Population : its law of increase / by Nathan Allen.

  • Nathan Allen
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Population : its law of increase / by Nathan Allen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    crease, as they have for the past fifty or one hundred years, the most surprising changes will take place. In no one thing in our community is there so much need of change or reform as in female education. Our girls are now put to— school too early—are confined in the school-room too many hours— have too many different studies, and in their whole course of educa- tion are urged on, in a variety of ways, by motives and appeals alto- gether too stimulating and exciting for their organization. The most intelligent members of the medical profession, and professed teachers themselves, who have carefully considered the subject, have remonstrated over and over, against the present practices. But their exposures, remonstrances, and appeals, have had apparently but little infiuence. If half the time of girls, between the ages of eight and eighteen, was spent in obtaining a thorough knowledge of every department of household duties, or of some suitable trade or business, how vastly better qualified would they be, not only in the most important matter of physical health and sound constitution, but in other desirable preparations, for performing the great duties of life? As education is now conducted, while it improves the mental faculties and furnishes the mind with stores of knowledge, how generally does this very training serve to increase the misery, the unhappiness, and suffering, of females in all their future life? It does this by cultivating a predominance of the nervous temperament, without enough of the muscular and vital to support it—by a knowledge of books merely, without any experience in domestic duties or other pursuits—in fact, by cultivating the mental faculties to a high degree, without the ability, the means or resources, to gratify them. It may be said, we have plenty of help at our own doors, in the foreign population, and that there is: no necessity of our girls and women applying them- selves to the dull routine and drudgery of domestic labor. Thus, our female friends at the South reasoned for several generations, living in comparative indolence, despising labor, devoted to a fash- ionable and extravagant course of life, till now a thorough recon- struction is needed in that portion of society, almost as much as in governmental affairs. If domestic labor is to be given up more and more, if physical exercise continues to be generally neglected by our girls, and this predominance of the nervous system in our women goes on increasing, a worse curse in time, we fear, will overtake us, than ever followed negro slavery.
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