Conversations dealing with the important mysteries of human nature, Obici and Marchesini were told by ladies who had formerly been pupils in Italian Normal Schools, are the order of the day in schools and colleges, and specially circle around procreation, the most difficult mystery of all. In England, even in the best and most modern colleges, in which games and physical exercise are much cultivated, I am told that "the majority of the girls are entirely ignorant of all sexual matters, and understand nothing whatever about them. But they do wonder about them, and talk about them constantly" (see Appendix D, "The School Friendships of Girls," in the second volume of these Studies). "The restricted life and fettered mind of girls," wrote a well-known physician some years ago (J. Milner Fothergill, Adolescence, 1880, pp. 20, 22) "leave them with less to actively occupy their thoughts than is the case with boys. They are studiously taught concealment, and a girl may be a perfect model of outward decorum and yet have a very filthy mind. The prudishness with which she is brought up leaves her no alternative but to view her passions from the nasty side of human nature. All healthy thought on the subject is vigorously repressed. Everything is done to darken her mind and foul her imagination by throwing her back on her own thoughts and a literature with which she is ashamed to own acquaintance. It is opposed to a girl's best interests to prevent her from having fair and just conceptions about herself and her nature. Many a fair young girl is irredeemably ruined on the very threshold of life, herself and her family disgraced, from ignorance as much as from vice. When the moment of temptation comes she falls without any palpable resistance; she has no trained educated power of resistance within herself; her whole future hangs, not upon herself, but upon the perfection of the social safeguards by which she is hedged and surrounded." Under the free social order of America to-day much the same results are found. In an instructive article ("Why Girls Go Wrong," Ladies' Home Journal, Jan., 1907) B.B. Lindsey, who, as Judge of the Juvenile Court of Denver, is able to speak with authority, brings forward ample evidence on this head. Both girls and boys, he has found, sometimes possess manuscript books in which they had written down the crudest sexual things. These children were often sweet-faced, pleasant, refined and intelligent, and they had respectable parents; but no one had ever spoken to them of sex matters, except the worst of their school-fellows or some coarse-minded and reckless adult. By careful inquiry Lindsey found that only in one in twenty cases had the parents ever spoken to the children of sexual subjects. In nearly every case the children acknowledged that it was not from their parents, but in the street or from older companions, that they learnt the facts of sex. The parents usually imagined that their children were absolutely ignorant of these matters, and were astonished to realize their mistake; "parents do not know their children, nor have they the least idea of what their children know, or what their children talk about and do when away from them." The parents guilty of this neglect to instruct their children, are, Lindsey declares, traitors to their children. From his own experience he judges that nine-tenths of the girls who "go wrong," whether or not they sink in the world, do so owing to the inattention of their parents, and that in the case of most prostitutes the mischief is really done before the age of twelve; "every wayward girl I have talked to has assured me of this truth." He considers that nine-tenths of school-boys and school-girls, in town or country, are very inquisitive regarding matters of sex, and, to his own amazement, he has found that in the girls this is as marked as in the boys.

It is the business of the girl's mother, at least as much as of the boy's, to watch over her child from the earliest years and to win her confidence in all the intimate and personal matters of sex. With these aspects the school cannot properly meddle. But in matters of physical sexual hygiene, notably menstruation, in regard to which all girls stand on the same level, it is certainly the duty of the teacher to take an actively watchful part, and, moreover, to direct the general work of education accordingly, and to ensure that the pupil shall rest whenever that may seem to be desirable. This is part of the very elements of the education of girls. To disregard it should disqualify a teacher from taking further share in educational work. Yet it is constantly and persistently neglected. A large number of girls have not even been prepared by their mothers or teachers for the first onset of the menstrual flow, sometimes with disastrous results both to their bodily and mental health.[26]

"I know of no large girl's school," wrote a distinguished gynaecologist, Sir W.S. Playfair ("Education and Training of Girls at Puberty," British Medical Journal, Dec. 7, 1895), "in which the absolute distinction which exists between boys and girls as regards the dominant menstrual function is systematically cared for and attended to. Indeed, the feeling of all schoolmistresses is distinctly antagonistic to such an admission. The contention is that there is no real difference between an adolescent male and female, that what is good for one is good for the other, and that such as there is is due to the evil customs of the past which have denied to women the ambitions and advantages open to men, and that this will disappear when a happier era is inaugurated. If this be so, how comes it that while every practical physician of experience has seen many cases of anaemia and chlorosis in girls, accompanied by amenorrhaea or menorrhagia, headaches, palpitations, emaciation, and all the familiar accompaniments of breakdown, an analogous condition in a school-boy is so rare that it may well be doubted if it is ever seen at all?"

It is, however, only the excuses for this almost criminal negligence, as it ought to be considered, which are new; the negligence itself is ancient. Half a century earlier, before the new era of feminine education, another distinguished gynaecologist, Tilt (Elements of Health and Principles of Female Hygiene, 1852, p. 18) stated that from a statistical inquiry regarding the onset of menstruation in nearly one thousand women he found that "25 per cent. were totally unprepared for its appearance; that thirteen out of the twenty-five were much frightened, screamed, or went into hysterical fits; and that six out of the thirteen thought themselves wounded and washed with cold water. Of those frightened ... the general health was seriously impaired."

Engelmann, after stating that his experience in America was similar to Tilt's in England, continues ("The Health of the American Girl," Transactions of the Southern Surgical and Gynaecological Society, 1890): "To innumerable women has fright, nervous and emotional excitement, exposure to cold, brought injury at puberty. What more natural than that the anxious girl, surprised by the sudden and unexpected loss of the precious life-fluid, should seek to check the bleeding wound—as she supposes? For this purpose the use of cold washes and applications is common, some even seek to stop the flow by a cold bath, as was done by a now careful mother, who long lay at the point of death from the result of such indiscretion, and but slowly, by years of care, regained her health. The terrible warning has not been lost, and mindful of her own experience she has taught her children a lesson which but few are fortunate enough to learn—the individual care during periods of functional activity which is needful for the preservation of woman's health."

In a study of one hundred and twenty-five American high school girls Dr. Helen Kennedy refers to the "modesty" which makes it impossible even for mothers and daughters to speak to each other concerning the menstrual functions. "Thirty-six girls in this high school passed into womanhood with no knowledge whatever, from a proper source, of all that makes them women. Thirty-nine were probably not much wiser, for they stated that they had received some instruction, but had not talked freely on the matter. From the fact that the curious girl did not talk freely on what naturally interested her, it is possible she was put off with a few words as to personal care, and a reprimand for her curiosity. Less than half of the girls felt free to talk with their mothers of this most important matter!" (Helen Kennedy, "Effects of High School Work upon Girls During Adolescence," Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1896.)

The same state of things probably also prevails in other countries. Thus, as regards France, Edmond de Goncourt in Cherie (pp. 137-139) described the terror of his young heroine at the appearance of the first menstrual period for which she had never been prepared. He adds: "It is very seldom, indeed, that women speak of this eventuality. Mothers fear to warn their daughters, elder sisters dislike confidences with their younger sisters, governesses are generally mute with girls who have no mothers or sisters."

Sometimes this leads to suicide or to attempts at suicide. Thus a few years ago the case was reported in the French newspapers of a young girl of fifteen, who threw herself into the Seine at Saint-Ouen. She was rescued, and on being brought before the police commissioner said that she had been attacked by an "unknown disease" which had driven her to despair. Discreet inquiry revealed that the mysterious malady was one common to all women, and the girl was restored to her insufficiently punished parents.

