RA 778 MCBRIDE LIFE AND HEALTH OF OUR GIRLS IN RELATION TO THEIR FUTURE THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES The Life and Health of Our Girls in Relation to Their Future. James H. McBride, M.D. Los Angeles, Cal. Reprinted from BULLETIN OP TUB AMERICAN ACADEMY OF MEDICINE. VOL. VI. No. 8. TTS M a I THE LIFE AND HEALTH OF OUR GIRLS IN RELA- TION TO THEIR FUTURE. 1 By JAMES H. MCBRIDE, M.D., Los Angeles, Cal. The first need of life is a good physique. Whether one's work is in the field, or the college, or the home, healh, vigor, and endurance determine the amount and quality of it. What- ever a few sickly geniuses may have accomplished, the average man or woman needs the physical capital of a sound body. Though the world's work is increasingly mental work, the tests of efficiency being more and more mental tests, there was never a time when physical robustness counted for more than at the present day. The mind has had exclusive attention in systems of education. They have dealt with nothing but the intellect. We are now be- ginning to recognize the importance of the body in the intellec- tual scheme, and of the brain in relation to the body, and of the mind as the supreme function of the body. Life is a conflict, and its vigor, harmony, and achievement come of this. Agencies within the body and without are work- ing against survival and tend to lessen life or destroy it. If the defenses of the body against disease were abandoned for a day, we should die. Our destruction would also be certain, though slower, if the higher contests of life were abated. Conflict is the price of existence. Life of the right sort consists in doing things, in overcoming. This requires robust qualities of mind and body, and these express the energy that days and years have developed and compacted into structure. From childhood to maturity we are determining the quality of health and character. At every stage of life we are what our past has made us. The brain is the organ of thought, but the entire body is con- cerned in the mental functions. This is so because at every step in the evolution of the organism from lower life, with every addi- tion to the nervous mechanism, there were corresponding new connections of brain and body in ever-increasing complexity. All ages of life have gone to this. All relations, all experiences, 1 Read before the American Academy of Medicine, Washington, D. C., May n, 1903. all conflicts, tragedies, triumphs, and failures, all su rvivals of in dividuals and of function went to the making of these relations that life exhibits. The interdependence of brain and body is a primary fact of life, and a commonplace of physiologic psychology. The solidarity of the organism is shown in the relation between the size of the heart and brain. It is not probable that any part of the body functionates without influencing the brain. If a limb is amputated in early life, the nerve cells of the center controlling it will not develop well. If the muscles of one arm are developed by exercise, the other arm grows stronger. If one hand gains in skill by special exercise, the other gains in a regular and meas- urable proportion. Mosso has shown that during mental effort blood leaves the extremities and flows toward the brain. We seem to think to our finger ends. The one thing more than any other that has dominated man's life and made him what he is, is action. The results of action were woven into the fabric of man's brain by the experiences of countless generations of ancestors. In the primitive man, thought always expressed action ; it was out of the necessities of action that thought came into existence. Our thinking has in it a muscular or motor element. It recapitulates those primitive motor co-ordi- nations that were in the making of it. It is not difficult to see that the athlete's actions are the ex- pression of his thoughts. The connection is familiar. It is a like truth and a larger one that all thinking, even the reasoning of the philosopher, has in it a subconscious rehearsal of old motor associations, through which thought came into existence ; ances- tors laid the foundation in their motor thinking for all the fine reasoning of their wise and spectacled descendant. In the primi- tive man the motor relationships of thought were simpler ; in the more highly developed, height upon height has been reared for more complex reasoning, and yet the motor element is still there, though it is veiled and takes place in invisible physiologic panto- mime. Stanley Hall says, " We think in terms of muscular ac- tion." With all mental processes there is this motor filiation, and as thought succeeds thought a thousand actions of the body are gone through with in physiologic shorthand. An educational system should have two main objects : First, to make a sound and healthy body ; second, the formation of char- acter through mental and moral discipline. As all character comes of moral experiment, so the efficient body comes of experi- ment in doing things, in all possible discipline that gives the body strength, symmetry, poise. The Greeks were wiser than we. They saw that the proper foundation for mental training was training of the body. In our system of education we have heretofore worked at the top and neglected the foundation. In our strenuous preoccupation with the mind we have forgotten the body. Dr. D. A. Sargent, of Harvard, says concerning the neglect of physical training in our public schools : " There is not a sin- gle exercise in the school curriculum that requires them to lift their hands above their heads, or to use their hands and fingers, except to turn a page or thumb a piece of chalk." Again he sa5 r s : " Under such conditions, with no attempt made at classi- fication according to physical needs, with every one doing the same thing without any moral enthusiasm on the part of the teacher, without hope of approval or reward on the part of the pupil, without even the inspiring strains of music to relieve the monotony, our public-school children are put through what some persons choose to call educational gymnastics." 