Vandalia Whig And Illinois Intelligencer

Female Education.--Let your first care be to give your little girls a good physical education. Let their early years be passed, if possible, in the country, gathering flowers in the fields, and partaking of all the free exercises in which they delight. When they grow older, do not condemn them to eight listless hours a day over their books, their work, their maps, and their music. Be assured that half the number of hours passed in real attention to well ordered studies will make them more accomplished and more agreeable companions than those who are said to be finished.

Pronounced grace, are only calculated to keep the degrading idea perpetually present, that they are preparing for the great market of the world. Real elegance of demeanor springs from the mind, as fashionable schools do but teach its imitation, whilst their rules forbid to be ingenuous. Philosophers never conceived the idea of so perfect a vacuum as is found to exist in the minds of young women supposed to have finished their education in such establishments.

If they marry husbands as uninformed as themselves, they fall into habits of insignificance with much pain--if they marry persons more accomplished, they can retain no hold of their affection. Hence many matrimonial miseries, in the midst of which the wife finds it a consolation to be always complaining of her health and ruined nerves. In the education of young women we would say--let them be secured from all the trappings and manacles of such a system; partake of every active exercise not absolutely unfeminine, and trust to their being able to get into or out of a carriage with a light and graceful step, which no drilling can accomplish.--Let then rise early and retire early to rest, and trust that their beauty will not need to be coined into artificial smiles in order to ensure a welcome, in whatever room they enter. Let them ride, walk, run, dance in the open air. Encourage the merry and innocent diversions in which the young delight--let them, under proper guidance, explore every hill and valley; let them plant and cultivate the garden, and make hay when the summer sun shines, and surmount all dread of a shower of rain, or the boisterous wind: and, above all, let them take no medicine except when the doctor orders it. The demons of hysteria and melancholy might hover over a group of young ladies so brought up; but they would not find one of them upon whom they could exercise any power.--For. Quart. Rev.