Half a century ago the sexual life of girls was ignored by their parents and teachers from reasons of prudishness; at the present time, when quite different ideas prevail regarding feminine education, it is ignored on the ground that girls should be as independent of their physiological sexual life as boys are. The fact that this mischievous neglect has prevailed equally under such different conditions indicates clearly that the varying reasons assigned for it are merely the cloaks of ignorance. With the growth of knowledge we may reasonably hope that one of the chief evils which at present undermine in early life not only healthy motherhood but healthy womanhood generally, may be gradually eliminated. The data now being accumulated show not only the extreme prevalence of painful, disordered, and absent menstruation in adolescent girls and young women, but also the great and sometimes permanent evils inflicted upon even healthy girls when at the beginning of sexual life they are subjected to severe strain of any kind. Medical authorities, whichever sex they belong to, may now be said to be almost or quite unanimous on this point. Some years ago, indeed, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, in a very able book, The Question of Rest for Women, concluded that "ordinarily healthy" women may disregard the menstrual period, but she admitted that forty-six per cent, of women are not "ordinarily healthy," and a minority which comes so near to being a majority can by no means be dismissed as a negligible quantity. Girls themselves, indeed, carried away by the ardor of their pursuit of work or amusement, are usually recklessly and ignorantly indifferent to the serious risks they run. But the opinions of teachers are now tending to agree with medical opinion in recognizing the importance of care and rest during the years of adolescence, and teachers are even prepared to admit that a year's rest from hard work during the period that a girl's sexual life is becoming established, while it may ensure her health and vigor, is not even a disadvantage from the educational point of view. With the growth of knowledge and the decay of ancient prejudices, we may reasonably hope that women will be emancipated from the traditions of a false civilization, which have forced her to regard her glory as her shame,—though it has never been so among robust primitive peoples,—and it is encouraging to find that so distinguished an educator as Principal Stanley Hall looks forward with confidence to such a time. In his exhaustive work on Adolescence he writes: "Instead of shame of this function girls should be taught the greatest reverence for it, and should help it to normality by regularly stepping aside at stated times for a few years till it is well established and normal. To higher beings that looked down upon human life as we do upon flowers, these would be the most interesting and beautiful hours of blossoming. With more self-knowledge women will have more self-respect at this time. Savagery reveres this state and it gives to women a mystic awe. The time may come when we must even change the divisions of the year for women, leaving to man his week and giving to her the same number of Sabbaths per year, but in groups of four successive days per month. When woman asserts her true physiological rights she will begin here, and will glory in what, in an age of ignorance, man made her think to be her shame. The pathos about the leaders of woman's so-called emancipation, is that they, even more than those they would persuade, accept man's estimate of this state."[27]

These wise words cannot be too deeply pondered. The pathos of the situation has indeed been—at all events in the past for to-day a more enlightened generation is growing up—that the very leaders of the woman's movement have often betrayed the cause of women. They have adopted the ideals of men, they have urged women to become second-rate men, they have declared that the healthy natural woman disregards the presence of her menstrual functions. This is the very reverse of the truth. "They claim," remarks Engelmann, "that woman in her natural state is the physical equal of man, and constantly point to the primitive woman, the female of savage peoples, as an example of this supposed axiom. Do they know how well this same savage is aware of the weakness of woman and her susceptibility at certain periods of her life? And with what care he protects her from harm at these periods? I believe not. The importance of surrounding women with certain precautions during the height of these great functional waves of her existence was appreciated by all peoples living in an approximately natural state, by all races at all times; and among their comparatively few religious customs this one, affording rest to women, was most persistently adhered to." It is among the white races alone that the sexual invalidism of women prevails, and it is the white races alone, which, outgrowing the religious ideas with which the menstrual seclusion of women was associated, have flung away that beneficent seclusion itself, throwing away the baby with the bath in an almost literal sense.[28]

In Germany Tobler has investigated the menstrual histories of over one thousand women (Monatsschrift fuer Geburtshuelfe und Gynaekologie, July, 1905). He finds that in the great majority of women at the present day menstruation is associated with distinct deterioration of the general health, and diminution of functional energy. In 26 per cent. local pain, general malaise, and mental and nervous anomalies coexisted; in larger proportion come the cases in which local pain, general weak health or psychic abnormality was experienced alone at this period. In 16 per cent. only none of these symptoms were experienced. In a very small separate group the physical and mental functions were stronger during this period, but in half of these cases there was distinct disturbance during the intermenstrual period. Tobler concludes that, while menstruation itself is physiological, all these disturbances are pathological.

As far as England is concerned, at a discussion of normal and painful menstruation at a meeting of the British Association of Registered Medical Women on the 7th of July, 1908, it was stated by Miss Bentham that 50 per cent. of girls in good position suffered from painful menstruation. Mrs. Dunnett said it usually occurred between the ages of twenty-four and thirty, being frequently due to neglect to rest during menstruation in the earlier years, and Mrs. Grainger Evans had found that this condition was very common among elementary school teachers who had worked hard for examinations during early girlhood.

In America various investigations have been carried out, showing the prevalence of disturbance in the sexual health of school girls and young women. Thus Dr. Helen P. Kennedy obtained elaborate data concerning the menstrual life of one hundred and twenty-five high school girls of the average age of eighteen ("Effect of High School Work upon Girls During Adolescence," Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1896). Only twenty-eight felt no pain during the period; half the total number experienced disagreeable symptoms before the period (such as headache, malaise, irritability of temper), while forty-four complained of other symptoms besides pain during the period (especially headache and great weakness). Jane Kelley Sabine (quoted in Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, Sept. 15, 1904) found in New England schools among two thousand girls that 75 per cent. had menstrual troubles, 90 per cent. had leucorrhoea and ovarian neuralgia, and 60 per cent. had to give up work for two days during each month. These results seem more than usually unfavorable, but are significant, as they cover a large number of cases. The conditions in the Pacific States are not much better. Dr. Mary Ritter (in a paper read before the California State Medical Society in 1903) stated that of 660 Freshmen girls at the University of California, 67 per cent. were subject to menstrual disorders, 27 per cent. to headaches, 30 per cent. to backaches, 29 per cent. were habitually constipated, 16 per cent. had abnormal heart sounds; only 23 per cent. were free from functional disturbances. Dr. Helen MacMurchey, in an interesting paper on "Physiological Phenomena Preceding or Accompanying Menstruation" (Lancet, Oct. 5, 1901), by inquiries among one hundred medical women, nurses, and women teachers in Toronto concerning the presence or absence of twenty-one different abnormal menstrual phenomena, found that between 50 and 60 per cent. admitted that they were liable at this time to disturbed sleep, to headache, to mental depression, to digestive disturbance, or to disturbance of the special senses, while about 25 to 50 per cent. were liable to neuralgia, to vertigo, to excessive nervous energy, to defective nervous and muscular power, to cutaneous hyperaesthesia, to vasomotor disturbances, to constipation, to diarrhoea, to increased urination, to cutaneous eruption, to increased liability to take cold, or to irritating watery discharges before or after the menstrual discharge. This inquiry is of much interest, because it clearly brings out the marked prevalence at menstruation of conditions which, though not necessarily of any gravity, yet definitely indicate decreased power of resistance to morbid influences and diminished efficiency for work.

How serious an impediment menstrual troubles are to a woman is indicated by the fact that the women who achieve success and fame seem seldom to be greatly affected by them. To that we may, in part, attribute the frequency with which leaders of the women's movement have treated menstruation as a thing of no importance in a woman's life. Adele Gerhard, and Helene Simon, also, in their valuable and impartial work, Mutterschaft und Geistige Arbeit (p. 312), failed to find, in their inquiries among women of distinguished ability, that menstruation was regarded as seriously disturbing to work.

Of late the suggestion that adolescent girls shall not only rest from work during two days of the menstrual period, but have an entire holiday from school during the first year of sexual life, has frequently been put forward, both from the medical and the educational side. At the meeting of the Association of Registered Medical Women, already referred to, Miss Sturge spoke of the good results obtained in a school where, during the first two years after puberty, the girls were kept in bed for the first two days of each menstrual period. Some years ago Dr. G.W. Cook ("Some Disorders of Menstruation," American Journal of Obstetrics, April, 1896), after giving cases in point, wrote: "It is my deliberate conviction that no girl should be confined at study during the year of her puberty, but she should live an outdoor life." In an article on "Alumna's Children," by "An Alumna" (Popular Science Monthly, May, 1904), dealing with the sexual invalidism of American women and the severe strain of motherhood upon them, the author, though she is by no means hostile to education, which is not, she declares, at fault, pleads for rest for the pubertal girl. "If the brain claims her whole vitality, how can there be any proper development? Just as very young children should give all their strength for some years solely to physical growth before the brain is allowed to make any considerable demands, so at this critical period in the life of the woman nothing should obstruct the right of way of this important system. A year at the least should be made especially easy for her, with neither mental nor nervous strain; and throughout the rest of her school days she should have her periodical day of rest, free from any study or overexertion." In another article on the same subject in the same journal ("The Health of American Girls," Sept., 1907), Nellie Comins Whitaker advocates a similar course. "I am coming to be convinced, somewhat against my wish, that there are many cases when the girl ought to be taken out of school entirely for some months or for a year at the period of puberty." She adds that the chief obstacle in the way is the girl's own likes and dislikes, and the ignorance of her mother who has been accustomed to think that pain is a woman's natural lot.

