The educational excesses of our schools, also, though shared by both sexes, tell much more formidably upon girls, in proportion as they are keener students, more submissive pupils, and are given to studying their lessons at recess-time, instead of shouting and racing in the open air.  They are also easily coerced into devoting Wednesday and Saturday afternoons to the added atrocity of music-lessons, and in general, but for the recent blessed innovation of skating, would undoubtedly submit to having every atom of air and exercise eliminated from their lives.  It is rare to find an American mother who habitually ranks physical vigor first, in rearing her daughters, and intellectual culture only second; indeed, they are commonly satisfied with a merely negative condition of health.  The girl is considered to be well, if she is not too ill to go to school; and she therefore lives from hand to mouth, as respects her constitution, and lays up nothing for emergencies.  From this negative condition proceeds her inability to endure accidents which to an active boy would be trivial.  Who ever hears of a boy’s incurring a lame knee for a year by slipping on the ice, or spinal disease for a lifetime by a fall from a sled?  And if a girl has not enough of surplus vitality to overcome such trifles as these, how is she fitted to meet the coming fatigues of wife and mother?

These are important, if superficial, suggestions; but there are other considerations which go deeper.  I take the special provocatives of disease among American women to be in great part social.  The one marked step achieved thus far by our civilization appears to be the abolition of the peasant class, among the native-born, and the elevation of the mass of women to the social zone of music-lessons and silk gowns.  This implies the disappearance of field-labor for women, and, unfortunately, of that rustic health also which in other countries is a standing exemplar for all classes.  Wherever the majority of women work in the fields, the privileged minority are constantly reminded that they also hold their health by the tenure of some substituted activity.  With us, all women have been relieved from out-door labor,—­and are being sacrificed in the process, until they learn to supply its place.  Except the graceful and vanishing pursuit of hop-picking, there is in New England no agricultural labor in which women can be said to be habitually engaged.  Most persons never saw an American woman making hay, unless in the highly imaginative cantata of “The Hay-Makers”; and Dolly the Dairy-Maid is becoming to our children as purely ideal a being as Cinderella.  We thus lose not only the immediate effect, but the indirect example, of these out-door toils.