1 There are evidences of an awakening interest in this country in the physical side of child life. Gymnasiums are now in use in the public schools in a number of our cities, though relatively the number is small. It is a most gratifying sign also that our col- leges and universities have gymnasiums with skilled directors, and, in the colleges for young women, special attention is now di- rected to the physical development of the students. The proportion of young people who go to colleges and univer- sities is, however, a mere fraction. The vast majority of our young people never go even to a high school, nor is anything whatever done with a view to physical development. We leave their bodies to the caprices of natural activity and the chances of occupation. Much of those old constructive forces that belonged to the virile life of primitive man, forces that were packed into 1 American Physical Educational Review, March, 1900. every fiber by ages of harsh experience, that were majestic in their power and still potential in every child as a splendid physi- cal capital, are not utilized by our methods. In regard to the life of young women, we are liable to be mis- led into thinking that more of them have an interest in outdoor life and sports than is the case. The young women who play golf and tennis are relatively conspicuous, and when we see them we congratulate ourselves and are inclined to brag a little be- cause of the growing fondness of young women for outdoor life. We forget their obscure sisters, the great majority of girls and young women who rarely or never play tennis or basket-ball or golf. Those who engage in these or any outdoor sports are a mere fraction of the total number. Unfortunately these latter, in common with the others, almost universally wear the conventional style of dress, that is, they compress their bodies with unyielding garments, and they will, of course, have the usual proportion of weak muscles and displaced organs. Physicians alone know how much misery is caused by the un- hygienic dress of women. That all protests have in the past been fruitless might easily have been foreseen. It took epidemics that killed their thousand, not sermons on hygiene, to make men es- tablish quarantine. Health regulations have rarely been adopted because of instruction in hygiene, they have been enforced by the necessity of self-protection. The promise of better health for women from proper dress is quite vague. The classes who illus- trate the advantages of it are not models of form and graceful- ness, while the appeal of fashion and the desire to conform and please come of a normal and wholesome instinct. It is not proba- ble that women will be greatly influenced in their dress by any appeals made on the ground of health or comfort. Hygienic dress for women will come as they discover that in their new competition with men, just now beginning, they will fall short of the best possible success to the degree that they lack the staying qualities that men have. They will then adopt hygienic dress from necessity. The worst feature of woman's dress is the corset. The fol- lowing is a hint of what it means in the life of women : In an Eastern college 1 for young women, there were 35 in the gradua- ting class. Of these, 19 dressed after hygienic models and wore no corsets ; 16 dressed in the usual style. Eighteen of the class took honors of these 13 wore no corsets. Of the seven who were chosen for Commencement parts, six wore no corsets. Of those who carried off prizes for essays during the year, none wore cor- sets. Of the five chosen for class-day orators, four wore no cor- sets. Query : If the wearing of a single style of dress will make this difference in the lives of young women, and that, too, in their most vigorous and resistive period, how much difference will a score of unhealthy habits make, if persisted in for a lifetime ? The vital capital of a generation depends primarily upon what the parents transmit. A sound constitution may be wrecked by abuse and the offspring be thereby affected unfavorably. The bodily vigor of the parent, which is largely under individual control, in- fluences offspring quite as much as the inborn parental qualities that are inheritable. The first demand of parenthood is health. A strong and robust body may battle successfully against a bad heredity. If men and women would live as they ought to live for a few generations, half the morbid heredity would be elimina- ted. This is a capital fact in the possible improvement of the race. The effort of society should be to make men and women of this day physically sound, and ultimately make the race so. Heredity, which is the most important single factor of life, would then always work toward racial betterment. As it is now, if all