Genre:

Abstract

Publications abstracted:

Arabella Kenealy Nineteenth Century

Subjects:

Breeding, Gender, Health

    Reports that 'having long ago demonstrated that the cultivation of their brain by women was accompanied by all manner of terrible dangers to their reproductive efficiency', Kenealy 'now lifts up her voice [...] to warn her sisters against the awful consequences of cultivating their muscle'. Her article, however, will 'read like cruel wrong to the myriad women to whom motherhood is an unattainable paradise', and may make 'lazy girls imagine that they are best fulfilling their destinies as breeding machines by never cultivating their minds or training their bodies'.