826 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



made a scrap-bag into which are dropped the dabs of this and that which 

 custom has decreed a young woman should know, and which she and 

 her friends regard very much in the same light as the bows and feath- 

 ers on her pretty bonnet. 



Between the ages of twelve and twenty, the time of all others when 

 her body and its healthful development ought to be carefully looked 

 after, a girl ordinarily receives all the intellectual training she ever has. 

 To do credit to the school and satisfy the mistaken pride of her friends, 

 she is kept in a perpetual hurry, memorizing an incredible number of 

 pages per day. Her chief recreation is a sedate walk, in which dress 

 and behavior have to be considered more than the toning up of her 

 flabby muscles and the oxygenizing of her thin blood. Her chief plea- 

 sures are evening entertainments, where her vanity is stimulated to 

 the utmost, and late hours, unhygienic dress, and unwholesome food 

 tax her vitality. 



Society emphasizes the education of the boarding-school. To 

 appear well is its sole demand upon young women. Earnestness, an 

 interest in the projects which their founders believe will regenerate the 

 world, all the ebullitions of force characterestic of the young mind that 

 thinks, even an enthusiasm for study, are " bad form " for a young lady 

 in society, and make her suspected of being, at least, " queer." Of 

 course, I speak of ordinary society. There are cultivated congeries in 

 every large city in which more is expected of a girl than mere pretti- 

 ness. A bright girl who has finished her school-life scarcely knows 

 what to do with herself. Her education was not a preparation for 

 any special work, and, unless she was very fortunate, it did not lay the 

 foundation of proper mental habits. The intellectual in her has been 

 roused, but she has not been taught how to direct it. Some way this 

 force will expend itself : if it can not find a legitimate outlet, it will 

 stimulate the emotions, and find a disastrous activity in them, and too 

 often the "sweet girl-graduate" becomes a sentimental creature, a 

 prey of Avhims and caprices, capable of an intense but one-sided energy 

 when her enthusiasm is roused, but incapable of any sustained, self- 

 directed effort. 



Women rarely find in marriage greater incentives to a real intel- 

 lectual activity than they find in the boarding-school or in society. 

 Whether the man whose name she takes will be as attractive in middle 

 life as in his youth whether she will be proud and glad that he is the 

 father of her children are matters about which the young girl is not 

 taught to think. Domestic economy, as now carried on, is burdensome 

 and full of distasteful and humdrum duties. Having no special apti- 

 tudes, not having enough control of her mind to elect to do anything, 

 or to persist in it if she so elect, not knowing how to make the most 

 of what is open to her, unhappiness, real or imaginary, preys upon the 

 average woman to an extent not to be guessed at by a person whose 

 mind is employed. 



