The emphasis is clear; the natural female forms Kingsley has seen in the British Museum belong to the mothers and sisters who have bred the greatest civilisation in the world. Kingsley compares the sculpted female forms to the contemporary ugliness he sees on the streets around him, which he condemns; advocating a form of physical education for young women as well as the wearing of less bodily restrictive clothing. Arguably, Kingsley’s ideas on the physical education of young women to equip them better for motherhood and a healthy life correspond to Gilbert’s reading of defining health in the mid-nineteenth.
