score are fit to be healthy wives and mothers, or in fact to be wives
and mothers at all. I have been asked this question myself very often,
and I have heard it asked of others. The answers I am not going to give,
chiefly because I should not be believed--a disagreeable position, in
which I shall not deliberately place myself. Perhaps I ought to add that
the replies I have heard given by others were appalling.

Next, I ask you to note carefully the expression and figures of the
young girls whom you may chance to meet in your walks, or whom you may
observe at a concert or in the ball-room. You will see many very
charming faces, the like of which the world cannot match--figures
somewhat too spare of flesh, and, especially south of Rhode Island, a
marvellous littleness of hand and foot. But look further, and
especially among New England young girls: you will be struck with a
certain hardness of line in form and feature which should not be seen
between thirteen and eighteen, at least; and if you have an eye which
rejoices in the tints of health, you will too often miss them on the
cheeks we are now so daringly criticising. I do not want to do more than
is needed of this ungracious talk: suffice it to say that multitudes of
our young girls are merely pretty to look at, or not that; that their
destiny is the shawl and the sofa, neuralgia, weak backs, and the varied
forms of hysteria,--that domestic demon which has produced untold
discomfort in many a household, and, I am almost ready to say, as much
unhappiness as the husband's dram. My phrase may seem outrageously
strong, but only the doctor knows what one of these self-made invalids
can do to make a household wretched. Mrs. Gradgrind is, in fiction, the
only successful portrait of this type of misery, of the woman who wears
out and destroys generations of nursing relatives, and who, as Wendell
Holmes has said, is like a vampire, sucking slowly the blood of every
healthy, helpful creature within reach of her demands.