No. 53.] ELIZA COOK'S JOURNAL SATURDAY, MAY 4, 1850. THE OCCUPATIONS AND HEALTH OF YOUNG LADIES. [PRICE 1d. But the chief work of the housewife was the preparation of the clothing for the whole family. Women were then the only spinners, dyers, weavers, dressmakers, and tailors. Fabrics, manufactured of wool, were those in general use; silk and cotton were scarcely known. The wool was the produce of the flock, or was purchased in a raw state; and was carded, spun, and in most instances, woven at home. The spinning occupied the housewife and her daughters during nearly the entire winteroccasionally alternated with knitting, embroidery and tapestry work. Many of our old country houses, at this day, bear witness to the steady winter's industry of even the noble ladies of England, in the many walls which they have covered with fine tapestry, the work of their own fingers. But the women of the middle classes had quite enough to do with the preparation of clothing for themselves and their families. The husband's coarse woollen dress, was the wife's work; all her own raiment, was spun, woven, and made up by herself and daughterɛ; and the family linen, in like manner, was prepared from the raw flax, and worked up into all manner of domestic fabrics. Thus, the mistress of a household, in former times, had very important duties to fulfil, and much hard work to do; and on her wise and prudent management depended, not merely the comfort, but the actual well-being of her entire household. THE revolution in our social system which has taken out of the hands of our women the various branches of domestic manufacture, is not altogether an unmixed blessing. Women had to work harder, in all ways, in olden times, than they do now, except perhaps among the poorest classes. Shops, were rare then; even large towns were badly supplied with articles of consumption; and in the provincial towns and the rural districts, wares were chiefly carried from door to door by travelling merchants, who made their appearance only at long intervals. The assortment of goods which they carried about was chiefly of a fanciful kind, mainly consisting of articles of luxury. In those days, therefore, women were under the necessity of themselves providing for the wants of their own households. The qualifications requisite to form a "good housewife" then were of a high order. In these modern days, when household articles of every kind are obtainable in any country town throughout the whole year, we can know little of the judgment, the foresight, and the nice calculations which were formerly required in the manager of a large household, who every autumn had to lay in almost a whole year's stores. There was the firewood, the rushes to strew the rooms-for the luxury of carpets is of comparatively modern date; there was the malt, the oatmeal, and the honey, then the sub-into fabrics from the raw state, by means of machinery. stitute for sugar; there was the salt, only sold in large quantities, and, if in the country, the wheat and barley for the bread, all to be provided and stored away for the year's supply. The greater part of the meat used for the winter's provision was killed and salted down at Martinmas; and the mistress had to provide the necessary stock for the winter and spring consumption, toge-ham; our hats are made at Oldham, and our gloves at ther with the stock-fish and "baconed herrings" for Lent. The annual fair was looked forward to with great interest, for there it was that the housewife took care to lay in those special articles which give a relish to life the ginger, nutmegs, and cinnamon for the Christmas posset and Sheer Monday Furmety, the currants and almonds for the twelfth-night cakes; the figs, with which our forefathers always celebrated Palm Sunday, and the pepper, saffron, and cinnamon, so highly prized in the ancient cookery. It is very different now. The work of women has been taken out of their hands. All our clothing is now worked up The domestic manufactures, which were wont to be carried on in every household, are now entirely extinguished. Our linen is woven by factory power-looms at Belfast, Barnsley, and Dunfermline; our cloth is manufactured at Leeds, Huddersfield, Bradford, and Devizes; our stockings are woven at Leicester and our laces at Notting Limerick; our brewing is done in huge manufactories; our wines are manufactured and imported from abroad; shops, for the sale of every imaginable article required for family use, abound in every town, almost in every village; and there is little work left for woman to do at home except in the way of fancy knitting, netting, and crotchet. Instead of spinning a store of sheets and linen for a "providing," young ladies in the middle classes now enter upon life with a stock of red and yellow kettle-holders, cows laid down in water colours and ducks in black-lead, fancy fire-screens, sundry anti-macassars, a few knitted bead-purses and hand-bags, and other kindred productions. Though factory women now have more work to do, nearly all classes of women, and especially the women of the middle and upper classes, have much less labour to undergo than they had in former times. The chief part of their time has been entirely disengaged, and young women especially have had a great deal of leise thrown upon their hands, which they do not yet know how to employ. Hence we find so many young women pressing into all the avenues of female employment, seemingly becoming narrower from day to day, inasmuch as the factories continue to engross what was wont to be women's peculiar work. The next step will probably be, that even our shirts and dresses will be manufactured by machines, so extraordinary is the perfection to which our mechanical contrivances have now arrived. 