disease and crime were swept away, mankind is living so badly that the crop of the diseased and criminal would soon be large again. The inheritance of both health and disease has generally had obscure beginnings in far-off relationships. The insanity of to-day is in its genesis largely an affair of the previous generation and others farther back. Influences that weakened the vital re- sistances of ancestors sent into the world unstable brains that were unequal to the adverse conditions of life. The heredity of each one is complex and infinite. Ages upon ageaof human expe- riences, with their strength and their weakness, are packed into our bodies. They act and think and speak in us. We are children of thousands of ancestors whose multiplied lives reach back across 1 Dr. Lucy M. Hall in Outlook. the centuries. In the deeper, physiologic sense the race inheri- tance is the larger. The common impression that play develops the body suffi- ciently is an error. Play is the natural language of the growing body, and is vitally important to children. It has the advantage of furnishing the greatest amount of exercise with the least ex- penditure of mental effort. It appeals especially to the automa- tisms, and so while it exercises, it diverts and rests. Play, how- ever, does not supply all the training that is demanded. Neither does work. Work is excellent, not alone because it does in some measure promote development, but because it has in it a moral discipline. It cannot supply alone a certain kind of discipline that is needed. The gymnasium of the garden and field has helped to give robustness to generations, but it develops the body unequally. Neither does it supply the finer and more accurate muscular adjustments, with the associated mental drill that special training supplies. Life demands this special training more and more as social organization increases in complexity, both in its intellectual and industrial relations. There is no more profitable drill than that which is obtained in this way. Atten- tion, alertness, interest, courage, quickness of decision, the larger forces of character are here being made in the individual as by a ruder training they were made in the race. Awkwardness, lack of skill in doing things is waste. Accuracy, ease, gracefulness are economies. Special training of the body brings the power of self-control in action an important matter in character-making. To do things speedily and accurately, to do them in one way and that the best, this is self-control of a high order. Self-control does not consist in keeping still. It consists in that wise self-direction that men of action show, and that makes their lives significant. No girl should be allowed to grow up without special physical training. This should be supplied when the body is growing and the physiologic habits are being established. If the body is not made strong and is not well developed before 20, it will not be after that time. The size of the muscles is determined during the growing period, as is the skill in using them. Special exercise in later life may develop temporarily neglected muscles, but as soon as the exercises are abandoned they will return to their former size. If they are well developed during the growing period, the larger size is a permanency, and the vigor that goes with this means not only physical capital, but a mental resource. There is no more important fact relative to the life-work than that all activities of the body tend to develop the brain and the mental power as well. Child play and games, the romp and frolic of boys and girls, and all games of skill involve those primary co- ordinations that are racial in origin, and that are a preparation for the higher and more complex co-ordinations of later life. Every game well learned, every kind of work involving skill that is well mastered, means new brain structure brought into activity that serves as a foundation for mental acquisition later. Every game that a boy learns makes a smarter boy of him if he utilizes the skill for the best purposes. Girls need not play all the games that boys do, but there is no reason why they should not be as robust as boys, and no reason why they should not have the phys- ical training that makes strong bodies. I am now directing the physical training of a little girl of 12. She is most active and has never been seriously ill. Her tastes are for outdoor life, and they have been encouraged. She climbs trees, runs over the hills, hunts flowers and insects, studies birds and loves nature. She is thoroughly healthy in mind and body. When I examined her at 1 1 years of age, I found her trunk and arm muscles were mere bands. They were certainly a poor re- port of her activities. She is now taking systematic training. She does not inherit large muscles, and there will be no attempt to make an athlete of her. To do this would be to rob other parts of the body. What she needs is compactness and solidity with moderate size and a certain skilfulness. Her life history will be practically determined by what is done with her body during the next five years. One could easily write a prescription for early invalidism in this child, and have it filled in thousands of homes of the land. Have her wear the conventional dress, crowd her in school and college and neglect her physical develop- . ment, and at twenty we have the tragedy. 