The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.2, page 302, 21 Apr. 1886, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WAS HINGTON Papers of underfeeding, and this is a result of their ignorance of the art of cooking. If ever in their possession, good cooking is a lost art now among the colored women in general of the South. The rations of sodden, unappetizing food that are served three times a day in most families are so many outrages upon those faithful but much abused servants, the digestive organs. Any school that succeeds in arousing in one of our young women an ambition to become a good cook does God and humanity a noble service. Seeds of disease and suffering are sown in infancy, childhood and girlhood by mothers, at first, through ignorance of proper methods of caring for their little ones from the time of their birth, and later through carelessness and ignorance in allowing them to go blindly on, ignorant of the laws of life, leaving them to come unshielded by any word of advice or caution to the possession of knowledge, whose possession is vicious in its influence upon health and character' only, because its acquirement is made a thing of chance, or which' the child feels she must obtain surreptitiously. I beg the women of this convention to be earnest 'in their endeavors to shield the young girls in their districts from the fearful sins of ignorance in this direction. Try to make the mothers fee! the serious responsibility that rests upon them. Show them in every way you can how to shield their girls from wrong and suffering brought on by pernicious habits. Inlet us now turn to the consideration of that part of the question which asks how can we make the women of our race stronger intellectually. ~ would not have you think, especially you my brother teachers, that we are seeking to find out how we can produce more ''strong minded'' women as that term is used in its most objectionable sense. Indeed it would require stronger evolutionary force than even Prof. Huxley would dare to advocate to evolve strong-minded women out of ~the] mass of intellectually deformed beings who compose the female portion of our race. Slavery with its offsprings of misery in the form of physical, mental and moral deformity has left its impress upon us, and its influence will be seen in us, for generations to come. It must be ~the] work of the earnest reformers among us in each generation to make this influence weaker and to hasten the day when slavery with all its entail will be a thing of the past indeed. 302