Every mother has not the power to answer these questions scientifically; but if she have it herself, she can at least inspire in her child a firm faith that everything in creation has its meaning and its use, and that until the workings of any function are made to promote the highest health and welfare of every human being, its law has not been discovered and obeyed.
The very search after the answer to her inquiry, is often the healthful exercise of mind which will drive away morbid doubts.
Health is the holiness of the body, and every girl should have a high standard of perfect health set before her, and be made to feel that she has no more right to trifle with and disobey the hygienic laws, than those of morality or civil society. She should be as much ashamed of illness brought on by her own folly, as of being whipped at school for disobedience to her teacher.
But how low, on the contrary, is the standard of health for woman! A thoroughly strong, able-bodied woman is almost an unknown ideal to American society.
A physician pleading before a legislative committee of Massachusetts a few years ago, bade the gentlemen present he grateful for their happy lot in being exempt from the infirmities that beset women. A very admirable teacher once said to me, "I tell my girls they mustn't complain if they do have to lose a year or two by ill health, it is hardly to be expected they should not."
Michelet treats semi-invalidism as the natural, inevitable, and charming condition of women. A perfectly healthy woman he considers to have lost her great charm. Science makes the astonishing discovery, that on the whole, women average a little smaller than men, and society seems to accept the idea that therefore, the smaller they are, the more womanly. But before we decide upon this puny condition as the necessary state of woman, let us look at some of the facts on the other side, and see what are the possibilities of physical strength and health compatible with womanhood. In the University of Michigan, pursuing her studies equally with the young men, is a young woman from Kentucky, who measures six feet two inches in height, and is well proportioned. She has a younger sister there who is already five feet eight inches high, and growing very fast. At the South, the negro women performed every kind of labor in the field, and were said to plough better than men. In Europe all kinds of hard work are performed by poor women; even yoked with animals for draught. In England women are employed in stacking large bars of iron. In Dahomey the Amazonian guards of the king perform all military duty with equal ease and thoroughness with men. Now, if these things be possible to women of the poorer classes, and of other countries, it proves that it is not her essential womanhood, but her artificial life and her inherited weakness that makes the lady of Western Europe and America an habitual invalid.