8 The physical development of girls is not so simple a matter as that of boys, for the girl's body is more complex and the develop- ment period has more risks in it. An inactive life is quite as bad for the girl as for the boy, and overstudy or stress of any kind is more serious in its consequences for the growing girl. Girls learn quite as fast as boys, or even faster, and the effects of overstudy are often not apparent until after they have left school. The phrase "overstudy" is often misused. If adults and children work under proper conditions they are rarely injured by any amount of mental labor. If men who work with their brains and students who apply their minds intensely would take proper rest, food and exercise, there would be no danger of overwork- ing. When people thus engaged break down in health they should charge their failure to a neglect of the essentials of healthy living. Many young women injure their health in school not because they study too hard, but because they fail to observe a few simple laws of health that could be summarized in a page. A girl of twelve coming under my observation studied hard at school and became morbidly anxious about her studies. She slept little, had almost constant headache, no appetite, was blood- less, emaciated and poorly developed. She was ordered from school for three months, and was required to play outdoor games and take much exercise. When school was resumed, her exercise and general hygiene were carefully directed. In six months she was strong and without an ailment, and now, four years after- wards, she is in perfect health, though she has not missed a day from school. The result showed that she had not studied too hard, but that her physical development had been neglected. The student girl should take active outdoor exercise every day under proper conditions of dress. Girls are liable to overdo at outdoor exercise and at gymnastics. This is especially liable to be the case with those who need exercise most. Intelligent direction is necessary for most of them. Mothers who are fearful their daughters will break down from overstudy need have no fears if the young women care for their physical life. Systematic and persistent exercise out doors will usually insure good health for girls and young women who are studying. A few weeks or months of outdoor life or of active training is not sufficient. This would be a parody on what should be a life habit, as much as eating and sleeping. Plato provided that two years out of the three from seventeen to twenty certainly, the best years for study should be entirely devoted to the gymnasium. Plato had limitations in his experience, for he had never ridden on a fast train, nor talked from New York to San Francisco, nor searched for God's stars through modern smoke, but he knew the secret of health and the real source of man's power. He looked to the triumph of life, not to the petty victory of examination day. We of ten hear it said that woman's organization is more delicate than man's, but this delicacy is partly if not wholly the work of civilization. Centuries of repression and hindrance, of hobbling and swaddling have gone to the making of her physical frailty, what there is of it. We admire the frail type of beauty with its appealing suggestions of dependence. The Amazonian mother whose hardy progeny will be the captains of the next generation draws no eye. Considering that civilization tends to refine away feminine vigor, and that there are yet many women who are physically strong, shows what miracles nature can work, and it certainly is a prophecy for racial betterment. In the wild state woman shows no serious physical frailty. She carries the burdens of the tribe, and her fiber is as tough as that of man. We need have no fear of the fate of the race if the living are kept healthy. Here as elsewhere, quality is more important than quan- tity. Through the law of the survival of the fittest, there comes ultimately the survival of the best. In nature's large economy, it is surely true that the race that becomes extinct deserves its fate. The building of a strong body with the establishment of good health means to achieve that which runs through all normal life ( good physiologic habit. All life is, in last analysis, habit ; there are not only habits of mind, but habits of body over which we have but indirect control. The functional life of any organ tends to repeat itself, and this repetition is habit. If by a wise way of living one has established the best possible functional life in the organs, this becomes the standard for the body and the energies 10 are on a level with the physiologic habits that have thus been formed. Doctors know how easy it is to set up morbid, grumbling habits in some organ or organs, that may continue for years or even a lifetime. Every part of the body has a certain capacity to resist disease or unfavorable. conditions, and if this resistance is once broken down by some neglect or disorder of any particular organ, the vital capacity of that part is ever after of an imperfect kind. Half our work as doctors is in treating disorders that are the result of some part of the system having been injured by sickness or neglect, and which ever after is an invalid organ, drawing a heavy pension from the system for its disability. The systematic physical activity and the good personal hygiene in early life that go to make one strong have also the advantage that these practices become life habits that cannot be broken with- out