Nashville Union And American

Her Celebrated Lecture on Girls.

Masonic Hall was thronged last night by a most intelligent audience to hear Olive Logan's lecture on "Our Girls." The lecturer was neatly dressed, and seemed to be quite at home on the stage. Her action is graceful and her voice pleasing. The subject was skillfully handled and the interest of the audience never for a moment flagged.

She prefaced her lecture by saying that in choosing her lectures she had always been animated less by the purpose of selecting a popular subject than by that of selecting a subject with which she could feel herself thoroughly at home. That was the reason she was going to speak about girls. She was thoroughly acquainted with girls. She was once a girl herself, her schoolmates were girls, her sisters were girls, and her mother said she had been a girl too. Naturally she might say something of little girls.

The first thing that happened to a little girl was that she was a baby. [Laughter.] It happened to little boys too, she supposed. [Laughter.] The girl baby and the boy baby looked very much alike, but as soon as they began to walk they took different paths. If little Mary had a desire to romp in the fields, or to pitch stones in the river, she was speedily made to understand that such things were not womanly. A girl having those healthful inclinations was reminded of the awful end of the "crowing hen;" she was warned against growing into that awful thing-a tom-boy. She was taught to crush out the instincts of nature; to avoid acquiring strength; to keep her hands soft and pretty, and her face free from tan and freckles. Her brother Tom might do what he liked, for every parent knew that was the road to health. Why was it not the road to health for girls, too? Why, the only reason she ever heard for it was that it was not womanly.

If Tom does an act that is wrong, he is told that it is not manly. If he cries with pain when he stubs his toe; he is told "Tom, that is not manly." If he is a coward, and screams at a mouse. "Why, Tom, I am astonished at you! Be a man." The worst thing you can call him is a "girl boy." If he is a quiet, retiring boy, his comrades point their fingers at him and cry, "O what a coward! Before I would be such a baby-just like a girl." And if you would make Tom's heart float with proud consciousness of his future, tell him "You will be a man before your mother." [Laughter.] That will make him strut. What little girl was ever made happy by the information that she would be a woman before her father?

One of the most peculiar characteristics of little girls is that they are always saying smart things. Here the lecturer narrated a number of anecdotes to illustrate the statement. But while girls are still children there is not so very much difference between them after all, and that was the principal reason why she made no division among them. The most popular which could be made was that which most mothers did actually make; namely, our little girls and other people's little girls. [Laughter.] Our little girls, of course, are everything that is interesting and delightful, but other people's little girls have a great many faults.

The big girls were classified as follows: 1st. The fashionable girl; 2d. The beautiful girl; 3d. The womanly girl, 4th. The Yankee girl; 5th, the Western girl; 6th, the Southern girl, and lastly, the strong-minded girl. She had not time to refer to the bad girl. They were the kind who did not come to her good lectures. There was the good girl, too, who did attend her lectures, and sat there, patiently, out to the end, and liked them first rate.

There were two kinds of fashionable girls. There was the ultra fashionable girl, who was merely fashionable and nothing else; who had but one idea, and that was to dress. There was another fashionable girl, who united to her fashionable habits some evidence of character, virtue, mind and soul. The ultra fashionable girl is a bundle of artificialities, artifices, airs and pretence, with just as little of the natural girl underneath them as it is possible to conceive. It is this stupid girl that has cast a stigma on all elegance of attire, and sickened so many people with the absurd prejudice that any girl who dresses fashionably must necessarily be a fool. When love of dress occupies a girl's mind to the entire exclusion of better things, it is not only a contemptible weakness, but absolutely a sin and a shame. Here the lecturer gave a description of an ultra fashionable girl she had lately met.

The other fashionable girl has brains and heart and the place she occupies in life is the result of wealth, fortune and circumstances. Such a girl feels the emptiness of a mere fashionable life. In the silence of her chamber she often asks herself if life has no sort of earnestness for her. She despises the vapid flatterers who surround her and sharpens her wit at their expense to their very faces. She generally has some hobby, and she rides it with a gallantry and zest which shows how useful she could be if her energies were only directed into nobler channels. But it is the pre-requisite of the fashionable girl all over the world that her hobby shall not be unfashionable. There is no prejudice so strong as that of the born and bred votary of fashion.

By the beautiful girl is meant the kind a man refers to when he says "there is a pretty girl." She overrates the advantages of personal beauty in the world, and underrates everything else. Unfortunately she is encouraged in this error by a thousand inferences. In almost every book she takes up she is sure to find some encouragement of this sort, for there is no end to the praise which men bestow on beauty. The poets of every age have exalted woman's beauty to the skies. The novelist whenever he hunts a heroine, almost always paints her with a pretty face. Men have raved through the literature of generations about the marvellous power of beauty in woman. From the conduct of the men she meets she draws the same inference. It is simply madness to expect a girl to go through life without seeing plainly what her power is, just through her personal beauty. It would be a wonder indeed if such a woman did not get an exaggerated idea of the value of such charms and be led to neglect the cultivation of head and heart to increase her personal attractions by superficial and artificial means.

Of all girls in the world, this girl is most difficult to advise, for she knows her power. The chief fault of most persons who undertake to advise her is misunderstanding what she overrates, and that is fatal. If you tell a girl that sensible men do not care for a pretty face, you close her ears to you at once. She knows better. You might as well tell her that sensible men don't care for strawberries and cream. The statement kills itself. My experience teaches me (and I have had my experience) that sensible men do care for pretty faces just as truly as they do for strawberries and cream. There is something about both which all sensible men smack their lips over [Laughter.] That is half the truth. The other half-truth of this matter is that neither sensible men nor fools can live on strawberries and cream alone. The strawberries on your rosy lips and the cream on your fair cheeks are excellent so far as they go, but they won't go far. At the dinner table strawberries and cream are talked of more than all other dishes on the table, but for all that, take my word for it, girls, it is the roast beef which does the solid work [Laughter.] It is the same with beauty. Give a hungry man his choice between a plate of corned-beef and cabbage and a plate of strawberries and cream. Do you think there is a man in all this world that would not take the corned-beef and cabbage and let the strawberries and cream go. It is exactly the same in your case girls. Men will praise you, but when they set about taking a wife they have got to take the solid meat of virtue, intelligence and wisdom (cheers).

I would not have one beautiful girl lose a single item of her personal beauty, but I would have her value it aright. You know beauty has long been spoken of by moralists and teachers as the dangerous gift. Alas, girls, it is too often dangerous, but it need not be; if and there is here to-night one beautiful girl who has not yet awakened to the knowledge that beauty may be her destruction, I pray her to awaken to it now, for there has been many such a girl, with the bright, beautiful face and the merry heart, who has entered the gay avenues leading down to the dark gulf of shame, and at the close of a brief and ghastly career, lies forsaken and in rags on the damp floor of some filthy hovel, left alone to die with her beauty all gone; has heard the Sabbath bells of memory peal their music on her dying ear from the far off home which she shall see no more, and cried aloud-in her agony, "Beauty was my curse! Beauty was my curse!"