THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR GRANDMOTHERS


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