Such a period of rest from mental strain, while it would fortify the organism in its resistance to any reasonable strain later, need by no means be lost for education in the wider sense of the word, for the education required in classrooms is but a small part of the education required for life. Nor should it by any means be reserved merely for the sickly and delicate girl. The tragic part of the present neglect to give girls a really sound and fitting education is that the best and finest girls are thereby so often ruined. Even the English policeman, who admittedly belongs in physical vigor and nervous balance to the flower of the population, is unable to bear the strain of his life, and is said to be worn out in twenty-five years. It is equally foolish to submit the finest flowers of girlhood to a strain which is admittedly too severe.

It seems to be clear that the main factor in the common sexual and general invalidism of girls and young women is bad hygiene, in the first place consisting in neglect of the menstrual functions and in the second place in faulty habits generally. In all the more essential matters that concern the hygiene of the body the traditions of girls—and this seems to be more especially the case in the Anglo-Saxon countries—are inferior to those of youths. Women are much more inclined than men to subordinate these things to what seems to them some more urgent interest or fancy of the moment; they are trained to wear awkward and constricting garments, they are indifferent to regular and substantial meals, preferring innutritious and indigestible foods and drinks; they are apt to disregard the demands of the bowels and the bladder out of laziness or modesty; they are even indifferent to physical cleanliness.[29] In a great number of minor ways, which separately may seem to be of little importance, they play into the hands of an environment which, not always having been adequately adjusted to their special needs, would exert a considerable stress and strain even if they carefully sought to guard themselves against it. It has been found in an American Women's College in which about half the scholars wore corsets and half not, that nearly all the honors and prizes went to the non-corset-wearers. McBride, in bringing forward this fact, pertinently remarks, "If the wearing of a single style of dress will make this difference in the lives of young women, and that, too, in their most vigorous and resistive period, how much difference will a score of unhealthy habits make, if persisted in for a life-time?"[30]

"It seems evident," A.E. Giles concludes ("Some Points of Preventive Treatment in the Diseases of Women," The Hospital, April 10, 1897) "that dysmenorrhoea might be to a large extent prevented by attention to general health and education. Short hours of work, especially of standing; plenty of outdoor exercise—tennis, boating, cycling, gymnastics, and walking for those who cannot afford these; regularity of meals and food of the proper quality—not the incessant tea and bread and butter with variation of pastry; the avoidance of overexertion and prolonged fatigue; these are some of the principal things which require attention. Let girls pursue their study, but more leisurely; they will arrive at the same goal, but a little later." The benefit of allowing free movement and exercise to the whole body is undoubtedly very great, both as regards the sexual and general physical health and the mental balance; in order to insure this it is necessary to avoid heavy and constricting garments, more especially around the chest, for it is in respiratory power and chest expansion more than in any other respect that girls fall behind boys (see, e.g., Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, Ch. IX). In old days the great obstacle to the free exercise of girls lay in an ideal of feminine behavior which involved a prim restraint on every natural movement of the body. At the present day that ideal is not so fervently preached as of old, but its traditional influence still to some extent persists, while there is the further difficulty that adequate time and opportunity and encouragement are by no means generally afforded to girls for the cultivation and training of the romping instincts which are really a serious part of education, for it is by such free exercise of the whole body that the neuro-muscular system, the basis of all vital activity, is built up. The neglect of such education is to-day clearly visible in the structure of our women. Dr. F. May Dickinson Berry, Medical Examiner to the Technical Education Board of the London County Council, found (British Medical Journal, May 28, 1904) among over 1,500 girls, who represent the flower of the schools, since they had obtained scholarships enabling them to proceed to higher grade schools, that 22 per cent, presented some degree, not always pronounced, of lateral curvature of the spine, though such cases were very rare among the boys. In the same way among a very similar class of select girls at the Chicago Normal School, Miss Lura Sanborn (Doctors' Magazine, Dec., 1900) found 17 per cent, with spinal curvature, in some cases of a very pronounced degree. There is no reason why a girl should not have as straight a back as a boy, and the cause can only lie in the defective muscular development which was found in most of the cases, sometimes accompanied by anaemia. Here and there nowadays, among the better social classes, there is ample provision for the development of muscular power in girls, but in any generalized way there is no adequate opportunity for such exercise, and among the working class, above all, in the section of it which touches the lower middle class, although their lives are destined to be filled with a constant strain on the neuro-muscular system from work at home or in shops, etc., there is usually a minimum of healthy exercise and physical development. Dr. W.A.B. Sellman, of Baltimore ("Causes of Painful Menstruation in Unmarried Women," American Journal Obstetrics, Nov., 1907), emphasizes the admirable results obtained by moderate physical exercise for young women, and in training them to care for their bodies and to rest their nervous systems, while Dr. Charlotte Brown, of San Francisco, rightly insists on the establishment in all towns and villages alike of outdoor gymnastic fields for women and girls, and of a building, in connection with every large school, for training in physical, manual, and domestic science. The provision of special playgrounds is necessary where the exercising of girls is so unfamiliar as to cause an embarrassing amount of attention from the opposite sex, though when it is an immemorial custom it can be carried out on the village green without attracting the slightest attention, as I have seen in Spain, where one cannot fail to connect it with the physical vigor of the women. In boys' schools games are not only encouraged, but made compulsory; but this is by no means a universal rule in girls' schools. It is not necessary, and is indeed highly undesirable, that the games adopted should be those of boys. In England especially, where the movements of women are so often marked by awkwardness, angularity and lack of grace, it is essential that nothing should be done to emphasize these characteristics, for where vigor involves violence we are in the presence of a lack of due neuro-muscular cooerdination. Swimming, when possible, and especially some forms of dancing, are admirably adapted to develop the bodily movements of women both vigorously and harmoniously (see, e.g., Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, Ch. VII). At the International Congress of School Hygiene in 1907 (see, e.g., British Medical Journal, Aug. 24, 1907) Dr. L.H. Gulick, formerly Director of Physical Training in the Public Schools of New York City, stated that after many experiments it had been found in the New York elementary and high schools that folk-dancing constituted the very best exercise for girls. "The dances selected involved many contractions of the large muscular masses of the body and had therefore a great effect on respiration, circulation and nutrition. Such movements, moreover, when done as dances, could be carried on three or four times as long without producing fatigue as formal gymnastics. Many folk-dances were imitative, sowing and reaping dance, dances expressing trade movements (the shoemaker's dance), others illustrating attack and defense, or the pursuit of game. Such neuro-muscular movements were racially old and fitted in with man's expressive life, and if it were accepted that the folk-dances really expressed an epitome of man's neuro-muscular history, as distinguished from mere permutation of movements, the folk-dance combinations should be preferred on these biological grounds to the unselected, or even the physiologically selected. From the aesthetic point of view the sense of beauty as shown in dancing was far commoner than the power to sing, paint or model."

It must always be remembered that in realizing the especial demands of woman's nature, we do not commit ourselves to the belief that higher education is unfitted for a woman. That question may now be regarded as settled. There is therefore no longer any need for the feverish anxiety of the early leaders of feminine education to prove that girls can be educated exactly as if they were boys, and yield at least as good educational results. At the present time, indeed, that anxiety is not only unnecessary but mischievous. It is now more necessary to show that women have special needs just as men have special needs, and that it is as bad for women, and therefore, for the world, to force them to accept the special laws and limitations of men as it would be bad for men, and therefore, for the world, to force men to accept the special laws and limitations of women. Each sex must seek to reach the goal by following the laws of its own nature, even although it remains desirable that, both in the school and in the world, they should work so far as possible side by side. The great fact to be remembered always is that, not only are women, in physical size and physical texture, slighter and finer than men, but that to an extent altogether unknown among men, their centre of gravity is apt to be deflected by the series of rhythmic sexual curves on which they are always living. They are thus more delicately poised and any kind of stress or strain—cerebral, nervous, or muscular—is more likely to produce serious disturbance and requires an accurate adjustment to their special needs.