discomfort. The desire for healthy exercise becomes a kind of hunger of the body that must be satisfied. There are very many people who from lack of early physical perfection live always on a lower plane than would otherwise have been the case. They are not sick they are simply less alive than they ought to be. Their physical development was never properly completed, and the functions of the body have never realized their full capacity. All the achievement of men and women is based largely upon capacity for sustained exertion. To be capable of this, one needs a body that from proper drill in the formative period of life has the habit of energetic and swift response to demands. A poorly developed body means less work and an inferior quality of work, less courage, less persistence. It means, in some cases, to put among the common places a career that with robust health might have risen to great achievement. Boys are better developed than girls because they lead more active lives than girls. There is no reason why a boy should be physically more active than a girl. There is no reason why the man should be better developed physically than the woman. Our methods should produce the best possible development of both. The animal enjoyment a boy finds after a day in school in II wild, rough play puts fresh life into him and new thoughts into his head, while the girl, early impressed with a sense of the im- portance of decorum and with the ghost of propriety ever before her, goes home quietly, and the studies of the day still recurring in the tired brain like an echo, her mind is occupied by them in spite of herself. Study pursued under such circumstances may be ruinously harmful, when the same amount might do little or no harm, if done with proper regard to the necessity for exercise and diversion. There is very much in the life of young women of the present time that tends to arrest the development and result in lowering of the life capacity. They get through girlhood successfully, but the stress of married life or independent employment is too much for their frail bodies and they become invalids or semiinvalids, capable of enduring little, doing little or enjoying little, and spend their lives on the border land of the physically necessitous. The girls of the present day, who are brought up under more comfortable conditions than their grandmothers, have gained much, no doubt, in the change of conditions ; but they have lost something, in that in many homes there is less of healthy exercise, less of that kind of work that developed the body and also devel- oped simple and healthy tastes. There is, as a result of this, poorer physical development, less feeling of responsibility in the home on the part of the young ladies, and not so great a sense of duty. When every member of the family had every-day, specific duties, work to do that had to be done, work that exercised the bod}' as well as the moral sense in discharging a duty, such life, dreary and harsh as it sometimes was, and often barren of most of those things that we regard as common comforts, had at least the great advantage of providing work that furnished physical exercise, and that was also done under the sense of obligation. There is a moral and physical healthfulness in such a life that goes to the making of strong and simple characters and that puts purity of blood and vigor of constitution into descendants. Many women, in my experience, break down because, or partly because, they have not a certain kind of training fitting them for 12 the responsibilities of life. No young woman should grow up to a marriageable age without having been initiated gradually into the work and responsibilities that belong to a wife and the keeper of a home. A lack of this kind of training is the cause of much nervous invalidism. One who has grown up without proper train- ing in these matters is much more liable to have a distaste for such duties than if she had been taught from girlhood to consider them as a matter of course. New and untried duties are always hard, and they are doubly hard if one dislikes them, for a dis- taste for work involves ruinous friction. The number of young women who soon after marriage break down from the unexpected strain of new duties is very large. The mother of a young woman who had become a nervous invalid within two years after marriage said to me there was no apparent cause for her daughter's illness, as she had been shielded from everything from childhood. This was apparently not because the young lady was delicate, but be- cause an indulgent and unoccupied mother chose to keep her daughter in the condition of a child. The real cause of her trouble was plain enough ; she had never known what work or care or responsibility was and the little stress of caring for a home made an invalid of her. One may well ask why any healthy girl should be shielded. What she needs is not shielding but intelligent and sympathetic direction in work that tends to develop a sense of duty and an exercise of judgment. What is a home for to a young woman, if it is not a school that in some measure anticipates by preparation the later and larger discipline which should come to all, a school from which she is graduated into the sober and exigent realities of womanhood. Why, indeed, should any one be shielded ? Were Maria Mitchell and Lucretia Mott shielded ? Were our grandmothers, who lived simple and toilsome lives, prepared therefor