The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUR DAUGHTERS? 623
nounce it unqualifiedly, lay to its charge no small amount
of the dire diseases on whose treatment gyneecologists fatten, and declare that it enhances the peril of maternity, and
inflicts upon the world inferior children. Men condemn
corsets in the abstract, and sometimes are brave enough to
insist that the women of their households shall be emancipated from them; and yet their eyes have been so generally
educated to the approval of the small waist, and the hourglass figure, that they often hinder women who seek a hygienic style of dress.
It is a mistake on the part of our daughters that the corset will give them beauty of figpure. The young American
girl is usually lithe and slender, and requires no artificial intensifying of her slightness. The corset will give her only
stiffness of appearance, and interferes with that grace of
motion, which is one of the charms of young girls. The
basque under-waist, made as a substitute for the corset, and
beginning to supersede it, fits the figure trimly, reve~aling
its graceful contour, and is kept in place, - not by bones, or
slips of steel, or thickly stitched-in stiff cords, - but by the
weight of the skirts buttoned on the lower part. Over this
under-waist the outer dress can be fitted; and its waist will
be smooth and unwrinkled,- a desideratum. to most women.
The stout woman, who wears a corset to diminish her
proportions, only distorts her figure; for her pinched waist
causes her broad shoulders and hips to look broader by contrast, while the pressure upon the heart and blood-vessels
gives to her face that permanent~ blowzy flush, that suggests
apoplexy