The fact that it is stress and strain in general, and not necessarily educational studies, that are injurious to adolescent women, is sufficiently proved, if proof is necessary, by the fact that sexual arrest, and physical or nervous breakdown, occur with extreme frequency in girls who work in shops or mills, even in girls who have never been to school at all. Even excesses in athletics—which now not infrequently occur as a reaction against woman's indifference to physical exercise—are bad. Cycling is beneficial for women who can ride without pain or discomfort, and, according to Watkins, it is even beneficial in many diseased and disordered pelvic conditions, but excessive cycling is evil in its results on women, more especially by inducing rigidity of the perineum to an extent which may even prevent childbirth and necessitate operation. I may add that the same objection applies to much horse-riding. In the same way everything which causes shocks to the body is apt to be dangerous to women, since in the womb they possess a delicately poised organ which varies in weight at different times, and it would, for instance, be impossible to commend football as a game for girls. "I do not believe," wrote Miss H. Ballantine, Director of Vassar College Gymnasium, to Prof. W. Thomas (Sex and Society, p. 22) "women can ever, no matter what the training, approach men in their physical achievements; and," she wisely adds, "I see no reason why they should." There seem, indeed, as has already been indicated, to be reasons why they should not, especially if they look forward to becoming mothers. I have noticed that women who have lived a very robust and athletic outdoor life, so far from always having the easy confinements which we might anticipate, sometimes have very seriously difficult times, imperilling the life of the child. On making this observation to a distinguished obstetrician, the late Dr. Engelmann, who was an ardent advocate of physical exercise for women (in e.g. his presidential address, "The Health of the American Girl," Transactions Southern Surgical and Gynaecological Association, 1890), he replied that he had himself made the same observation, and that instructors in physical training, both in America and England, had also told him of such cases among their pupils. "I hold," he wrote, "precisely the opinion you express [as to the unfavorable influence of muscular development in women]. Athletics, i.e., overdone physical training, causes the girl's system to approximate to the masculine; this is so whether due to sport or necessity. The woman who indulges in it approximates to the male in her attributes; this is marked in diminished sexual intensity, and in increased difficulty of childbirth, with, in time, lessened fecundity. Healthy habits improve, but masculine muscular development diminishes, womanly qualities, although it is true that the peasant and the laboring woman have easy labor. I have never advocated muscular development for girls, only physical training, but have perhaps said too much for it and praised it too unguardedly. In schools and colleges, so far, however, it is insufficient rather than too much; only the wealthy have too much golf and athletic sports. I am collecting new material, but from what I already have seen I am impressed with the truth of what you say. I am studying the point, and shall elaborate the explanation." Any publication on this subject was, however, prevented by Engelmann's death a few years later.

A proper recognition of the special nature of woman, of her peculiar needs and her dignity, has a significance beyond its importance in education and hygiene. The traditions and training to which she is subjected in this matter have a subtle and far-reaching significance, according as they are good or evil. If she is taught, implicitly or explicitly, contempt for the characteristics of her own sex, she naturally develops masculine ideals which may permanently discolor her vision of life and distort her practical activities; it has been found that as many as fifty per cent. of American school girls have masculine ideals, while fifteen per cent. American and no fewer than thirty-four per cent. English school girls wished to be men, though scarcely any boys wished to be women.[31] With the same tendency may be connected that neglect to cultivate the emotions, which, by a mischievously extravagant but inevitable reaction from the opposite extreme, has sometimes marked the modern training of women. In the finely developed woman, intelligence is interpenetrated with emotion. If there is an exaggerated and isolated culture of intelligence a tendency shows itself to disharmony which breaks up the character or impairs its completeness. In this connection Reibmayr has remarked that the American woman may serve as a warning.[32] Within the emotional sphere itself, it may be added, there is a tendency to disharmony in women owing to the contradictory nature of the feelings which are traditionally impressed upon her, a contradiction which dates back indeed to the identification of sacredness and impurity at the dawn of civilization. "Every girl and woman," wrote Hellmann, in a pioneering book which pushed a sound principle to eccentric extremes, "is taught to regard her sexual parts as a precious and sacred spot, only to be approached by a husband or in special circumstances a doctor. She is, at the same time, taught to regard this spot as a kind of water-closet which she ought to be extremely ashamed to possess, and the mere mention of which should cause a painful blush."[33] The average unthinking woman accepts the incongruity of this opposition without question, and grows accustomed to adapt herself to each of the incompatibles according to circumstances. The more thoughtful woman works out a private theory of her own. But in very many cases this mischievous opposition exerts a subtly perverting influence on the whole outlook towards Nature and life. In a few cases, also, in women of sensitive temperament, it even undermines and ruins the psychic personality.

Thus Boris Sidis has recorded a case illustrating the disastrous results of inculcating on a morbidly sensitive girl the doctrine of the impurity of women. She was educated in a convent. "While there she was impressed with the belief that woman is a vessel of vice and impurity. This seemed to have been imbued in her by one of the nuns who was very holy and practiced self-mortification. With the onset of her periods, and with the observation of the same in the other girls, this doctrine of female impurity was all the stronger impressed on her sensitive mind." It lapsed, however, from conscious memory and only came to the foreground in subsequent years with the exhaustion and fatigue of prolonged office work. Then she married. Now "she has an extreme abhorrence of women. Woman, to the patient, is impurity, filth, the very incarnation of degradation and vice. The house wash must not be given to a laundry where women work. Nothing must be picked up in the street, not even the most valuable object, perchance it might have been dropped by a woman" (Boris Sidis, "Studies in Psychopathology," Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, April 4, 1907). That is the logical outcome of much of the traditional teaching which is given to girls. Fortunately, the healthy mind offers a natural resistance to its complete acceptation, yet it usually, in some degree, persists and exerts a mischievous influence.

It is, however, not only in her relations to herself and to her sex that a girl's thoughts and feelings tend to be distorted by the ignorance or the false traditions by which she is so often carefully surrounded. Her happiness in marriage, her whole future career, is put in peril. The innocent young woman must always risk much in entering the door of indissoluble marriage; she knows nothing truly of her husband, she knows nothing of the great laws of love, she knows nothing of her own possibilities, and, worse still, she is even ignorant of her ignorance. She runs the risk of losing the game while she is still only beginning to learn it. To some extent that is quite inevitable if we are to insist that a woman should bind herself to marry a man before she has experienced the nature of the forces that marriage may unloose in her. A young girl believes she possesses a certain character; she arranges her future in accordance with that character; she marries. Then, in a considerable proportion of cases (five out of six, according to the novelist Bourget), within a year or even a week, she finds she was completely mistaken in herself and in the man she has married; she discovers within her another self, and that self detests the man to whom she is bound. That is a possible fate against which only the woman who has already been aroused to love is entitled to regard herself as fairly protected.

There is, however, a certain kind of protection which it is possible to afford the bride, even without departing from our most conventional conceptions of marriage. We can at least insist that she shall be accurately informed as to the exact nature of her physical relations to her future husband and be safeguarded from the shocks or the disillusions which marriage might otherwise bring. Notwithstanding the decay of prejudices, it is probable that even to-day the majority of women of the so-called educated class marry with only the vaguest and most inaccurate notions, picked up more or less clandestinely, concerning the nature of the sexual relationships. So highly intelligent a woman as Madame Adam has stated that she believed herself bound to marry a man who had kissed her on the mouth, imagining that to be the supreme act of sexual union,[34] and it has frequently happened that women have married sexually inverted persons of their own sex, not always knowingly, but believing them to be men, and never discovering their mistake; it is not long indeed since in America three women were thus successively married to the same woman, none of them apparently ever finding out the real sex of the "husband." "The civilized girl," as Edward Carpenter remarks, "is led to the 'altar' often in uttermost ignorance and misunderstanding of the sacrificial rites about to be consummated." Certainly more rapes have been effected in marriage than outside it.[35] The girl is full of vague and romantic faith in the promises of love, often heightened by the ecstasies depicted in sentimental novels from which every touch of wholesome reality has been carefully omitted. "All the candor of faith is there," as Senancour puts it in his book De l'Amour, "the desires of inexperience, the needs of a new life, the hopes of an upright heart. She has all the faculties of love, she must love; she has all the means of pleasure, she must be loved. Everything expresses love and demands love: this hand formed for sweet caresses, an eye whose resources are unknown if it must not say that it consents to be loved, a bosom which is motionless and useless without love, and will fade without having been worshipped; these feelings that are so vast, so tender, so voluptuous, the ambition of the heart, the heroism of passion! She needs must follow the delicious rule which the law of the world has dictated. That intoxicating part, which she knows so well, which everything recalls, which the day inspires and the night commands, what young, sensitive, loving woman can imagine that she shall not play it?" But when the actual drama of love begins to unroll before her, and she realizes the true nature of the "intoxicating part" she has to play, then, it has often happened, the case is altered; she finds herself altogether unprepared, and is overcome with terror and alarm. All the felicity of her married life may then hang on a few chances, her husband's skill and consideration, her own presence of mind. Hirschfeld records the case of an innocent young girl of seventeen—in this case, it eventually proved, an invert—who was persuaded to marry but on discovering what marriage meant energetically resisted her husband's sexual approaches. He appealed to her mother to explain to her daughter the nature of "wifely duties." But the young wife replied to her mother's expostulations, "If that is my wifely duty then it was your parental duty to have told me beforehand, for, if I had known, I should never have married." The husband in this case, much in love with his wife, sought for eight years to over-persuade her, but in vain, and a separation finally took place.[36] That, no doubt, is an extreme case, but how many innocent young inverted girls never realize their true nature until after marriage, and how many perfectly normal girls are so shocked by the too sudden initiation of marriage that their beautiful early dreams of love never develop slowly and wholesomely into the acceptance of its still more beautiful realities?