by being shielded ? Was it ever the case anywhere that a person who had been shielded grew to be a forceful character or proved a success in presence of the swift and onerous demands of life ? Every girl should at least be prepared for the eventualities of married life. Not all women marry, but no woman is a loser 13 who has the training that prepares her for all possible respon- sibilities of womanhood. Whatever tends to develop in woman all the characteristics of womanhood is an advantage to her. We cannot ignore the fact that there lies at the basis of woman's nature the eternal law of womanhood, and that whatever she may do, whatever station she may fill, she is none the worse but in- finitely the better for being a thorough woman. It is worth remarking that happiness depends more largely upon health than people know. Whatever the causes of unhappiness may be in general, I believe that imperfect health, not that which puts one to bed, but that of low vitality and sluggish function which makes endurance unreliable and the performance of to- morrow uncertain, this kind of imperfect health is chargeable with much of the unhappiness that there is in the world. With a desire to get the views of educators and physicians on the subject of the life and health of American girls, I recently addressed the following question to 20 physicians, school-princi- pals and teachers. ' ' Do you believe that American girls of this generation will be physically stronger than their mothers ?' ' I have only space to quote the reply of Prof. H. E. Kratz, Superintendent of the Schools of Calumet, Michigan. Professor Kratz is an educator of national reputation, one of those who had the insight to recognize early the primary importance of the physical side of the life of school children. He has made careful investigations on this subject and has written articles of perma- nent value in regard to child growth and health. He says : ' ' Your question is one that cannot be answered off- hand, and even then not definitely or positively. There are some things that would indicate that the girls of to-day are not as strong, physically, as their mothers were at their age. "I believe there is a growing tendency on the part of parents in this country to shield their girls from the hardships and severe experiences to which they were exposed. A mistaken kindness seeks to protect them from all adverse influences. Of course, strong character and strong bodies are not as readily developed under such conditions. I believe there is also an attitude on the part of the boys and girls to demand more from their parents, H taking it as their right to escape these severer experiences of life which go to make up strong men and women. There is, therefore, a tendency to hot-house growth, and this will of course neither develop strong bodies nor strong minds. "On the other hand, we are waking up more to the need of physical training in the public schools, particularly in the cities. The matter is in its infancy, but the time I believe is not far distant when our high schools and at least upper-grade schools will all have well-equipped gymnasiums, and more careful attention will be paid to the physical development. Quite a number of the best-equipped high schools are already well equipped along these lines, but the great mass of the girls and boys are not yet pro- vided with such physical training as they need. "As the city population is so rapidly increasing in proportion to the rural, the necessity is growing greater for better provision in the line of physical training, as in the cities the opportunities for physical training and the limited number of duties which can be imposed upon the children are a great handicap. "The universities, as you rather intimate, are making, as a rule, excellent provision for physical training, but of course the number of girls in universities is small as compared with the large number elsewhere. "On the whole, 1 am rather inclined to the opinion that the girls of to-day are not as strong physically as their mothers. ' ' ' The overwrought and intense manner of many American women is partly due, I suppose, to the contagiousness of custom ; but it is also due to jerky and imperfect co-ordination of undeveloped muscles and oversensitive nerve centers. Well-developed and vigorous nerve centers command the muscles to orderly, smooth and graceful movement, whereas those not so developed leave the 1 Dr. Mary E. B. Ritter, in a paper read before the California State Medical Society in 1903. gave the results of the examination of 660 Freshman girls at the University of the State of California, at Berkeley. Of this number, 176 or 26* 3 per cent, are subject to head- aches ; 193 or 29' < 4 per cent, are habitually constipated ; 86 or 13 per cent, are subject to in- digestion ; 3 or 1/1 per cent, had denned tuberculosis ; 7 or /i P" cent had goitre ; 57 or 9 per cent, were markedly anemic ; 105 or 16 per cent, had abnormal heart sounds ; 62 or 9^1 per cent, had rapid or irregular pulse ; 193 or 29' 4 were subject to backaches ; 443 or 67 per cent, were subject to menstrual disorders ; ioort'/i per cent, gave histories of having broken down in grammar or high school, two from " nervous prostration." In contrast to these figures, 149 or 22* lfl per cent, reported themselves as free from all aches or pains or 'unctional disturbances. .15 muscles to ill-regulated and haphazard action. This is made worse