386 



FEMALE NATIVES. 



[1830. 



mothers at eleven years old. Those that are married at so early an 

 age generally cease to bear before they are thirty. 



After their accouchement, at which male practitioners never assist, 

 they recover health and strength very rapidly. Miscarriages and acci- 

 dents are scarcely known among them ; their female accoucheurs, having 

 all been mothers themselves, know their business practically, which is 

 a thing impossible to one of our sex. With these female natives of 

 Luconia there is no art or affectation ; all is nature with them. They 

 have not been taught to look forward to the important hour which 

 makes them mothers with apprehensions of danger ; there are no arti- 

 ficial terrors thrown around the interesting scene. The indispensable 

 pangs, which are courted rather than shrunk from, are endured with 

 patience, and an humble reliance on that Power whose wisdom ordained 

 this mode of fulfilling the divine command to " increase, and multiply, 

 and replenish the earth." 



Their sufferings, however, are trifling compared with those which 

 fashion entails upon her wretched vassals in the United States. The 

 Manillian wives have never had their lovely forms screwed up in a ma- 

 chine of torture that was never heard of among all the diabolical inven- 

 tions of the Inquisition ; a machine of whalebone, and steel, and cord, and 

 pulleys, and levers ! a machine as far more ridiculous and mischievous 

 than the iron shoe of China as the body and vitals of a human being are 

 of more value than the foot. They have lived according to nature, and 

 now enjoy their reward. The apprehension of deformity or malforma- 

 tion in the infant, a horrid idea which flits across the imagination of 

 almost every European and American female in the situation alluded 

 to, never enters the mind of these children of nature, among thousands 

 of whom a single instance of personal deformity was never known. 

 These females are all elegantly shaped, and so are the men ; almost 

 every one being a suitable model for a Venus or an Apollo. In form, 

 feature, limb, eyes, teeth, and every thing but " complexion, the tinc- 

 ture of the skin," they are equal to the fairest of my own country- 

 women ; a majority of whom are braced up so sharp that they can 

 neither stoop for their glove, should they chance to drop it, nor tie their 

 shoe-string, should it be dangling on the pavement. 