Before the age of puberty it would seem that the sexual initiation of the child—apart from such scientific information as would form part of school courses in botany and zooelogy—should be the exclusive privilege of the mother, or whomever it may be to whom the mother's duties are delegated. At puberty more authoritative and precise advice is desirable than the mother may be able or willing to give. It is at this age that she should put into her son's or daughter's hands some one or other of the very numerous manuals to which reference has already been made (page 53), expounding the physical and moral aspects of the sexual life and the principles of sexual hygiene. The boy or girl is already, we may take it, acquainted with the facts of motherhood, and the origin of babies, as well as, more or less precisely, with the father's part in their procreation. Whatever manual is now placed in his or her hands should at least deal summarily, but definitely, with the sexual relationship, and should also comment, warningly but in no alarmist spirit, with the chief auto-erotic phenomena, and by no means exclusively with masturbation. Nothing but good can come of the use of such a manual, if it has been wisely selected; it will supplant what the mother has already done, what the teacher may still be doing, and what later may be done by private interview with a doctor. It has indeed been argued that the boy or girl to whom such literature is presented will merely make it an opportunity for morbid revelry and sensual enjoyment. It can well be believed that this may sometimes happen with boys or girls from whom all sexual facts have always been mysteriously veiled, and that when at last they find the opportunity of gratifying their long-repressed and perfectly natural curiosity they are overcome by the excitement of the event. It could not happen to children who have been naturally and wholesomely brought up. At a later age, during adolescence, there is doubtless great advantage in the plan, now frequently adopted, especially in Germany, of giving lectures, addresses, or quiet talks to young people of each sex separately. The speaker is usually a specially selected teacher, a doctor or other qualified person who may be brought in for this special purpose.

Stanley Hall, after remarking that sexual education should be chiefly from fathers to sons and from mothers to daughters, adds: "It may be that in the future this kind of initiation will again become an art, and experts will tell us with more confidence how to do our duty to the manifold exigencies, types and stages of youth, and instead of feeling baffled and defeated, we shall see that this age and theme is the supreme opening for the highest pedagogy to do its best and most transforming work, as well as being the greatest of all opportunities for the teacher of religion" (Stanley Hall, Adolescence, vol. i, p. 469). "At Williams College, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Clark," the same distinguished teacher observes (ib., p. 465), "I have made it a duty in my departmental teaching to speak very briefly, but plainly to young men under my instruction, personally if I deemed it wise, and often, though here only in general terms, before student bodies, and I believe I have nowhere done more good, but it is a painful duty. It requires tact and some degree of hard and strenuous common sense rather than technical knowledge."

It is scarcely necessary to say that the ordinary teacher of either sex is quite incompetent to speak of sexual hygiene. It is a task to which all, or some, teachers must be trained. A beginning in this direction has been made in Germany by the delivery to teachers of courses of lectures on sexual hygiene in education. In Prussia the first attempt was made in Breslau when the central school authorities requested Dr. Martin Chotzen to deliver such a course to one hundred and fifty teachers who took the greatest interest in the lectures, which covered the anatomy of the sexual organs, the development of the sexual instinct, its chief perversions, venereal diseases, and the importance of the cultivation of self-control. In Geschlecht und Gesellschaft (Bd. i, Heft 7) Dr. Fritz Reuther gives the substance of lectures which he has delivered to a class of young teachers; they cover much the same ground as Chotzen's.

There is no evidence that in England the Minister of Education has yet taken any steps to insure the delivery of lectures on sexual hygiene to the pupils who are about to leave school. In Prussia, however, the Ministry of Education has taken an active interest in this matter, and such lectures are beginning to be commonly delivered, though attendance at them is not usually obligatory. Some years ago (in 1900), when it was proposed to deliver a series of lectures on sexual hygiene to the advanced pupils in Berlin schools, under the auspices of a society for the improvement of morals, the municipal authorities withdrew their permission to use the classrooms, on the ground that "such lectures would be extremely dangerous to the moral sense of an audience of the young." The same objection has been made by municipal officials in France. In Germany, at all events, however, opinion is rapidly growing more enlightened. In England little or no progress has yet been made, but in America steps are being taken in this direction, as by the Chicago Society for Social Hygiene. It must, indeed, be said that those who oppose the sexual enlightenment of youth in large cities are directly allying themselves, whether or not they know it, with the influences that make for vice and immorality.

Such lectures are also given to girls on leaving school, not only girls of the well-to-do, but also those of the poor class, who need them fully as much, and in some respects more. Thus Dr. A. Heidenhain has published a lecture (Sexuelle Belehrung der aus den Volksschule entlassenen Maedchen, 1907), accompanied by anatomical tables, which he has delivered to girls about to leave school, and which is intended to be put into their hands at this time. Salvat, in a Lyons thesis (La Depopulation de la France, 1903), insists that the hygiene of pregnancy and the care of infants should form part of the subject of such lectures. These subjects might well be left, however, to a somewhat later period.

Something is clearly needed beyond lectures on these matters. It should be the business of the parents or other guardians of every adolescent youth and girl to arrange that, once at least at this period of life, there should be a private, personal interview with a medical man to afford an opportunity for a friendly and confidential talk concerning the main points of sexual hygiene. The family doctor would be the best for this duty because he would be familiar with the personal temperament of the youth and the family tendencies.[37] In the case of girls a woman doctor would often be preferred. Sex is properly a mystery; and to the unspoilt youth, it is instinctively so; except in an abstract and technical form it cannot properly form the subject of lectures. In a private and individualized conversation between the novice in life and the expert, it is possible to say many necessary things that could not be said in public, and it is possible, moreover, for the youth to ask questions which shyness and reserve make it impossible to put to parents, while the convenient opportunity of putting them naturally to the expert otherwise seldom or never occurs. Most youths have their own special ignorances, their own special difficulties, difficulties and ignorances that could sometimes be resolved by a word. Yet it by no means infrequently happens that they carry them far on into adult life because they have lacked the opportunity, or the skill and assurance to create the opportunity, of obtaining enlightenment.

It must be clearly understood that these talks are of medical, hygienic, and physiological character; they are not to be used for retailing moral platitudes. To make them that would be a fatal mistake. The young are often very hostile to merely conventional moral maxims, and suspect their hollowness, not always without reason. The end to be aimed at here is enlightenment. Certainly knowledge can never be immoral, but nothing is gained by jumbling up knowledge and morality together.

