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 ...

624 WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUR DAUGHTERS?
gaitered, is the national vanity. How we stare at the big
feet of foreigners, and wonder what may be the price of
leather in those countries, and where all the aristocratic
blood is, that these plebeian extremities so predominate!"
The prevailing French boots made for women, and exhibited in the shop-windows, are painfully suggestive.
Pointed and elongated, they prophesy cramped and atrophied toes; while the high and narrow heel, that slides
down under the instep, throws the whole body into an unnatural position in walking, creating diseases which are difficult of cure. " Show me her boots!" said a physician, called
to a young lady suffering from unendurable pain in the
back and knee-joints, which extended and engirt her, till, to
use her own language, "' she was solid pain downwards from
the waist." "There's the trouble!" was his sententious
comment, as he tossed the fashionable torturing boot from
him after examination.
While the clothing of our daughters should not deform
the figure nor injure the health, it need be neither inelegant
nor inartistic. No particular style of dress can be recommended, but each one should choose what is most becoming
and appropriate in fashion and material. With sacred regard to the laws of health, and without too large expenditure of time and money, every woman should aim to present
an attractive exterior to her friends and the world. So, indeed, should every man; for it is the duty of all human
beings to be as beautiful as possible.
I have spoken at length of dress, because of the physical
discomfort and hindrance caused by the prevailing dress of
women, and because it is also a prolific source of disease,
which becomes chronic and incurable. But food, sleep, exercise, and other matters demand attention when one is intrusted with the education of girls. American children,