OCR Text |
Show LITTLE BARE LEGS. Miss Susan Wright has been a teacher for twenty-one years in a girl's public school in New York. She is now the principal of the primary department. A short time ago she wrote a letter to the Board of Health, in which she said that the short dresses worn by many of the girl pupils did more harm than bad plumbing and defective ventilation, and that the fashion made the children liable to rheumatism, consumption, pneumonia, and other diseases, which are the result of exposure. Her letter closed as follows: "My sympathy for the ill used children of the rich and poor compels me to ask your attention to this crying abuse, and to risk the unpopularity of putting the blame where it rightly belongs - upon physicians, too tender-pocketed to make parents full sharers in the blame which belongs to neglected buildings and ignorant teachers, in this murder of the innocents." The Board of Health referred the letter to the Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Mr. Elbridge T. Gerry the President of the Society returned an answer, in which he wrote. "It is impossible for the Society to interfere upon the general complaint preferred by Miss Wright. If she will furnish evidence of any specific set of willful cruelty, the case will be prosecuted at once." Miss Wright said afterward to a Sun reporter, that even where poor children in her school had been given dresses of a proper length they had returned next day with the dresses cut short. The children of wealthy parents were as poorly clad in this respect as the poor children. The stockings might be of finer quality, but there was no more warmth in them. Mothers cover themselves with heavy flannels and furs, and yet they send out their delicate little girls with their legs exposed, in some cases even above the knee, to the cold winds. It is simply a foolish desire, Miss Wright said, to be in the fashion. Years ago girls wore long dresses and were then sufficiently protected. Certainly girls are not hardier now than they were then. She had lately seen very small children who wore socks which left a space of bare flesh exposed above them. Little boys with knickerbockers generally wore ulsters, and are thus protected. The cold is much more injurious to girls than boys. A great deal of sickness in the schools, Miss Wright said, arises from this cause. In regard to the answer of the Society, she said that she could not, with propriety, give the names of parents of ill clad children. The Society could see the children anywhere in the streets. She hoped to accomplish much by calling the matter to public notice, and believed that when parents learned of the wrong they were doing their children; they would seek to remedy the evil. A physician skilled in children's diseases said that it was undoubtedly unhealthy to expose any portion of the body to the cold. It affected the lungs and heart, and was liable to bring on diphtheria and other complaints. All children should wear heavy underclothing and warm woolen leggings in the cold weather. Stockings are a very insufficient protection in a cold wind. It would be wrong to blame the doctors for the short dresses. They do not set the fashions, and are only asked for advice when the child becomes ill. |