible by means of food and sleep. Clothing, too, properly belongs under this division; for, were it not for this, the heat of the body would often be carried off faster than it could be generated, and the destructive process would outstrip the reconstructive. Moreover, the clothing too frequently interferes with the normal functions of the most important repairing organs, and its consideration, therefore, must constitute the third branch of our inquiry. The division Repair, then, will embrace a consideration of
1 Food,
2 Sleep,
3 Clothing.
Food.—The kind and quantity of food must obviously vary with age, temperament, and the season. But three general rules may be laid down as of prime importance: the meals should be regular in their occurrence; they should be sufficiently near together to prevent great hunger, and absolutely nothing should be taken between them. An exception may, however, be safely made to this last rule, with regard to young children, in this wise, making a rule which I have known as established in families. “If the children are hungry enough to eat dry bread, they can have as much as they want at any time; if they are not, they are far better off without anything.” These are the plainest rules of Physiology, and yet how few of the girls around us are made to follow them! Nothing is more sure to produce a disordered digestion, than the habit of irregular eating or drinking. If possible, the growing girl should have her dinner in the middle of the day. The exigencies of city life make this arrangement in some cases inconvenient, and yet inconvenience is less often than is popularly supposed synonymous with impracticability. If this cannot be done, and luncheons must be carried to school, the filling of the lunch-basket should never be left, except under exact directions, to the kind-hearted servant, or to the girl herself; and she should under no circumstances be allowed to buy her luncheon each day of the baker, or the confectioner, a usual practice twenty years ago of the girls in Boston private schools.
There are children and young girls who are said to have cravings for certain kinds of food, not particularly nutritious, but in ninety-nine per cent of these cases the cause of the morbid appetite can be found in the want of proper direction in childhood. The fact is, that the formation of a healthy appetite is properly a subject of education. The physical taste of the little girl needs rational direction as well as her mental taste, though mothers too often do not recognize the fact. It would seem almost like an insult to the intelligence of my readers, to say, that warm bread of whatever kind, pastry, confectionery, nuts, and raisins, should form no part of a girl's diet; did we not every day, not only in restaurants and hotels, but at private tables, see our girls fed upon these articles.
The German child, in the steady German climate, may drink perhaps with impunity, beer, wine, tea and coffee; but to our American girls, with their nervous systems stung into undue activity by the extremes of our climate, and the often unavoidable conditions of American society, these should all be unknown drinks. The time will come soon enough, when the demands of adult life will create a necessity for these indispensable accompaniments of civilization; but before the time when the girl enters upon the active duties of a woman, they only stimulate to debilitate.
It cannot be too often repeated, that the appetite and the taste for certain kinds of food are, to a greater degree than is usually acknowledged, merely the results of education; and the mother who sees her daughter pale and sickly, and falling gradually under the dominion of dyspepsia, in any of its multitudinous forms or results, and who seeks the physician's aid, has too often only her own neglect to blame, when the medicines fail to cure. From the food is manufactured the blood; from the blood all parts of the living tissue of every organ; not only bone and muscle cells, but nerve cells are built up from it, and if the blood be not of the best quality, either from the fact that the food was not of proper material or properly digested, not only the digestive organs, but the whole system, will be weak. Moreover, those organs which await for their perfect development a later time than the others will be most apt to suffer from the result of long-established habits, and it is as true of the human body as of a chain, that no matter where the strain comes, it will break at its weakest part. The truth of what is here stated may be illustrated by the teeth, which are formed at different periods of life. Many have a perfect set of what are known as first teeth; but in too many children in our American homes, the second teeth make their first appearance in a state of incipient decay, while it has become almost proverbial, that the wisdom teeth are of no use, except to the dentist. Mothers have only to consult easily procured books to learn the kinds of food most easily digestible, and most nourishing. That they do not do so, results from the seeming general belief, that this matter of eating will take care of itself, and that it does not come within the province of education. The whole matter lies in the hands of women. The physician can do but little, because he can know but little. It is the intelligent women of America who must realize the evil, and must right the wrong, if we would see our girls what we most earnestly desire them to be—perfectly healthy and well developed.
Again, the cure of many diseases, especially those which are prevalent in the summer months, belongs more to the women of the household than to the physician. They alone can check the evil at its commencement. Every educated woman ought to know, for instance, that cracked wheat and hominy, oat-meal, corn-bread, and Graham bread, should not, as a general rule, be made the staple of diet in case of what is popularly known as “summer complaint”; and yet, how few girls seem to have any idea, when they are thus sick, that it is a matter of the least consequence what they eat, or that they ought not to make their breakfast of Boston brown bread; and by how few of our girls is it considered a matter of any moment that the opposite trouble exists for days. Ought they not to be educated to know that they can devise no surer way of poisoning the whole system, and then of straining all the contiguous organs, than by wilful neglect in this direction? When some facts are obvious, and some are latent, the blame, if trouble exists, is not unnaturally laid on the visible facts. It is evident to the physician that the girl has attended school. It is not so evident that, since her earliest childhood, she has been fed on improper food, at irregular hours, and that the processes by which the poisonous dead matter is removed from the system, have been irregularly carried on. His questions put on these topics are put in a general way, and answered in the same, with, perhaps, a worse than foolish mock-modesty to prompt the reply. He does the best that he can, but he cannot help stumbling, if he is required to walk in the dark. This false shame of which I speak, on this matter, seems to be a folly peculiarly American, and I am quite sure that it is not so common now as it was twenty years ago, though there are still many American women who would choose to run the risk of making themselves sick rather than to tread the folly out under a pure womanly scorn. This is also a matter which belongs to education.
One great trouble with our American girls, and one which can be remedied by us, though we cannot remedy the climate, is not that their brains are overworked, but that their bodies generally, including brain, are underfed. I do not mean that they do not eat enough in bulk, though that is often the case, but that they do not take in enough of the chemical elements which they must have to build up the system. Their food is not sufficiently nutritious, and the energy of the digestive organs is wasted in working upon material which, if it does not irritate and inflame, is at least of no economic value, and is simply rejected by the system; or, worse still, in default of better, it is absorbed, and the whole blood becomes poisoned. Sometimes our girls do not eat often enough. For instance, a girl who, after tea, has been obliged to employ her brain in unusually hard work, might probably be helped by eating some nourishing food before sleep. If she do not, the result will not infrequently be that she will awake tired and languid; she will sit idly at the breakfast table, play with her knife and fork, and feel only disgust at the food provided. She may soon suffer from, if she does not complain of, back-ache and other attendant troubles, the simple result of weakness. It is only Micawber's old statement over again: “Annual income, twenty pounds, annual expenditure, twenty pounds, ought, and six; result—Misery.”
After a long course of this kind, the physician is summoned, and the girl is forbidden to study. But it seldom occurs to any one that if 5 - 8 = −3, the two may be made equal just as easily by adding the three to