In emphasizing the nature of the physician's task in this matter as purely and simply that of wise practical enlightenment, nothing is implied against the advantages, and indeed the immense value in sexual hygiene, of the moral, religious, ideal elements of life. It is not the primary business of the physician to inspire these, but they have a very intimate relation with the sexual life, and every boy and girl at puberty, and never before puberty, should be granted the privilege—and not the duty or the task—of initiation into those elements of the world's life which are, at the same time, natural functions of the adolescent soul. Here, however, is the sphere of the religious or ethical teacher. At puberty he has his great opportunity, the greatest he can ever obtain. The flower of sex that blossoms in the body at puberty has its spiritual counterpart which at the same moment blossoms in the soul. The churches from of old have recognized the religious significance of this moment, for it is this period of life that they have appointed as the time of confirmation and similar rites. With the progress of the ages, it is true, such rites become merely formal and apparently meaningless fossils. But they have a meaning nevertheless, and are capable of being again vitalized. Nor in their spirit and essence should they be confined to those who accept supernaturally revealed religion. They concern all ethical teachers, who must realize that it is at puberty that they are called upon to inspire or to fortify the great ideal aspirations which at this period tend spontaneously to arise in the youth's or maiden's soul.[38]

The age of puberty, I have said, marks the period at which this new kind of sexual initiation is called for. Before puberty, although the psychic emotion of love frequently develops, as well as sometimes physical sexual emotions that are mostly vague and diffused, definite and localized sexual sensations are rare. For the normal boy or girl love is usually an unspecialized emotion; it is in Guyau's words "a state in which the body has but the smallest place." At the first rising of the sun of sex the boy or girl sees, as Blake said he saw at sunrise, not a round yellow body emerging above the horizon, or any other physical manifestation, but a great company of singing angels. With the definite eruption of physical sexual manifestation and desire, whether at puberty or later in adolescence, a new turbulent disturbing influence appears. Against the force of this influence, mere intellectual enlightenment, or even loving maternal counsel—the agencies we have so far been concerned with—may be powerless. In gaining control of it we must find our auxiliary in the fact that puberty is the efflorescence not only of a new physical but a new psychic force. The ideal world naturally unfolds itself to the boy or girl at puberty. The magic of beauty, the instinct of modesty, the naturalness of self-restraint, the idea of unselfish love, the meaning of duty, the feeling for art and poetry, the craving for religious conceptions and emotions—all these things awake spontaneously in the unspoiled boy or girl at puberty. I say "unspoiled," for if these things have been thrust on the child before puberty when they have yet no meaning for him—as is unfortunately far too often done, more especially as regards religious notions—then it is but too likely that he will fail to react properly at that moment of his development when he would otherwise naturally respond to them. Under natural conditions this is the period for spiritual initiation. Now, and not before, is the time for the religious or ethical teacher as the case may be—for all religions and ethical systems may equally adapt themselves to this task—to take the boy or girl in hand, not with any special and obtrusive reference to the sexual impulses but for the purpose of assisting the development and manifestation of this psychic puberty, of indirectly aiding the young soul to escape from sexual dangers by harnessing his chariot to a star that may help to save it from sticking fast in any miry ruts of the flesh.

Such an initiation, it is important to remark, is more than an introduction to the sphere of religious sentiment. It is an initiation into manhood, it must involve a recognition of the masculine even more than of the feminine virtues. This has been well understood by the finest primitive races. They constantly give their boys and girls an initiation at puberty; it is an initiation that involves not merely education in the ordinary sense, but a stern discipline of the character, feats of endurance, the trial of character, the testing of the muscles of the soul as much as of the body.

Ceremonies of initiation into manhood at puberty—involving physical and mental discipline, as well as instruction, lasting for weeks or months, and never identical for both sexes—are common among savages in all parts of the world. They nearly always involve the endurance of a certain amount of pain and hardship, a wise measure of training which the softness of civilization has too foolishly allowed to drop, for the ability to endure hardness is an essential condition of all real manhood. It is as a corrective to this tendency to flabbiness in modern education that the teaching of Nietzsche is so invaluable.

The initiation of boys among the natives of Torres Straits has been elaborately described by A.C. Haddon (Reports Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. v, Chs. VII and XII). It lasts a month, involves much severe training and power of endurance, and includes admirable moral instruction. Haddon remarks that it formed "a very good discipline," and adds, "it is not easy to conceive of a more effectual means for a rapid training."

Among the aborigines of Victoria, Australia, the initiatory ceremonies, as described by R.H. Mathews ("Some Initiation Ceremonies," Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1905, Heft 6), last for seven months, and constitute an admirable discipline. The boys are taken away by the elders of the tribe, subjected to many trials of patience and endurance of pain and discomfort, sometimes involving even the swallowing of urine and excrement, brought into contact with strange tribes, taught the laws and folk-lore, and at the end meetings are held at which betrothals are arranged.

Among the northern tribes of Central Australia the initiation ceremonies involve circumcision and urethral subincision, as well as hard manual labor and hardships. The initiation of girls into womanhood is accompanied by cutting open of the vagina. These ceremonies have been described by Spencer and Gillen (Northern Tribes of Central Australia, Ch. XI). Among various peoples in British East Africa (including the Masai) pubertal initiation is a great ceremonial event extending over a period of many months, and it includes circumcision in boys, and in girls clitoridectomy, as well as, among some tribes, removal of the nymphae. A girl who winces or cries out during the operation is disgraced among the women and expelled from the settlement. When the ceremony has been satisfactorily completed the boy or girl is marriageable (C. Marsh Beadnell, "Circumcision and Clitoridectomy as Practiced by the Natives of British East Africa," British Medical Journal, April 29, 1905).

Initiation among the African Bawenda, as described by a missionary, is in three stages: (1) A stage of instruction and discipline during which the traditions and sacred things of the tribe are revealed, the art of warfare taught, self-restraint and endurance borne; then the youths are counted as full-grown. (2) In the next stage the art of dancing is practiced, by each sex separately, during the day. (3) In the final stage, which is that of complete sexual initiation, the two sexes dance together by night; the scene, in the opinion of the good missionary, "does not bear description;" the initiated are now complete adults, with all the privileges and responsibilities of adults (Rev. E. Gottschling, "The Bawenda," Journal Anthropological Institution, July to Dec., 1905, p. 372. Cf., an interesting account of the Bawenda Tondo schools by another missionary, Wessmann, The Bawenda, pp. 60 et seq.).

The initiation of girls in Azimba Land, Central Africa, has been fully and interestingly described by H. Crawford Angus ("The Chensamwali' or Initiation Ceremony of Girls," Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1898, Heft 6). At the first sign of menstruation the girl is taken by her mother out of the village to a grass hut prepared for her where only the women are allowed to visit her. At the end of menstruation she is taken to a secluded spot and the women dance round her, no men being present. It was only with much difficulty that Angus was enabled to witness the ceremony. The girl is then informed in regard to the hygiene of menstruation. "Many songs about the relations between men and women are sung, and the girl is instructed as to all her duties when she becomes a wife.... The girl is taught to be faithful to her husband, and to try and bear children. The whole matter is looked upon as a matter of course, and not as a thing to be ashamed of or to hide, and being thus openly treated of and no secrecy made about it, you find in this tribe that the women are very virtuous, because the subject of married life has no glamour for them. When a woman is pregnant she is again danced; this time all the dancers are naked, and she is taught how to behave and what to do when the time of her delivery arrives."

Among the Yuman Indians of California, as described by Horatio Rust ("A Puberty Ceremony of the Mission Indians," American Anthropologist, Jan. to March, 1906, p. 28) the girls are at puberty prepared for marriage by a ceremony. They are wrapped in blankets and placed in a warm pit, where they lie looking very happy as they peer out through their covers. For four days and nights they lie here (occasionally going away for food), while the old women of the tribe dance and sing round the pit constantly. At times the old women throw silver coins among the crowd to teach the girls to be generous. They also give away cloth and wheat, to teach them to be kind to the old and needy; and they sow wild seeds broadcast over the girls to cause them to be prolific. Finally, all strangers are ordered away, garlands are placed on the girls' heads, and they are led to a hillside and shown the large and sacred stone, symbolical of the female organs of generation and resembling them, which is said to protect women. Then grain is thrown over all present, and the ceremony is over.

The Thlinkeet Eskimo women were long noted for their fine qualities. At puberty they were secluded, sometimes for a whole year, being kept in darkness, suffering, and filth. Yet defective and unsatisfactory as this initiation was, "Langsdorf suggests," says Bancroft (Native Races of Pacific, vol. i, p. 110), referring to the virtues of the Thlinkeet woman, "that it may be during this period of confinement that the foundation of her influence is laid; that in modest reserve and meditation her character is strengthened, and she comes forth cleansed in mind as well as body."

We have lost these ancient and invaluable rites of initiation into manhood and womanhood, with their inestimable moral benefits; at the most we have merely preserved the shells of initiation in which the core has decayed. In time, we cannot doubt, they will be revived in modern forms. At present the spiritual initiation of youths and maidens is left to the chances of some happy accident, and usually it is of a purely cerebral character which cannot be perfectly wholesome, and is at the best absurdly incomplete.

