Woman's mission.

Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Woman's mission. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    83/180 (page 77)
    fetter than to restrain ; and that to attempt to re- move evil by the first-occurring remedy is a natural impulse. But a pause should he made, lest ^ in applying the remedy a worse evil he not engen- dered. Distorted spines and “ pale consumptions,” the results of the one mistake, are trifling evils when compared with the moral evils resulting from the other. For if, as is affirmed, no education can be good which does not bear upon future duties, how can that he wise which keeps love and its temptations, maternity and its responsibilities, out of view? ^Vho would believe that this lo\e, so denounced, so guarded against, so carefully ba- nished from the minds of young women, is the one principle on which their future happiness may be founded or wrecked ? It is sure to seek them (most of them at least) like death in the fable, to find them unprepared,^—too often to leave them wretched. Meanwhile, these exaggerated precautions in the education of one sex, have been met by equally fatal negligence in the education of the other; and while to girls have been denied the very thoughts of love,—even in its noblest and purest form, the most effeminate and corrupt productions of the heathen writers have been unhesitatingly laid open to hoys; so that the two sexes, on whose respective notions of this passion depends the ennobling or