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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



She knows nothing of the glorious freedom of the 

 hills and woods and rocky shore ; she misses all 

 the relief which lonely rides and walks afford 

 from those petty worries which, like the wasps 

 and ants in the dreadful old Persian torture, are 

 sure to fasten on the poor wretch pinned to the 

 ground. " To be weak is to be miserable." 

 There is no truer maxim ; and, when we reflect 

 how many women are weak — not merely in com- 

 parison to men, which is nothing to the purpose, 

 but weak absolutely and judged by the standard 

 of Nature — we have before us a vast, low-lying 

 field of dull wretchedness profoundly mournful to 

 contemplate. Out of it, what evil vapors of mor- 

 bid feelings, jealousies, suspicions, hysterical pas- 

 sions, religious terrors, melancholy, and even in- 

 sanity, are generated, who shall estimate ? To 

 preserve the mens Sana otherwhere than in the 

 corpore sano is a task of almost superhuman wis- 

 dom and conscientiousness. The marvel is, not 

 that so many fail, as that a few succeed in per- 

 forming it. 



Be it noted, further, that it is the chronic 

 petite sante much more than any positive disease, 

 which is morally so injurious to the sufferer and 

 all around her. I have heard one whose long 

 years of pain seem each to have lifted her nearer 

 to heaven remark with a smile, that " actual pain 

 is always, in a sense, entertaining /." She in- 

 tended, no doubt, to say that it tasked the powers 

 of will and religious trust to bear it firmly. Out 

 of such contests and such triumphs over either 

 bodily or mental suffering, springs (as we all rec- 

 ognize) that which is most precious in human 

 experience, the gold purified in the furnace, the 

 wheat thrashed # with the flail : 



" Only upon some crops of pain and woe 

 God's eon may lie, 

 Each soul redeemed from self and ain must know 

 Its Calvary." 



But the high moral results of positive pain and 

 danger seem unattainable by such a mere nega- 

 tion of health as we are considering. The sun- 

 shine is good and the storm is good, but the gray, 

 dull drizzle of November — how is any one to gain 

 much from it ? Some beautiful souls do so, no 

 doubt ; but far more often chronic petite sante 

 leads to self-indulgence ; and self-indulgence to 

 selfishness ; and selfishness (invariably) to deceit 

 and affectation, till the whole character crumbles 

 to pieces with dry rot. 



Now, I must say at once that I consider the 

 frequency of this valetudinarianism among women 

 to be a monstrous state of things, totally opposed 

 to any conception I can form of the intentions of 



Providence or the laws of beneficent Nature ; and 

 the contented way in which it is accepted, as if 

 it were a matter of course, by society and the 

 poor sufferers themselves, and even by such well- 

 meaning friends of women as M. Michelet, strikes 

 me as both absurd and deplorable. That the 

 Creator should have planned a whole sex of pa- 

 tients — that the normal condition of the female 

 of the human species should be to have legs 

 which walk not, and brains which can only work 

 on pain of disturbing the rest of the ill-adjusted 

 machine — this is to me simply incredible. The 

 theory would seem to have been suggested by a 

 study, not of the woman's body, framed by the 

 great Maker's wisdom, but from that of her silly 

 clothes sent home from the milliner, with tags, 

 and buttons, and flounces, meant for show, not 

 use ; and a feather and an artificial flower by 

 way of a head-gear. 



Nay, my skepticism goes further, even into 

 the stronghold of the enemy. I do not believe 

 that even the holy claims of motherhood ought 

 to involve — or, if women's lives were better regu- 

 lated, zvould involve — so often as they do, a state 

 of invalidism for the larger part of married life ; 

 or that a woman ought to be disabled from per- 

 forming the supreme moral and intellectual duties 

 of a parent toward her first-born children, when 

 she fulfills the lower physical part of her sacred 

 office toward those who come afterward. Were 

 this to be inevitably the case, I do not see how a 

 woman who has undertaken the tremendous re- 

 sponsibilities of a mother toward the opening 

 soul of a child could venture to burden herself 

 with fresh duties which will incapacitate her 

 from performing them with all her heart and 

 soul, and strength. 



One of the exasperating things about this 

 evil of female valetudinarianism is, that the 

 women who are its victims are precisely the 

 human beings who, of our whole mortal race, 

 seem naturally most exempt from physical want 

 or danger, and ought to have enjoyed immunity 

 from disease or pain of any kind. Such ladies 

 have probably never from their birth been ex- 

 posed to hardship, or toil, or ill-ventilation, or 

 bad or scanty food, fuel, or raiment. They have 

 fed on the fatness of the earth, and been clothed 

 in purple and fine linen. They are the true 

 lotos-eaters whom the material cares of the world 

 reach not. They 



" live and lie reclined," 

 in a land where (in a very literal sense) 

 " It seemet.h always afternoon," 

 and where they find a certain soothing, assthetic 