This cerebral initiation commonly occurs to the youth through the medium of literature. The influence of literature in sexual education thus extends, in an incalculable degree, beyond the narrow sphere of manuals on sexual hygiene, however admirable and desirable these may be. The greater part of literature is more or less distinctly penetrated by erotic and auto-erotic conceptions and impulses; nearly all imaginative literature proceeds from the root of sex to flower in visions of beauty and ecstasy. The Divine Comedy of Dante is herein the immortal type of the poet's evolution. The youth becomes acquainted with the imaginative representations of love before he becomes acquainted with the reality of love, so that, as Leo Berg puts it, "the way to love among civilized peoples passes through imagination." All literature is thus, to the adolescent soul, a part of sexual education.[39] It depends, to some extent, though fortunately not entirely, on the judgment of those in authority over the young soul whether the literature to which the youth or girl is admitted is or is not of the large and humanizing order.

All great literature touches nakedly and sanely on the central facts of sex. It is always consoling to remember this in an age of petty pruderies. And it is a satisfaction to know that it would not be possible to emasculate the literature of the great ages, however desirable it might seem to the men of more degenerate ages, or to close the avenues to that literature against the young. All our religious and literary traditions serve to fortify the position of the Bible and of Shakespeare. "So many men and women," writes a correspondent, a literary man, "gain sexual ideas in childhood from reading the Old Testament, that the Bible may be called an erotic text-book. Most persons of either sex with whom I have conversed on the subject, say that the Books of Moses, and the stories of Amnon and Tamar, Lot and his daughters, Potiphar's wife and Joseph, etc., caused speculation and curiosity, and gave them information of the sexual relationship. A boy and girl of fifteen, both friends of the writer, and now over thirty years of age, used to find out erotic passages in the Bible on Sunday mornings, while in a Dissenting chapel, and pass their Bibles to one another, with their fingers on the portions that interested them." In the same way many a young woman has borrowed Shakespeare in order to read the glowing erotic poetry of Venus and Adonis, which her friends have told her about.

The Bible, it may be remarked, is not in every respect, a model introduction for the young mind to the questions of sex. But even its frank acceptance, as of divine origin, of sexual rules so unlike those that are nominally our own, such as polygamy and concubinage, helps to enlarge the vision of the youthful mind by showing that the rules surrounding the child are not those everywhere and always valid, while the nakedness and realism of the Bible cannot but be a wholesome and tonic corrective to conventional pruderies.

We must, indeed, always protest against the absurd confusion whereby nakedness of speech is regarded as equivalent to immorality, and not the less because it is often adopted even in what are regarded as intellectual quarters. When in the House of Lords, in the last century, the question of the exclusion of Byron's statue from Westminster Abbey was under discussion, Lord Brougham "denied that Shakespeare was more moral than Byron. He could, on the contrary, point out in a single page of Shakespeare more grossness than was to be found in all Lord Byron's works." The conclusion Brougham thus reached, that Byron is an incomparably more moral writer than Shakespeare, ought to have been a sufficient reductio ad absurdum of his argument, but it does not appear that anyone pointed out the vulgar confusion into which he had fallen.

It may be said that the special attractiveness which the nakedness of great literature sometimes possesses for young minds is unwholesome. But it must be remembered that the peculiar interest of this element is merely due to the fact that elsewhere there is an inveterate and abnormal concealment. It must also be said that the statements of the great writers about natural things are never degrading, nor even erotically exciting to the young, and what Emilia Pardo Bazan tells of herself and her delight when a child in the historical books of the Old Testament, that the crude passages in them failed to send the faintest cloud of trouble across her young imagination, is equally true of most children. It is necessary, indeed, that these naked and serious things should be left standing, even if only to counterbalance the lewdly comic efforts to besmirch love and sex, which are visible to all in every low-class bookseller's shop window.

This point of view was vigorously championed by the speakers on sexual education at the Third Congress of the German Gesellschaft zur Bekaempfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten in 1907. Thus Enderlin, speaking as a headmaster, protested against the custom of bowdlerizing poems and folk-songs for the use of children, and thus robbing them of the finest introduction to purified sexual impulses and the highest sphere of emotion, while at the same time they are recklessly exposed to the "psychic infection" of the vulgar comic papers everywhere exposed for sale. "So long as children are too young to respond to erotic poetry it cannot hurt them; when they are old enough to respond it can only benefit them by opening to them the highest and purest channels of human emotion" (Sexualpaedagogik, p. 60). Professor Schaefenacker (id., p. 98) expresses himself in the same sense, and remarks that "the method of removing from school-books all those passages which, in the opinion of short-sighted and narrow-hearted schoolmasters, are unsuited for youth, must be decisively condemned." Every healthy boy and girl who has reached the age of puberty may be safely allowed to ramble in any good library, however varied its contents. So far from needing guidance they will usually show a much more refined taste than their elders. At this age, when the emotions are still virginal and sensitive, the things that are realistic, ugly, or morbid, jar on the young spirit and are cast aside, though in adult life, with the coarsening of mental texture which comes of years and experience, this repugnance, doubtless by an equally sound and natural instinct, may become much less acute.

Ellen Key in Ch. VI of her Century of the Child well summarizes the reasons against the practice of selecting for children books that are "suitable" for them, a practice which she considers one of the follies of modern education. The child should be free to read all great literature, and will himself instinctively put aside the things he is not yet ripe for. His cooler senses are undisturbed by scenes that his elders find too exciting, while even at a later stage it is not the nakedness of great literature, but much more the method of the modern novel, which is likely to stain the imagination, falsify reality and injure taste. It is concealment which misleads and coarsens, producing a state of mind in which even the Bible becomes a stimulus to the senses. The writings of the great masters yield the imaginative food which the child craves, and the erotic moment in them is too brief to be overheating. It is the more necessary, Ellen Key remarks, for children to be introduced to great literature, since they often have little opportunity to occupy themselves with it in later life. Many years earlier Ruskin, in Sesame and Lilies, had eloquently urged that even young girls should be allowed to range freely in libraries.

What has been said about literature applies equally to art. Art, as well as literature, and in the same indirect way, can be made a valuable aid in the task of sexual enlightenment and sexual hygiene. Modern art may, indeed, for the most part, be ignored from this point of view, but children cannot be too early familiarized with the representations of the nude in ancient sculpture and in the paintings of the old masters of the Italian school. In this way they may be immunized, as Enderlin expresses it, against those representations of the nude which make an appeal to the baser instincts. Early familiarity with nudity in art is at the same time an aid to the attainment of a proper attitude towards purity in nature. "He who has once learnt," as Hoeller remarks, "to enjoy peacefully nakedness in art, will be able to look on nakedness in nature as on a work of art."

Casts of classic nude statues and reproductions of the pictures of the old Venetian and other Italian masters may fittingly be used to adorn schoolrooms, not so much as objects of instruction as things of beauty with which the child cannot too early become familiarized. In Italy it is said to be usual for school classes to be taken by their teachers to the art museums with good results; such visits form part of the official scheme of education.

There can be no doubt that such early familiarity with the beauty of nudity in classic art is widely needed among all social classes and in many countries. It is to this defect of our education that we must attribute the occasional, and indeed in America and England frequent, occurrence of such incidents as petitions and protests against the exhibition of nude statuary in art museums, the display of pictures so inoffensive as Leighton's "Bath of Psyche" in shop windows, and the demand for the draping of the naked personifications of abstract virtues in architectural street decoration. So imperfect is still the education of the multitude that in these matters the ill-bred fanatic of pruriency usually gains his will. Such a state of things cannot but have an unwholesome reaction on the moral atmosphere of the community in which it is possible. Even from the religious point of view, prurient prudery is not justifiable. Northcote has very temperately and sensibly discussed the question of the nude in art from the standpoint of Christian morality. He points out that not only is the nude in art not to be condemned without qualification, and that the nude is by no means necessarily the erotic, but he also adds that even erotic art, in its best and purest manifestations, only arouses emotions that are the legitimate object of man's aspirations. It would be impossible even to represent Biblical stories adequately on canvas or in marble if erotic art were to be tabooed (Rev. H. Northcote, Christianity and Sex Problems, Ch. XIV).

