Purity, intellect, and puberty: Advice for the middle classes

"It is of the highest importance to remove young girls from boarding-school, when they approach the age of puberty, in order to exercise a constant watch over them. We should prevent, as far as possible, the false emotions produced by the reading of licentious books, especially of the highly-wrought romances of the modern school, which are the more injurious, as all the faculties become, as it were, overpowered by the desire to experience the sentiment which these works always represent in an imaginary and exaggerated strain. Frequent visits to the theatre ought to be carefully avoided, because they, also, may give rise to sensations conformable to the moral conditions, which is, naturally, at puberty, already too much exalted. These powerful, exciting agents, and still more frequently, the violent intimacies formed at boarding-school, tear the veil of modesty, and destroy, for ever, the seductive innocence which is the most charming ornament of a young girl. Endowed with an organization eminently impressionable, she soon contracts improper habits, and constantly tormented by an amorous melancholy, becomes sad, dreamy, sentimental and languishing. Like a delicate plant, withered by the rays of a burning sun, she fades and dies under the influence of a poisoned breath. The desires for happiness and love, so sweet and attractive in their native truth, are in her converted into a devouring flame, and onanism, that execrable and fatal evil, soon destroys her beauty, impairs her health, and conducts her almost always to a premature grave! . . ."

"They should also avoid cold feet; they should not remain with the arms or neck uncovered, and must abstain from iced, exciting and alcoholic drinks, such as sherbets, coffee, tea, liqueurs, etc."

"It is well, also, to avoid sitting upon cold and damp places, or example the earth, a stone bench, a grassy bank, etc."

from Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women's Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States, edited by Erna Olafson Hellerstein, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981.

Marc Colombat, A Treatise on the Diseases and Special Hygiene of Females, tr. Charles Meigs (Philadelphia, 1850), pp. 544-47. First published in Paris in 1838.