PHYSICAL CULTURE FOR WOMEN

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XVIII, Issue XVIII, 30 November 1912, Page 9

PHYSICAL CULTURE FOR WOMEN

With the dawn of the twentieth century -it is pleasant for the true lover of ms race to see woman resigning her position as a mere drawing-room ornament, and developing into a really usehil, though none the less ornate, member of society. Surely the days are now gone for ever when women aimed at a pale and wan complexion, when Allhealth was considered "interesting " when women were afflicted with "the vapours," and swooned on the smallest provocation, and when damozels like Isabella spent their time and tears over pote of basil, or in plying the sampler, and teasing the housewife's wool for lack or any healthier occupation. A little healthy outdoor exercise in those olden days would, we feel sure,, have afforded much happiness to many tragically celebrated personages, though what was thus gained to humanity might have been lost to literature. Had liomeo and Juliet possessed a pneu-matic-tyred tandem; had Isabella cultivated her bicycle rather than her basil • or had Ophelia thought less,of Hamlet and more of hockey—their ends, though possibly accidental, might have been less tragic. Leander showed a good example by going in for long-distance swimming, but he went to extremes and was lost.

fhe number or girls and young women who go m for physical culture nowadays in increasing, and in consequence there are fewer of those chronic invalids who spend their lives between the bed and the soia, with an occasional hour of glorious life in a Bath-chair. Invalidism ot the merely "interesting" kind is no longer admired, and girls with a tendency to hysteria, spinal irritation, or neurasthenia no longer command and engross the sympathies of a crowd of anxious relatives. ,it jis well known to physicians that the two most widespread causes of disease in women are overwork and underwork (idleness). The rich do not suffer from the former, nor tnepoor from the latter. Want of physical or mental employment is the curse of the well-to-do The poor never suffer from spinal irritation or neurasthenia ; they eimply cannot aitord to. It is an expensive disease, and is to be seen in all its glory and tropical luxuriance among the fair women who toil not, neither do they spin, even on bicycles.