Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 October 1885 — The Amusement Question. [ARTICLE]

The Amusement Question.

“What shall be a young woman’s recreations and amusements?” Usually, whatever happens to be the fashion. Amusements come and go like the winds whensoever they listeth. Real amusements must generally bring the two sexes together—such is the law of heaven. No attraction is so strong as the attraction between men and women, and it is idle to call anything amusement that rules that out Yet the law of heaven is law, not anarchy, chaos; real amusement is always amenable to order, dignity, self-possession. Dancing is,, perhaps, the most decorous and beautiful Of pure amusements. Rhythmic, graceful, imperious, demanding exact obedience, displaying beauty of form, and motion, and decoration, it has received the tribute of all ages and all countries. It exhibits, at once, and produces strength and agility. It exhilarates and it fatigues, in one sway of pleasureable activity, training the body and tranquilizing the soul. Tennis is an exercise—active, and, if not in excess, most healthful Cro-

quet is but an animated idleness to the unskillful, yet, in the hands of a master, the balls do leap about like intelligent creatures. Boating, riding, rowing, their name is legion. One hesitates to strike a man when he is down, but the skating rink is crowded, indiscriminate and rather vulgar. Beal skating firs much to say for itself. Far the best way is to let the ypuag woman select their own amusements. A girl well reared, furnished with good principles’and fortified with good habits, may be safely trusted to play at whatever she likes. And at all good plays and by all good principles the intelligent and affectionate inspection of parents and elders is not suffered as a necessary evil, but welcomed as an additional pleasure, if not even demanded as a prerequisite to pleasure. —Gail Hamilton. 1