E-text prepared by Jason Isbell, Karen Dalrymple, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 21829-h.htm or 21829-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/1/8/2/21829/21829-h/21829-h.htm) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/1/8/2/21829/21829-h.zip)
Page numbers 10 and 370 were skipped in the original text; they are not missing. There were two pages 355 and 356 in the original; the two between page 354 and the first page 355 have been renumbered 354a and 345b and references to them in the text changed accordingly.
Printer errors were corrected silently and hyphenation was made consistent, but variant spellings have been preserved.
For the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School.
Revised Edition, With Numerous Additions and Illustrative Engravings.
New-York: Harper & Brothers, 82 Cliff Street. 1845.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1842, by Thomas H. Webb, & Co., in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts.
whose intelligence and virtues have inspired admiration and respect, whose experience has furnished many valuable suggestions, in this work, whose approbation will be highly valued, and whose influence, in promoting the object aimed at, is respectfully solicited, this work is dedicated, by their friend and countrywoman,
The author of this work was led to attempt it, by discovering, in her extensive travels, the deplorable sufferings of multitudes of young wives and mothers, from the combined influence of _poor health_, _poor domestics_, _and a defective domestic education_. The number of young women whose health is crushed, ere the first few years of married life are past, would seem incredible to one who has not investigated this subject, and it would be vain to attempt to depict the sorrow, discouragement, and distress experienced in most families where the wife and mother is a perpetual invalid.
The writer became early convinced that this evil results mainly from the fact, that young girls, especially in the more wealthy classes, _are not trained for their profession_. In early life, they go through a course of school training which results in great debility of constitution, while, at the same time, their physical and domestic education is almost wholly neglected. Thus they enter on their most arduous and sacred duties so inexperienced and uninformed, and with so little muscular and nervous strength, that probably there is not _one chance in ten_, that young women of the present day, will pass through the first years of married life without such prostration of health and spirits as makes life a burden to themselves, and, it is to be feared, such as seriously interrupts the confidence and happiness of married life.