Every young woman of the present generation, so soon as she ventures to
have a headache or a set of nerves, is immediately confronted by indignant
critics with her grandmother. If the grandmother is living, the fact of her
existence is appealed to: if there is only a departed grandmother to
remember, the maiden is confronted with a ghost. That ghost is endowed with
as many excellences as those with which Miss Betsey Trotwood endowed the
niece that never had been born; and just as David Copperfield was
reproached with the virtues of his unborn sister who "would never have run
away," so that granddaughter with the headache is reproached with the
ghostly perfections of her grandmother, who never had a headache--or, if
she had, it is luckily forgotten. It is necessary to ask, sometimes, what
was really the truth about our grandmothers? Were they such models of
bodily perfection as is usually claimed?
If we look at the early colonial days, we are at once met by the fact, that
although families were then often larger than is now common, yet this
phenomenon was by no means universal, and was balanced by a good many
childless homes. Of this any one can satisfy himself by looking over any
family history; and he can also satisfy himself of the fact,--first pointed
out, I believe, by Mrs. Ball,--that third and fourth marriages were then
obviously and unquestionably more common than now. The inference would seem
to be, that there is a little illusion about the health of those days, as
there is about the health of savage races. In both cases, it is not so much
that the average health is greater under rude social conditions, as that
these conditions kill off the weak, and leave only the strong. Modern
civilized society, on the other hand, preserves the health of many men and
women--and permits them to marry, and become parents--who under the
severities of savage life or of pioneer life would have died, and given way
to others.
On this I will not dwell; because these primeval ladies were not strictly
our grandmothers, being farther removed. But of those who were our
grandmothers,--the women of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary
epochs,--we happen to have very definite physiological observations
recorded; not very flattering, it is true, but frank and searching. What
these good women are in the imagination of their descendants, we know. Mrs.
Stowe describes them as "the race of strong, hardy, cheerful girls that
used to grow up in country places, and made the bright, neat New England
kitchens of olden times;" and adds, "This race of women, pride of olden
time, is daily lessening; and in their stead come the fragile, easily
fatigued, languid girls of a modern age, drilled in book-learning, ignorant
of common things."
What, now, was the testimony of those who saw our grandmothers in the
flesh? As it happens, there were a good many foreigners, generally
Frenchmen, who came to visit the new Republic during the presidency of
Washington. Let us take, for instance, the testimony of the two following.
The Abbé Robin was a chaplain in Rochambeau's army during the Revolution,
and wrote thus in regard to the American ladies in his "Nouveau Voyage
dans l'Amerique Septentrionale," published in 1782:--
"They are tall and well-proportioned; their features are generally
regular; their complexions are generally fair and without color....
At twenty years of age the women have no longer the freshness of
youth. At thirty-five or forty they are wrinkled and decrepit. The
men are almost as premature."
Again: The Chevalier Louis Félix de Beaujour lived in the United States
from 1804 to 1814, as consul-general and _chargé d'affaires;_ and wrote a
book, immediately after, which was translated into English under the title,
"A Sketch of the United States at the Commencement of the Present Century."
In this he thus describes American women:--
"The women have more of that delicate beauty which belongs to their
sex, and in general have finer features and more expression in their
physiognomy. Their stature is usually tall, and nearly all are
possessed of a light and airy shape,--the breast high, a fine head,
and their color of a dazzling whiteness. Let us imagine, under this
brilliant form, the most modest demeanor, a chaste and virginal air,
accompanied by those single and unaffected graces which flow from
artless nature, and we may have an idea of their beauty; but this
beauty fades and passes in a moment. At the age of twenty-five their
form changes, and at thirty the whole of their charms have
disappeared."
These statements bring out a class of facts, which, as it seems to me, are
singularly ignored by some of our physiologists. They indicate that the
modification of the American type began early, and was, as a rule, due to
causes antedating the fashions or studies of the present day. Here are our
grandmothers and great-grandmothers as they were actually seen by the eyes
of impartial or even flattering critics. These critics were not Englishmen,
accustomed to a robust and ruddy type of women, but Frenchmen, used to a
type more like the American. They were not mere hasty travellers; for the
one lived here ten years, and the other was stationed for some time at
Newport, R.I., in a healthy locality, noted in those days for the beauty
of its women. Yet we find it their verdict upon these grandmothers of
nearly a hundred years ago, that they showed the same delicate beauty, the
same slenderness, the same pallor, the same fragility, the same early
decline, with which their granddaughters are now reproached.
In some respects, probably, the physical habits of the grandmothers were
better: but an examination of their portraits will satisfy any one that
they laced more tightly than their descendants, and wore their dresses
lower in the neck; and as for their diet, we have the testimony of another
French traveller, Volney, who was in America from 1795 to 1798, that "if
a premium were offered for a regimen most destructive to the teeth, the
stomach, and the health in general, none could be devised more efficacious
for these ends than that in use among this people." And he goes on to give
particulars, showing a far worse condition in respect to cookery and diet
than now prevails in any decent American society.
We have therefore strong evidence that the essential change in the American
type was effected in the last century, not in this. Dr. E.H. Clarke says,
"A century does not afford a period long enough for the production of great
changes. That length of time could not transform the sturdy German
_fräulein_ and robust English damsel into the fragile American miss." And
yet it is pretty clear that the first century and a half of our colonial
life had done just this for our grandmothers. And, if so, our physiologists
ought to conform their theories to the facts.