How Our Women Fade

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HOW OUR WOMEN FADE.

We have resisted, in a previous article, the common disparaging view taken of the health of American women in comparison with that of English women; but we, at the same time, felt constrained to admit, that American women could enjoy a larger measure of health than they do, if they would. And besides, our women lose their youthful bloom and beauty earlier than those of any other Northern people. That is the remark of all observing foreigners who visit us, and from that arises the opinion that they are so much more unhealthy. How is this? We make no doubt that there is an influence towards this, both in the dryness of our atmosphere and the opposite extremes of heat and cold presented by our summer and winter. The first, we take it, has a tendency to reduce at least the superficial humility, circulation, and vitalization, by its greater evaporating power, of all parts accessible to the atmosphere; and for the second: the skin, distended with enlarged veins, under a summer heat reaching 100 Fahrenheit in the shade, is contracted in the following part of the year by exposure to cold descending as low as 80 or 40 below the freezing point. Both these influences together, as far as they go, tend to give the skin the appearance of being weather-beaten or shrunken. But we wish the superior beauty of our girls were no more rapidly evanescent than is hereby accounted for. There is not the one-hundredth part of the destruction. Ninety ninth hundreths they inflict themselves. One many formed evil is folly in dress. Tightness of waist—as ill-looking as suicidal—has received too much attention at the hands of hygienic writers to need expatiation here. It is a sin of less enormity now, too, we believe, than formerly. But the injury done by improper dressing of the feet is perhaps less well known. We complain of too tight and too thin covering for the feet and ankles. You wear easy things in the house when you are standing and sitting by turns, and when you are in a warm atmosphere; but warmer at your head than at your feet, mind, and the blood tending more towards your head than towards you feet. Then you go out in the winter, if dry weather, with no thicker slippers than you wear in the house, only tighter, and they neither protect your feet from the cold flags and the frosty air, nor allow the blood impelled down there by the exercise to protect them. Much better go in stocking feet. That would allow Nature to do her best for you. No nation out of China is as foolish as you in this respect. In Paris they dress the foot neatly; but that neatness consists in having the last or shoe fit, rather than in being excessively tight. Then, do you know that you are not in Paris? You dress your feet more lightly and tightly than any other women, when you have reason to do exactly the reverse—when you ought to dress them more heavily and loosely. In winter you ought to dress them more heavily and loosely. In winter you ought to dress them more loosely and stoutly, and warmly, in order to give them adequate protection against severer cold. They plow and sow, and the meadows are partially green in mid-winter in France;—and so in England. You ought to dress them more loosely in summer and with thicker soles, to give your poor swelling feet room for their expansion under a broiling sun; and to keep them well off a heated flagging that would blister your naked hand. Now, these insufficient shoes, not only get your feet cold, deprive them of their proper circulation; and work direct derangement and mischief in that way; but the consequent pain inflicted tends to nervous ailment, and other difficulties by sympathy, which may act and react throughout the whole system. Most of you of mature years must know the truth of what we tell you by experience. The climatic influences we spoke of, may leave your health entirely unharmed; but your miserable little shoes wriggle off with your health and bloom together.

We can make room but for one more destroyer of the youthful beauty of our women, and that we deem the giant killer of all. We mean stoves in unventilated rooms. Nothing more is wanted to prove the natural healthiness of our women, than the fact that they live long enough to lose their youthful freshness of appearance through their semi-annual carbonizings. Will our fair readers just look into some school Chemistry, or Physiology, or recall to mind what they have once learned, and seemingly forgotten, and ask themselves by the light of such information, what must be the effect upon any breathing animal, to burn all the oxygen in the atmosphere, and admit no more to supply its place? You will answer: Death, almost as soon as by drowning. Well, your stove-heated rooms often times more than half fulfill those conditions: i. e., there is not half the proportion of oxygen, or half the freedom from vicious, poisonous matter, in the atmosphere of your rooms that there is in the unpent air as God made it to be breathed. Then what must be the effect upon you of living hours upon hours in such an atmosphere daily? A direct effect is to reduce the vitality and poison the system throughout; and a consequence of that is a predisposition to organic disease. But further, what you deprecate still more, it destroys the freshness and softness of your cheek, and deadens its power of resistance to every exposure to the free air, which otherwise might only have aroused it to a more pertinacious donning of the rose.

Do study the inexorable conditions of health and protracted beauty, fair readers. Nature gives you the palm for loveliness; and when you come to be your own mistresses, you idly throw it away!