d, they are commonly satisfied with a merely negative condition of
health. The girl is considered to be well, if she is not too ill to go
to school; and she therefore lives from hand to mouth, as respects her
constitution, and lays up nothing for emergencies. From this negative
condition proceeds her inability to endure accidents which to an active
boy would be trivial. Who ever hears of a boy's incurring a lame knee
for a year by slipping on the ice, or spinal disease for a lifetime by
a fall from a sled? And if a girl has not enough of surplus vitality to
overcome such trifles as these, how is she fitted to meet the coming
fatigues of wife and mother?

These are important, if superficial, suggestions; but there are other
considerations which go deeper. I take the special provocatives of
disease among American women to be in great part social. The one marked
step achieved thus far by our civilization appears to be the abolition
of the peasant class, among the native-born, and the elevation of the
mass of women to the social zone of music-lessons and silk gowns. This
implies the disappearance of field-labor for women, and, unfortunately,
of that rustic health also which in other countries is a standing
exemplar for all classes. Wherever the majority of women work in the
fields, the privileged minority are constantly reminded that they also
hold their health by the tenure of some substituted activity. With
us, all women have been relieved from out-door labor,--and are being
sacrificed in the process, until they learn to supply its place. Except
the graceful and vanishing pursuit of hop-picking, there is in New
England no agricultural labor in which women can be said to be
habitually engaged. Most persons never saw an American woman making hay,
unless in the highly imaginative cantata of "The Hay-Makers"; and Dolly
the Dairy-Maid is becoming to our children as purely ideal a being as
Cinderella. We thus lose not only the immediate effect, but the indirect
example, of these out-door toils.

This influence of the social transition bears upon all women: there
is another which especially touches wives and mothers. In European
countries, the aim at anything like gentility implies keeping one or
more domestics to perform house-hold labors; but in our Free States
every family aims at gentility, while not one in five keeps a domestic.
The aim is not a foolish one, though follies may accompany it,--for the
average ambition of our