66 This state of things will ultimately, we believe, lead to a greater enlargement of the sphere of female intelligence; for, when the use of time is better understood, it will be ascertained that the most beneficial use to which the leisure so produced can be applied is, the acquisition of useful knowledge, the development of the mental powers, and the culture of the heart and understanding. But, in the meantime, with some good, some evil is the product; the latter displaying itself too often in insipidity and ennui, frivolous and useless pursuits, and a morbid and hysterical state of female health. The minds of most young ladies are not yet accustomed to healthy, mental food. To seek knowledge for its own sake, or for the sake of the advantages which it brings, may be very well for those who have to live by it; but to apply the mind to solid subjects is considered by many women as monstrously ungenteel, and altogether subversive of that apathetic elegance which is the envy of the numerous aspirants for consideration in fashionable life. All kinds of reading, excepting the most frivolous, is regarded, to say the least of it, as singular;" the display of genuine and unsophisticated sentiment is very apt to excite feelings of pity, akin to contempt; the beauties of nature, the triumphs of science, the miracles of art, excite no more than a languid expression of wonder; youth grows into middle age; middle age advances into declining years; and the mind, having no resources to retreat upon, the frivolity of early life is too frequently exchanged for a feverish devotion, and a chronic, hysteric sensibility. It were surely better that women had their old domestic work thrown back upon their hands, than that they should lead this life of listless uselessness, of miserable ennui, and moping discontent. Every medical man of experience knows well enough how rapidly the class of diseases called "nervous" has increased during the last half century, among the women of the middle class. "The nerves has become a popular disease, and many are the quack medicines advertised to cure it. There is only one way of doing that, which is, to give the physical frame the active exercise and occupation that it needs, to occupy the mind with sober and improving thoughts, and to cease to feed it upon mere amusement and excitement. The nervous suffering produced by frivolity is far greater than the physical suffering produced by hard work; and far more tears are shed, and low spirits, mental discontent, vapours, and bewailings are displayed, by those who do nothing, than by that large and hard-working class who feed, clothe, and lodge the entire population. One of the first objects of a parent in the education of a child, ought to be to implant active habits of body, with the view of developing the physical health of the system. Health is the basis of all after-growth; the moral and intellectual are alike founded on the physical. Girls should be taught the claims of duty, as being far above those of pleasure; and parents would do well to consider. that pleasures of the higher sort cannot be enjoyed unless through the medium of a healthy physical system. Nor ought the claims of the next generation upon the proper education of this, to be altogether disregarded. Girls ought to be taught to get early to-bed, and get up betimes in the morning. There is always household work to do in a family, which they would not emean themselves by taking part in. Every girl should make her own bed, toss the bedding and mattress about, leaving all to the free influence of the atmosphere for some hours, before tidying up. There are rooms to dust, and clean, and put in order; meals to prepare, and to know how to do this properly is the duty of every woman. At least, let exercise be taken freely out of doors; get out into the fields, not in a listless, melancholy walk, but with a spirit full of cheerfulness and love of life. A cultivated mind will extract pleasure from nature of the highest kind. And when books are read, let them be of an improving and instructive kind. There is no need for sitting for hours together on a musicstool, drumming at a piano-forte. This is another fertile source of nervousness among young women. Female children are too ordinarily set to music whether they have an ear for it or not, because, forsooth, it is a fashionable branch of education; and so they drum away for years, occupying a great deal of time that might have been infinitely better employed, and laying in a stock of "nerves," sick head-aches, and morbid irritability. Much of the time now spent by growing girls on a music stool, in the futile attempt to cultivate a taste and acquire an art, for which nature has not qualified them-to laboriously earn the fingering of a piano or a harp, which they at once give up and think no more about, so soon as they are free to take their own course-much of the time so wasted, would be much better employed in children's games, in a good hearty romp, in battledore and shuttlecock, in skipping-rope, or in any kind of play or exercise out of doors, in the open air and the sunshine. And if girls go out to take an airing, see that it be not in the dull, boarding-school procession-palefaced creatures walking two and two along a high-road at a stated hour-often a melancholy sight enough; but let it be a cheerful walk; let them run, ride, dance if they like in the open air. Let them under proper guidance, explore every hill and valley: let them plant and cultivate the garden-one of the most healthy and delightful of all employments,-make hay when the summer sun shines, and surmount all dread of a shower of rain or the boisterous wind; and above all, let them take no medicine, except when the doctor orders. The demons of hysteria and melancholy might hover over a group of young ladies so brought up, but they would not find one of them on whom they could exercise any power. "The gymnastics of life and labour," says J. P. Richter, in his Levana, "are the third commandment of female education. But these do not consist of so-called lady-like occupations. Sewing, knitting, or spinning, with a Parisian pocket spinning-wheel, are recreation and repose from labour, not labour and exercise. Worsted work, this female mosaic work, more suitable for the higher classes, who must refresh themselves from doing nothing by doing little, easily converts the pattern into a covering for indisposition or ill-humour. Most employments of the fingers, by which you attempt to fix the female quicksilver, have this injurious effect-that the mind left to idleness rusts away, or is entirely given up to the waves of circle-after-circle spreading fancy. A change of occupation is especially adapted to the female character, as the steady pursuit of one is to that of the man. Distraction, forgetfulness, want of consideration, and presence of mind, are the first and worst consequences of this secret internal and external far niente; and a woman needs nothing more to poison the holy trinity of wedlock, child, husband, and self. Now, how can this be obviated? Just as it is obviated among the humble |