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