To avoid arousal more generally, women were instructed to get plenty of fresh air, avoid stimulating pastimes like reading and card games, and above all never to use their brains more than was strictly necessary. Educating them was not simply a waste of time and resources but dangerously bad for their delicate constitutions. In 1865, John Ruskin opined in an essay that women should be educated just enough to make themselves practically useful to their spouses, but no further. Even the American educator Catharine Beecher, who was by the standards of the age a radical feminist, argued
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