Good Health | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Oct 30, 1879

Good Health.

Healthy Women.

A WRITER, in urging the necessity for more attention to physical culture, notes as a favorable sign the fact that "the pale and interesting" female beauty is fast losing its popularity, and that men of position and influence are declaring for the healthy standard of womanly beauty, such as was ever recognized by Greece and Rome. This is certainly an important and happy change in public taste and already the effects of it are to be detected in an improved condition of feminine health; for it will hardly be denied that on an average the women of to-day are physically superior to what they were a few years ago, when tight-lacing and similar destroying customs prevailed. Young women take more exercise than they formerly did. They ride and walk more and more in the open air. They have not the insane dread of the sun's rays which they once had. But there is much room for improvement yet. Many homes are still presided over by invalid wives and mothers, who furnish a constant spectacle of sadness and misery to their families and friends, and are a subject of unlimited expense to their husbands. In such homes the greatest of all blessings that could be hoped for would be the health of the mistress restored; but too often it is the one blessing which never comes. American homes more than others perhaps in the world, have been saddened by sickly women. If this shall be so no longer, it will be a great blessing to the nation. And the remedy is simple. American women are as strong and healthy as those of other nations; there is no reason why American women should not be. All that is needed is proper attention to dress and exercise. Let women dress as men do, so that their bodies shall not be squeezed and pressed together, but have free room for motion, and let them get out into the air and sunshine, as men do, and exercise their bodies, and the race of American women will not become extinct, as it once threatened to do. On the contrary, it will be improved, built up and beautified, and a time will come when a healthy man will not have to hunt a whole country over to find a healthy wife. We are on the right track now; all that is needed is to go ahead, and the result will soon be manifest. Women will die to be in the fashion; therefore let the fashion of female beauty be vigor and strength, and all the ladies in the land will be swinging dumb-bells, practicing archery, riding on horseback, and walking as for a wager, but they will be in style.