What Our Girls Read by Harper's Bazar

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 29, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 21.

What Our Girls Read.

By Harper's Bazar

It is very unusual to find a mother who is indifferent to her daughter's clothes. Even when that daughter is but a wee tot, the petty details of costume are scrupulously looked after and the maternal mind allows itself to be painfully disturbed over incongruousness of tint between the ribbons serving as fillet and necktie, and by meagerness of garniture on frock and apron. Practical-minded women will ever, in spite of girlish remonstrance, insist on low heels, loose clothes, and warm wraps, and with wise saws and hygienic maxims crush the fashionable yearnings of budding womanhood for French heels, a genteel waist, and sleeveless jackets.

But what can be said about the endeavor to provide for our daughters' mental nourishment and intellectual adornments? To develop in them a taste for great and noble thoughts, and the capacity to enjoy companionship with pure and elevating writers, and association in ideal worlds filled with honest men and pure women? To arouse that instinct for pure 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 development than its passionate and enervating indulgence in nauseous mental pabulum, 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 12 or 13 years, is apparently criminally indifferent to the character of her associates in the world of books. She will watch what boy carries her girl's books home from school, but forgets to 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 regard to what young girls read is responsible for the destruction of the finer tone of character of many of our children developing into womanhood, and explains a good deal of the frivolity, demoralizing coquetry, and unfortunate "affairs" which from time to time startle the community and bring sorrow and disgrace on highly respectable families.

During the formative period of life, when both mind and body are changing and unfolding from the chrysalis state of the child into the completeness of the woman, the future stamina, moral powers of resistance, and physical capacity of 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 quantity of the nutritious particles of matter, material and intellectual, which go to make the substance of the one and the spirit of the other.

Feed your child on pickles and sweetmeats, allow her to wear paper-soled shoes and an insufficiency of flannel, and we all know what the consequences will be—dyspepsia and a hectic cough. Does it never occur to you that the analogy applies to her mental sustenance 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 a woman anything solid will be rejected by the pampered appetite? Have you ever seen this, you mothers?