The notion is practically found
everywhere, that boys and girls are one, and that the boys make the
one. Girls, young ladies, to use the polite phrase, who are about
leaving or have left school for society, dissipation, or self-culture,
rarely permit any of Nature's periodical demands to interfere with
their morning calls, or evening promenades, or midnight dancing, or
sober study. Even the home draws the sacred mantle of modesty so
closely over the reproductive function as not only to cover but to
smother it. Sisters imitate brothers in persistent work at all times.
Female clerks in stores strive to emulate the males by unremitting
labor, seeking to develop feminine force by masculine methods. Female
operatives of all sorts, in factories and elsewhere, labor in the same
way; and, when the day is done, are as likely to dance half the night,
regardless of any pressure upon them of a peculiar function, as their
fashionable sisters in the polite world. All unite in pushing the
hateful thing out of sight and out of mind; and all are punished by
similar weakness, degeneration, and disease.
There are two reasons why female operatives of all sorts are likely to
suffer less, and actually do suffer less, from such persistent work,
than female students; why Jane in the factory can work more steadily
with the loom, than Jane in college with the dictionary; why the girl
who makes the bed can safely work more steadily the whole year
through, than her little mistress of sixteen who goes to school.
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