The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1883-11-09
What Our Young Daughters Read.

What Our Young Daughters Read.
It's very unusual to find mother
who is Indifferent to her daughter s
clothes. Even when that daughter is
but n wee tot the petty details OF
costume are scr,lpulously looked after,
and the maternal mind allows itself to
be painfully disturbed over homogeneous
ness of tint between the ribbons serving
as fillet and neck-tie. and by measer-
ness of garniture on ,frock and apron.
Predetermined women will even, in
spite of girlish remonstrance, insist on
low heels, loose clothes and warm
wraps, and with::wiseEaws and hygienic
maxims crush the fashionable yearnings
of budding womanhood for French heels,
a genteel waist and sleeveless jackets.
Careful, intelligent housewives are
scrupulously exacting in regard to the
amount of cracked wheat and oatmeal,
beef-steak and potatoes, milk and
brown-bread which the growing maid
ems must consume; and if the fitful ap-
petite so often seen in schoolgirls fails
to respond to the mothers coaxing, the
family doctor is promptly applied to
for tonics and iron. As a matter OF
fact, the average affectionate American
mother looks after the physical needs
and social duties of her daughters with
more or less of conscience, common
sense, and rightful maternal pride. She
feeds and clothes them with considerable
expenditure of time and thought, sends
them to the best school she can find,
has them taught to play on the piano,
to dance, and perchance to dabble in
decorative art, and when they have at
tanned the age at which they are ex-
pected to leave school and .tgo out"
She exerts all her energies to provide
for them good time, and to help them
to settle in life. In word, the moth
| er's utmost care is concentrated on sup
plying physical food and clothing, and
what has been called ornamental
! gingerbread.
But what can be said about the en-
deavor to provide for our daughters
mental nQlrishment and intellectual
adornmenfs? to develop in them taste
for great and noble thoughts, and the
capacity to enjoy compaIionship with
pure and elevating writers, and associa-
ton in ideal worlds filled with honest
men and pure women? to arouse that
instinct for true knowledge which is,
indeed, the main purpose of education,
certainly of that Kind of education
which is .'the leading of human souls
to what is best, and making what is
best out of them?'
There is no more amazing phase OF
nineteenth-century feminine develop
ment than its passionate and enervating
indulgence in nauseous mental pabu-
lum, and the appalling extent to which
an unlimited supply of such stuff is
| furnished to the young. The same
woman who is conscientiously careful
of the school companionship of her
| daughter of twelve or fourteen years,
/ is apparently criminally Indifferent to
the character of her associates in the
world of books. She will watch what
boy carries her girls books home from
school, but forgets 10 look below the
cover of the new novel that same
daughter has brought back from the
circulating library, stopping there for it
on the way home.
Now this apathy or ignorance in re-
gard to what young girls read is re-
| sponsible for the destruction of the
finer tone of character of many of our
children developing into womanhood,
and explains good deal of the frivolity,
demoralizing cOquetry, and unfortunate
affairs which from time to time
startle a community, and bring sorrow
and disgrace on highly respectable FAM
! lilies.
During the formative period of life,
when both mind and body are chang ing
and unfolding from the chrysalis state
of the child into the completeness of
! the woman, the future stamina-moral
powers of resistance and physical ca
pacity for endurance, the purer mental
tone and healthy bodily muscles-are
dependent upon the manner in which
both body and mind are exercised, fed
and trained, and to the quality and
quantity of the nutritious particles of
matter, material and intellectual, which
90 to make the substance of the one
and the spirit of the other.
Feed your child on pickles and sweet
meats, allow her to wear paper-soled
shoes and an insuificiency of flannel,
and we all know what the consequences
will be-dyspepsia and hectic cough.
Does it never occur to you that the
analogy applies to her mental susie
nance and equipment?-that if we feed
her uniformed and emotional nature
with high-spiced, morbid, unreal fiction
she will become incapable of digesting
better literature, and that by the time
she is woman anything solid will be
rejected by the pampered appetite?
Have you never seen this, you mothers?
-Harper's Bazar.