when one falls into the too common American habit of fictitious animation, stilted attitudes of mind and body, and arti- ficial and fussy manners that arouse tense, cramp-like muscular states that are wastefully exhausting, so that gripped hands, scowling features, anxious eyes, irregular movements leak away the energy as fast as it accumulates. Many women seem to think that interest calls for a display of intensity, eagerness, an affecta- tion of excitement. They are vastly mistaken. Healthy interest is quiet-mannered ; it is low- voiced ; it demands no fuss ; it in- volves no strain. Our intense and hurried American life which indicates mental tension and unhealthy excitement can be cured by cultivating composure and stopping our high-pressure methods of doing things. The greatest need for healthy human lives is plain, simple, and homely interests. Those who do not have them lack an essential condition of sound character. The interests of American women are too often mere excite- ments, and these are always unhealthy. They are unfavorable to quiet and systematic living and lead to selfishness and discontent. I believe much of the poor health of women is due to their habits of excitement. They lose thereby the nack of taking things with composure and self-restraint ; the most ordinary occurrences stir up an intensity of feeling and a certain amount of mental tension that are uncalled for and are unhealthy. The woman who is thoroughly healthy lives a frictionless and a fuller life ; she is cheerful, she is satisfied with those simple and homely things upon which the most of happiness and the healthier happiness depends. She is more charitable, she has more faith in life and more confidence in human nature. She does not ' ' endlessly question whether she has done just the right thing." She does not make her consciousness a reception hospital for wounded feel- ings, and in seeing things in just proportion she distinguishes be- tween the occurrences of moment and the trivial incidents of life. We Americans, both men and women, have too much self- consciousness ; we are overanxious about appearances and effects; our dash and intensity and eagerness are artificial and wasteful. i6 Healthy-mindedness is outward-mindedness; it is forgetful of self in a quiet interest in things to be quietly done. It means that calmness, not excitement, indicates strength ; that force of char- acter is not shown by haste, but rather by deliberateness ; not how speedy, but how careful ; not how much, but how well. There is too much eagerness and fussy restlessness in our life. Expression is entirely out of proportion to impression. Though the greater part of life consists in doing something, it does not follow that we should be forever on the run. The work of life is not wholly in action. Self-restraint, calmness, a certain repose have a large share in the enterprise. In all physiologic processes, there is a certain amount of energy put by as a reserve. If this were not so, every action or every thought would leave us bankrupt of vitality. If we are to have proper self -direction and concentration of effort, there must be structures and centers that are resting, having reserves of unused energy. Through this comes self-direction and restraint of ten- dencies and impulses. In the healthy and well-developed body, unconscious restraints are always being applied in order that irregular action and waste be prevented. Those who fail here wear too much expression in their faces, and are restless and anxious-minded. They scatter their energies in useless muscular tensions and in ill-regulation of thought and action. One often sees in plain country folk a calmness of expression and a quiet manner that is in beautiful and restful contrast to the knit brows and eager manner of the city resident. To insist upon the completest womanhood is not to demand that every woman should marry. The idea that woman's only function was that of reproduction was primitive ; it was a belated survival of the period of the tent and the war club. There are other things for many women besides marriage and maternity. There is no danger of race extinction ; Nature has taken out insurance against that. The problem is not to get more people it is rather to improve those we have, and leave room also for those who come after us to live better and ampler lives. The cry for more people and dense populations is animal and material. Is not the struggle already hard enough and bitter enough ? Do we want more of the necessitous ; more mothers weary and worn with grinding toil, more stunted children, more fathers heartsick and hopeless with the fight of poverty ? It will, however, always remain true that the one, best work for most women will be in the home, where as wives and mothers they will have the making of men and the shaping of men's destiny. Though there are other worthy aspirations that woman may have, there are none higher than this. No oratory that she can pronounce, no pictures that she can paint, and no books that she can write, exceed in worth to the world a life like this. By leaving her impress upon her children, she lives again in them and in their descendants, and in them too she carries forward the ideals, and perpetuates the great traditions of the race. 140243 University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 405 Hlloard Avenue, Lo. Angeles, CA 90024-1. 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