Page:How to Get Strong (1899).pdf/61

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WILL DAILY EXERCISE FOR GIRLS PAY?

impressive a carriage and be able to walk as far as the manly young fellows at the Academy across the river, but a few miles distant? But at which college for women in all our land is there such teaching? And not of some pupils, but of all? where they make the slim arm full-sized, plump and round and strong? and the flat chest well set? and every girl a fleet runner, doing a mile or two easily; and graceful, lissome and springy of step besides.

Looking again at the effect on the mental work; would the daily half-hour of exercise in-doors, and the hour's constitutional out-doors in all weathers, if sensibly arranged, interfere one whit with all the intellectual progress the girls could or should make? For, is that a rational system of intellectual progress which brings out a bright intellect on a half-developed body, and promises fine things in the future; when the body has had no training adequate to justify the belief that there will be much of any future? Is not that rather a dear price to pay for such intellectuality? Hear Herbert Spencer on this point:

"On women the effects of this forcing system are, if possible, even more injurious than on men. Being in a great measure debarred from those vigorous and enjoyable exercises of body by which boys mitigate the evils of excessive study, girls feel these evils in their full intensity. Hence the much smaller proportion of them who grow up well made and healthy. In the pale, angular, flat-chested young ladies, so abundant in London drawing-rooms, we see the effect of merciless application unrelieved by youthful sports; and this physical degeneracy exhibited by them hinders their welfare far more than their many accomplishments aid it. Mamas anxious to make their daughters attractive could scarcely choose a course more fatal than this, which sacrifices the body to the mind. Either they disregard the tastes of the opposite sex; or else their conception of those tastes is erroneous. Men care compara-

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