"To improve her figure; no young lady can grow up properly without them."
"I beg your pardon; young gentlemen grow up very well without them, and so may young ladies."
"O, you are mistaken. See what a stoop she has already; depend on it this girl will be both a dwarf and a cripple if we don't put her into stays."
"My child may be a cripple, ma'am, if such is God's will; but she shall be one of his making, not ours."
All remonstrance was vain; stays and every species of tight dress were strictly prohibited by the authority of one whose will was, as every man's ought to be, absolute in his own household. He also carefully watched against any evasion of the rule: a ribbon drawn tightly round my waist would have been cut without hesitation by his determined hand; while the little girl of the anxious friend whose operations he had interrupted, enjoyed all the advantages of that system from which I was preserved. She grew up a wandlike figure, graceful and interesting, and died of decline at nineteen; while I, though not able to compare shapes with a wasp or an hour-glass, yet passed muster very fairly among mere human forms of God's moulding; and I have enjoyed to this hour a rare exemption from headaches, and other ladylike maladies, that appear the almost exclusive privilege of women in the higher classes.
This is no trivial matter, believe me; it has frequently been the subject of conversation with professional men of high attainment, and I never met with one among them who did not, on hearing that I never but once, and then only for a few hours, submitted to the restraint of these unnatural machines, refer to that exemption, as a means, the free respiration, circulation, and powers both of exertion and endurance with which the Lord has most mercifully gifted me. There can be no doubt that the hand which first encloses the waist of a girl in these cruel contrivances, supplying her with a fictitious support, where the hand of God has placed bones and muscles that ought to be brought into vigorous action, that hand lays the foundation of bitter sufferings; at the price of which, and probably of a premature death, the advantage must be purchased of rendering her figure as unlike as possible to all the models of female beauty, universally admitted to be such, because they are chiselled after nature itself. I have seen pictures, and I have read harrowing descriptions, of the murderous consequences of thus flying in the face of the Creator's skill, and presuming to mend, to improve, his perfect work; but my own experience is worth a thousand treatises and ten thousand illustrations, in bringing conviction to my mind. Once, when introduced, as it is called, to the public, through the medium of a ballroom, I did join in persuading my father to allow of a fashionable lacing-up, though by no means a tight one. I felt much as, I suppose, a frolicksome young colt feels when first subjected to the goading apparatus that fetters his wild freedom. I danced, but it was with a heavy heart and laboring breath; I talked, under the influence of a stupefying headache, and on my return home flew to my apartment and cut the goodly fabric in pieces; nor was I ever afterwards tempted so to tempt my all-wise Maker by saying to the frame that he had fashioned and supplied with means of healthful growth, "Hitherto shalt thou go and no further."
Compressure of the feet was with equal strictness forbidden by my judicious father. This vain custom is perhaps not so fatal as the other, but it produces many evils. Coldness of the extremities may certainly exist where nothing of the kind has been practised; but while rejoicing that I, experimentally, know nothing of it, I cannot help recollecting that the bounding pulse which plays so joyously through my veins was never impeded in any part; and feeling this, I would no more expose a girl to one infliction than I would to the other. Do Christian mothers take a sufficiently serious and prayerful view of this subject, as regards their children? Do they weigh, in a balance of God's providing, this necessary provision of clothing, to separate not only what is unseemly for the woman professing godly simplicity, but what is enervating to those physical powers which she is bound to devote to the Lord, and the weakening of which is actual robbery of him? I fear we females are more ready to ask counsel one of another in this matter than of the Lord; or even of our husbands, who, in nine cases out of ten, no doubt would decide against the foolish and pernicious custom. At least, in all my arguments with my own sex, I have found the men invariably siding with me upon this topic.
You will be tired of these digressions, my dear friend, but I set out by forewarning you that my opinions would be freely stated; and while touching on a period of mortal life, where the body no less than the mind usually takes its direction for the rest of our pilgrimage, I cannot pass by any thing that appears to me of real importance to either. We will now return to what poets have sung and citizens sighed for, time out of mind—the delights of rural life.
All cramping is decidedly bad: wholesome restraints there are, which parents are bound to lay upon their children, and the latter to submit to; and among other things, I am sure a defined method and regular habits in education, work, and play, together, with a most strict attention to scrupulous punctuality, are not only valuable but indispensable to a right government of the mind and conduct in after- life. I have daily cause to lament the unavoidable neglect of such a system in my own case, during three important years; but unavoidable it was, unless my life had been sacrificed to the maintenance of such order. Accordingly, mine was the life of a butterfly; and whatever of the busy bee has since appeared in my proceedings must be ascribed to divine grace alone. I often recall those days of summer sunshine to which I have alluded; and the scarcely less joyous winter season, when, ploughing the light snow, we raced with our inseparable companion, the favorite pointer, or built up a brittle giant for the glory of demolishing him with balls of his own substance, or directed the soft missiles against each other. Accompanied by our father, but never alone, we made excursions upon our frozen stream; and very sweet it was to the fond hearts of my tender parents to watch the mantling glow of health, the elastic vigor of increasing stature, and the unbounded play of most exuberant spirits, in the poor child whom they had expected to enclose in an early grave. How often, seated on the low wide brick-work corner of the immense fireplace in a neighboring farm-house, have I been smoked among hams and tongues, while watching the progress of baking a homely cake upon those glowing wood-embers, or keeping guard over a treasury of apples, nuts, and elderberry wine, all streaming together in the lusciousness of a promised feast? Patriotism is with me no inert principle; it verily lives and acts and pervades my whole spirit; and I believe its energetic character, except as God deigns to work by his especial influence, is traceable to that early acquaintance with what is most purely English among us—the homes and the habits of our own bold yeomanry.
Cities may resemble one another, and the aping propensities of their inhabitants produce among them a rapid approximation of appearance and manners; but where shall we look for the counterpart of a rural English HOME? The thing is as untransferable as the word is untranslatable. The antique village church, with its broad square tower or low spire, its stone porch and oak seats, its narrow casements and the many vestiges of those abominations which the besom of the blessed Reformation swept from our services, though it could not, without demolishing the building, efface their relics from its walls; the churchyard surrounding its base, with undulating hillocks of mortality clad in long, rich grass, where lie, half hidden, the old grey monumental stones that can no longer tell the tale of bygone generations; the more modern sculpture, and the homely grave-rail standing sentry over the last resting-place of the poor, while some venerable tree overshadows the ground, where it has probably stood since the first stone of that modest temple was laid by our forefathers—all these are so endearingly English. The broad, rich fields, the hedgerow boundaries and stately lines of vigorous trees guarding their native soil; and above all, the manly bearing of a bold, an independent, and a peaceful peasantry, the humblest of whom knows that his cottage is a chartered sanctuary, protected alike from the aggressions of civil and of ecclesiastical tyranny—these, too, are English, sacredly English; and they leave upon the heart that has once expanded among them, an impress never to be effaced. Among national reformers, what a noble position would he occupy who should prevail upon our monied countrymen to exchange their habits of periodical vagrancy into popish lands, for a sojourn in the moral districts of their own Protestant England, in the confidence that the climate which agreed with their fathers from generation to generation—as the dates and ages decipherable on our monuments will testify—would not annihilate them; and that the sphere in which God had seen good to place them was that wherein he purposed them to move, to exert their influence, and to occupy for his glory, with the talents committed to their charge.