Selected Lead Articles from The Dawn | Page 4

and wholly natural fellow-man? A writer in Scribner's
magazine says regarding the physical development of women:
When we reflect that woman has constricted her body for centuries we

believe that to this fashion alone is due much of her failure to realize
her best opportunities for development, and, through natural heritage,
to advance the mental and physical progress of the race.
Whether women may by acting on rules of sense instead of fashion or
habit, really advance in the future the physical standard of their
children, is a thing to be tested, but this thing is sure and indubitable,
that but little progress is possible until we have all learned to reject and
expel with abhorrence every species of artifice and the whole brood of
shams.

Tea And Bread-And-Butter
The Dawn Volume 2, Number 4. Sydney, August 3, 1889
THERE is story of a girl who kept herself alive for some time by
sucking a clean pocket-handkerchief. We do not know how many
grains of starch a handkerchief usually carries, nor can we say if, in this
case, the laundress had mistaken it for a shirt front, and had so supplied
a plentiful quantity of stiffening, but the story, true or false, furnishes a
parallel very slightly extended of the method by which many women
are nowadays content to keep themselves alive. A little starch for
breakfast, dinner and tea, is certainly not the rule, but a little tea and
bread-and-butter for all meals is the staple food of hundreds of women,
and as sustenance for a healthy body, this diet is not very much better
than the pocket-handkerchief. When the men are away, the wives and
mothers starve themselves; whether it is to save trouble in the kitchen,
or to, save time for themselves, or from sheer indifference to food, the
same result ensues--"A cup of tea is all I want!" It does seem as if
women in the mass are incapable of regarding good health and a sound
body and mind as worth cultivating at the cost of any little trouble.
Doctors know well enough that women are the most difficult of all their
patients to cure; dietary rules and healthful habits, which involve some
kind of watchfulness, restraint, and patience, are too irksome for the
average woman to obey. Working girls would rather starve themselves
and be well clad, than preserve a healthy body simply and cheaply

dressed. Even nursing mothers and hard-working women are equally
indifferent to all health rules; they will not make themselves eat at
regular times and in sufficient quantities. For this the children suffer,
and the whole household indirectly suffers too. Half-nourished bodies
produce a score of trifling ailments, fatigue, strained nerves, and
irritable tempers. "Laugh and grow fat" is a cheery adage, but life is sad
to many, and to grow fat is a costly ambition. It is not our object to
glorify gluttony and extol corpulence, but these are unquestionable
facts that in any reverse of life you can laugh if you are healthy; that
almost everyone can be healthy if they will, and that to be healthy it is
necessary, among other things, to eat the right food and plenty of it. If
the leanness of your purse cries out against meat at lunchtime (which is
properly meat-time), do without those coveted feathers or that
much-to-be-desired bodice. Internal health is worth external beauty a
thousand times over. What is the chance of a beautifully dressed
woman against she who has the even temper and good spirits of perfect
health, even if you apply no other test than the relative value in the
husband market? To have "a sound mind in a sound body" is the first of
ambitions. Accomplishments, beauty, riches, dress, are insignificant
beside health; virtue, happiness, and rational thoughts, build themselves
on health, and the heights of in tellectual and moral worth are not to be
scaled without it. If you lack a profession, if you have no defined
ambition, set yourself to be professionally sound in body; the sound
mind will follow. To eat too little is less disgusting than to eat too
much, but both are equally foolish, and in large towns where it is the
almost universal custom for men to be away from home during the day
and to return for dinner at night, the women are habitually guilty of
eating too little. Even the children are often allowed to eat a meat
dinner in the evening, perhaps only an hour before they go to bed, in
order to save the trouble of giving them meat and vegetables at midday,
which is the right time, and the only time when such a meal should be
given them. Bush women are not much more sensible in this than their
urban sisters, indeed some pride themselves