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Personal Recollections - Abridged, Chiefly in Parts Pertaining to Political and Other - Controversies Prevalent at the Time in Great Britain by Charlotte Elizabeth
page 28 of 185 (15%)
this girl will be both a dwarf and a cripple if we don't put her into
stays."

"My child may be a cripple, ma'am, if such is God's will; but she shall
be one of his making, not ours."

All remonstrance was vain; stays and every species of tight dress were
strictly prohibited by the authority of one whose will was, as every
man's ought to be, absolute in his own household. He also carefully
watched against any evasion of the rule: a ribbon drawn tightly round my
waist would have been cut without hesitation by his determined hand;
while the little girl of the anxious friend whose operations he had
interrupted, enjoyed all the advantages of that system from which I was
preserved. She grew up a wandlike figure, graceful and interesting, and
died of decline at nineteen; while I, though not able to compare shapes
with a wasp or an hour-glass, yet passed muster very fairly among mere
human forms of God's moulding; and I have enjoyed to this hour a rare
exemption from headaches, and other ladylike maladies, that appear the
almost exclusive privilege of women in the higher classes.

This is no trivial matter, believe me; it has frequently been the
subject of conversation with professional men of high attainment, and I
never met with one among them who did not, on hearing that I never but
once, and then only for a few hours, submitted to the restraint of these
unnatural machines, refer to that exemption, as a means, the free
respiration, circulation, and powers both of exertion and endurance with
which the Lord has most mercifully gifted me. There can be no doubt that
the hand which first encloses the waist of a girl in these cruel
contrivances, supplying her with a fictitious support, where the hand of
God has placed bones and muscles that ought to be brought into vigorous
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