Woman's Profession as Mother and Educator, with Views in Opposition to Woman Suffrage

by Catharine Esther Beecher

Before reading it, I would ask that my definitions be borne in mind when I class the degrees of health, and also the fact that when I give my own observations I am confined to those persons whom I know well enough to ascertain exactly their state of health, while there

may be others in close vicinity not noticed, whom on enquiry I might find to be vigorously healthy women.

Every woman who has any kind of liability to be a mother, or a nurse of the sick, or to meet other exhausting emergencies of the family state needs a reserved force of vital strength which many women who seem to be in perfect health find lacking in such emergencies. This want of this is one cause of the frequent failure of health after marriage, and is one result of a transmitted delicate constitution.

I also ask special attention to the fact that women in the country of the industrial classes have not the robust health of earlier generations. In addition to other causes, for this, is the overworking and anxiety consequent on increased civilization. The fashions and expenditures of cities stimulate the country, and the mothers strain every nerve to secure for sons and daughters a style of dress and furniture in former days unknown. This and the desire to accumulate, wears out many a wife and mother before half her days are accomplished, making her a perpetual invalid or sending her to an early grave.

LETTER EIGHTEENTH.
STATISTICS OF FEMALE HEALTH.

During my extensive tours in all portions of the Free States, I was brought into most intimate communion, not only with my widely-diffused circle of relatives, but with very many of my former pupils who had become wives and mothers. From such, I learned the secret domestic history both of those I visited and of many of their intimate friends. And oh! what heartaches were the result of these years of quiet observation of the experience of my sex in domestic life. How many young hearts have revealed the fact, that what they had been trained to imagine the highest earthly felicity, was but the beginning of care, disappointment, and sorrow, and often led to the extremity of mental and physical suffering. Why was it that I was so often told that "young girls little imagined what was before them when they entered married life?" Why did I so often find those united to the most congenial and most devoted husbands expressing the hope that their daughters would never marry? For years these were my quiet, painful conjectures.

But the more I traveled, and the more I resided in health establishments, the more the conviction was pressed on my attention that there was a terrible decay of female health all over the land, and that this evil was bringing with it an incredible extent of individual, domestic, and social suffering, that was increasing in a most alarming ratio. At last, certain developments led me to take decided measures to obtain some reliable statistics on the subject. During my travels the last year I have sought all practicable methods of obtaining information, and finally adopted this course with most of the married ladies whom I met, either on my journeys or at the various health establishments at which I stopped.

I requested each lady first to write the initials of ten of the married ladies with whom she was best acquainted in her place of residence. Then she was requested to write at each name, her impressions as to the health of each lady. In this way, during the past year, I obtained statistics from about two hundred different places in almost all the Free States.