Physical and Intellectual Development : Part 2

Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women
by George S. Weaver

(Page 7 of 17)

It is so; it must be so; virtue can never be all she may be and ought to be, in a sickly and fevered body. Reason can never wield her grandest scepter of power on a shattered and trembling throne. Love can never be that pure, constant, heavenly flame which is a proper symbol of divine affection in a bosom racked with pain or oppressed with weakness. The divine energies of humanity can never urge the soul to a realization of its highest ideals of excellency in a frame overcome with disease, relaxed with dissipation, or oppressed with unnatural burdens. Yes, the body must be sound, healthy, perfect, to realize the highest mental states of which we are capable. Feeble and sickly is the best culture we can give to a mind locked in a feeble and tormented body. No proposition is clearer then, than that we should nurture, cherish, and invigorateour bodies with the most watchful care and rigid and healthful discipline. It is wicked to neglect or abuse them. We violate the most sacred principles of duty when we harm the dwelling-places of our souls. To carelessly expose ourselves to any physical danger, to engage in any species of dissipation or intemperance, to ruthlessly waste in any way the physical energies which God has given us, to recklessly weaken, sicken, mar, or injure our bodies is as much a sin as to violate the commands of the Decalogue, or deny in practice the principles of the moral law.

God will not hold such an offender guiltless. The visitation of His retribution is and will be upon such transgressors. It is our duty to be healthy, to obey the physical laws of our being, to possess sound and active bodies. Every pain, fever, sickness, is a retributive evidence of a violation of these laws; and for every such violation we not only suffer physical evil, but we suffer mentally, morally, socially, and spiritually. We belittle ourselves in the sight of God and men, bemean ourselves in the presence of the moral law, and stay more or less our progress in the great educational work of life. If we would be eminently pious, benevolent, and good, we must be healthy. If we would be endowed with wisdom, virtue, and love, we must be healthy. If we would win men's deepest confidence and God's highest approval, we must be healthy. If we would develop most vigorously all our powers of mind and heart, and give the richest possible culture to our souls, we must be sound in body. If we would impart the greatest possible intellectual and moral vigor to the generation to come, we must obey the laws of health. If we would progress most rapidly in the divine life, and win the brightest laurels for our spiritual brows, we must cultivate well our physical powers. Life's attainments and heaven's joys are not a little affected by our physical conditions. We are of those who believe that we have no right to abuse our bodies, no right to be the puny, feeble, sickly things the most of us are; no right to carry about consuming disease and cankering maladies that eat out our joys and waste our powers.

We have no right to make our bodies pestiferous hospitals to bear about the seeds of disease, weakness, and misery. Our physical education is the very first thing to be attended to. In childhood and youth it is a matter of great moment. Every child should be thoroughly instructed in his physical duties, and every youth should make himself wise in all matters pertaining to life and health. I deem this subject of vast importance to young women. Their usefulness and happiness depend in no small degree upon it. Their progress in the arts of life, their influence on the generations to come, their degree of culture and power, depend much upon their obedience to the laws of health. If they would be the women they ought to be, noble, high-minded, matronly women, impressed with a lofty sense of their duty and high and generous conceptions of womanhood, it is imperatively important that they cultivate judiciously the greatest possible strength and activity of body. What a sickly womanhood grows up in a nervous, feeble, neuralgic, splenetic female body!

How is it with our young women? Are they vigorous and healthy? Can they eat well, sleep well, work well, walk well, bear well the changes of climate, endure heat and cold, toil and fatigue, trial and study? Are their forms full of life and health, their muscles full of strength and activity, their chests well expanded, their lungs full and free, their hearts large and strong, sending out the currents of life ladened with their stores of well-formed nutriment? Ah, would it were so! But we know it is not. Our young women are sickly house-plants, that a chill wind will shake or an untimely frost nip and wither. They are pet-birds, with no strength of wing to bear life's long, brave flight. Colds and coughs, aches and pains, weaknesses and diseases innumerable prey upon them. They faint at the sight of a spider and scream at the far-off hiss of a serpent. They are full of weaknesses and pains that wear out life and enervate all their mental and spiritual powers. The women of our day grow old in their youth. They often have all the marks of fifty years of age at twenty-five - decayed teeth, sallow skins, sunken cheeks, wrinkled faces, nervous debility, and a whole crowd of female ailments. Our grandmothers at sixty years were stouter and more capable of endurance than our young women at twenty-five.

Why is it so? Simply because our girls and their mothers have neglected to cultivate their physical powers. They have been shut up in tight rooms, bound up in bandages, fed on sweetmeats and spices, doctored with poisons, dressed in whalebones and death-cords, petted like house-plants, steeped in tea and coffee, till they are nothing but bundles of shattered nerves and diseased muscles. There may be noble exceptions, but this is the general rule. Our men and women are all too weak and sickly. But we know that our men are by far the most healthy. And well it may be so. Our boys are turned out to stretch their limbs and try their muscles, while the girls are compelled to look at them through the windows. It is a burning shame to imprison all the little girls in the country, to shut them in from the fresh air and the life-giving sun, from the green fields and the flowing water-brooks, from the woods and hills where health is breathing in every gale and strength is made at every bounding step. All the girls should wear good, tight boots, loose, flowing short-dresses, open sun-bonnets, and then run, and shout, and laugh in natural out-of-doors glee.

They should sleep in cool, well-ventilated rooms; eat simple, coarse, plain food; exercise much in health-giving work and play; drink pure, cold water, and bathe in it daily; be taught to practice temperate, prudent, and regular habits; learn the laws of health and how to obey them, the physiology of their own bodies, and what is demanded for health and strength. Such a course of early physical training will impart beauty, vivacity, cheerfulness, amiability, strength of mind, warmth of heart, and moral stability, more surely and rapidly than can otherwise be done. Girls thus trained will possess a higher and nobler womanhood, exert a wider and deeper influence in their families and spheres, impart firmer bodies and richer minds to their children than those who are rocked through girlhood in luxury and dress and shut up in confined air and more confined dresses. We are pampering our women to death. We are killing them with tenderness, not with enlightened moral and affectionate tenderness, but with the tenderness of folly, fashion, luxury, idleness, with the tenderness of vicious habits of life.

Fowler and Wells, Publishers, New York, 1856.