Early familiarity with the nude in classic and early Italian art should be combined at puberty with an equal familiarity with photographs of beautiful and naturally developed nude models. In former years books containing such pictures in a suitable and attractive manner to place before the young were difficult to procure. Now this difficulty no longer exists. Dr. C.H. Stratz, of The Hague, has been the pioneer in this matter, and in a series of beautiful books (notably in Der Koerper des Kindes, Die Schoenheit des Weiblichen Koerpers and Die Rassenschoenheit des Weibes, all published by Enke in Stuttgart), he has brought together a large number of admirably selected photographs of nude but entirely chaste figures. More recently Dr. Shufeldt, of Washington (who dedicates his work to Stratz), has published his Studies of the Human Form in which, in the same spirit, he has brought together the results of his own studies of the naked human form during many years. It is necessary to correct the impressions received from classic sources by good photographic illustrations on account of the false conventions prevailing in classic works, though those conventions were not necessarily false for the artists who originated them. The omission of the pudendal hair, in representations of the nude was, for instance, quite natural for the people of countries still under Oriental influence are accustomed to remove the hair from the body. If, however, under quite different conditions, we perpetuate that artistic convention to-day, we put ourselves into a perverse relation to nature. There is ample evidence of this. "There is one convention so ancient, so necessary, so universal," writes Mr. Frederic Harrison (Nineteenth Century and After, Aug., 1907), "that its deliberate defiance to-day may arouse the bile of the least squeamish of men and should make women withdraw at once." If boys and girls were brought up at their mother's knees in familiarity with pictures of beautiful and natural nakedness, it would be impossible for anyone to write such silly and shameful words as these.

There can be no doubt that among ourselves the simple and direct attitude of the child towards nakedness is so early crushed out of him that intelligent education is necessary in order that he may be enabled to discern what is and what is not obscene. To the plough-boy and the country servant-girl all nakedness, including that of Greek statuary, is alike shameful or lustful. "I have a picture of women like that," said a countryman with a grin, as he pointed to a photograph of one of Tintoret's most beautiful groups, "smoking cigarettes." And the mass of people in most northern countries have still passed little beyond this stage of discernment; in ability to distinguish between the beautiful and the obscene they are still on the level of the plough-boy and the servant-girl.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] These manifestations have been dealt with in the study of Autoerotism in vol. i of the present Studies. It may be added that the sexual life of the child has been exhaustively investigated by Moll, Das Sexualleben des Kindes, 1909.

[19] This genital efflorescence in the sexual glands and breasts at birth or in early infancy has been discussed in a Paris thesis, by Camille Renouf (La Crise Genital et les Manifestations Connexes chez le Foetus et le Nouveau-ne, 1905); he is unable to offer a satisfactory explanation of these phenomena.

[20] Amelineau, La Morale des Egyptiens, p. 64.

[21] "The Social Evil in Philadelphia," Arena, March, 1896.

[22] Moll, Kontraere Sexualempfindung, third edition, p. 592.

[23] This powerlessness of the law and the police is well recognized by lawyers familiar with the matter. Thus F. Werthauer (Sittlichkeitsdelikte der Grosstadt, 1907) insists throughout on the importance of parents and teachers imparting to children from their early years a progressively increasing knowledge of sexual matters.

[24] "Parents must be taught how to impart information," remarks E.L. Keyes ("Education upon Sexual Matters," New York Medical Journal, Feb. 10, 1906), "and this teaching of the parent should begin when he is himself a child."

[25] Moll (op. cit., p. 224) argues well how impossible it is to preserve children from sights and influence connected with the sexual life.

[26] Girls are not even prepared, in many cases, for the appearance of the pubic hair. This unexpected growth of hair frequently causes young girls much secret worry, and often they carefully cut it off.

[27] G.S. Hall, Adolescence, vol. i, p. 511. Many years ago, in 1875, the late Dr. Clarke, in his Sex in Education, advised menstrual rest for girls, and thereby aroused a violent opposition which would certainly not be found nowadays, when the special risks of womanhood are becoming more clearly understood.

[28] For a summary of the physical and mental phenomena of the menstrual period, see Havelock Ellis: Man and Woman, Ch. XI. The primitive conception of menstruation is briefly discussed in Appendix A to the first volume of these Studies, and more elaborately by J.G. Frazer in The Golden Bough. A large collection of facts with regard to the menstrual seclusion of women throughout the world will be found in Ploss and Bartels, Das Weib. The pubertal seclusion of girls at Torres Straits has been especially studied by Seligmann, Reports Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. v, Ch. VI.

[29] Thus Miss Lura Sanborn, Director of Physical Training at the Chicago Normal School, found that a bath once a fortnight was not unusual. At the menstrual period especially there is still a superstitious dread of water. Girls should always be taught that at this period, above all, cleanliness is imperatively necessary. There should be a tepid hip bath night and morning, and a vaginal douche (which should never be cold) is always advantageous, both for comfort as well as cleanliness. There is not the slightest reason to dread water during menstruation. This point was discussed a few years ago in the British Medical Journal with complete unanimity of opinion. A distinguished American obstetrician, also, Dr. J. Clifton Edgar, after a careful study of opinion and practice in this matter ("Bathing During the Menstrual Period," American Journal Obstetrics, Sept., 1900), concludes that it is possible and beneficial to take cold baths (though not sea-baths) during the period, provided due precautions are observed, and that there are no sudden changes of habits. Such a course should not be indiscriminately adopted, but there can be no doubt that in sturdy peasant women who are inured to it early in life even prolonged immersion in the sea in fishing has no evil results, and is even beneficial. Houzel (Annales de Gynecologie, Dec., 1894) has published statistics of the menstrual life of 123 fisherwomen on the French coast. They were accustomed to shrimp for hours at a time in the sea, often to above the waist, and then walk about in their wet clothes selling the shrimps. They all insisted that their menstruation was easier when they were actively at work. Their periods are notably regular, and their fertility is high.

[30] J.H. McBride, "The Life and Health of Our Girls in Relation to Their Future," Alienist and Neurologist, Feb., 1904.

[31] W.G. Chambers, "The Evolution of Ideals," Pedagogical Seminary, March, 1903; Catherine Dodd, "School Children's Ideals," National Review, Feb. and Dec., 1900, and June, 1901. No German girls acknowledged a wish to be men; they said it would be wicked. Among Flemish girls, however, Varendonck found at Ghent (Archives de Psychologie, July, 1908) that 26 per cent. had men as their ideals.

[32] A. Reibmayr, Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes und Genies, 1908, Bd. i, p. 70.

[33] R. Hellmann, Ueber Geschlechtsfreiheit, p. 14.

[34] This belief seems frequent among young girls in Continental Europe. It forms the subject of one of Marcel Prevost's Lettres de Femmes. In Austria, according to Freud, it is not uncommon, exclusively among girls.

[35] Yet, according to English law, rape is a crime which it is impossible for a husband to commit on his wife (see, e.g., Nevill Geary, The Law of Marriage, Ch. XV, Sect. V). The performance of the marriage ceremony, however, even if it necessarily involved a clear explanation of marital privileges, cannot be regarded as adequate justification for an act of sexual intercourse performed with violence or without the wife's consent.

[36] Hirschfeld, Jahrbuch fuer Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 1903, p. 88. It may be added that a horror of coitus is not necessarily due to bad education, and may also occur in hereditarily degenerate women, whose ancestors have shown similar or allied mental peculiarities. A case of such "functional impotence" has been reported in a young Italian wife of twenty-one, who was otherwise healthy, and strongly attached to her husband. The marriage was annulled on the ground that "rudimentary sexual or emotional paranoia, which renders a wife invincibly refractory to sexual union, notwithstanding the integrity of the sexual organs, constitutes psychic functional impotence" (Archivio di Psichiatria, 1906, fasc. vi, p. 806).

[37] The reasonableness of this step is so obvious that it should scarcely need insistence. "The instruction of school-boys and school-girls is most adequately effected by an elderly doctor," Naecke remarks, "sometimes perhaps the school-doctor." "I strongly advocate," says Clouston (The Hygiene of Mind, p. 249), "that the family doctor, guided by the parent and the teacher, is by far the best instructor and monitor." Moll is of the same opinion.

[38] I have further developed this argument in "Religion and the Child," Nineteenth Century and After, 1907.

[39] The intimate relation of art and poetry to the sexual impulse has been realized in a fragmentary way by many who have not attained to any wide vision of auto-erotic activity in life. "Poetry is necessarily related to the sexual function," says Metchnikoff (Essais Optimistes, p. 352), who also quotes with approval the statement of Moebius (previously made by Ferrero and many others) that "artistic aptitudes must probably be considered as secondary sexual characters."



CHAPTER III.

SEXUAL EDUCATION AND NAKEDNESS.

The Greek Attitude Towards Nakedness—How the Romans Modified That Attitude—The Influence of Christianity—Nakedness in Mediaeval Times—Evolution of the Horror of Nakedness—Concomitant Change in the Conception of Nakedness—Prudery—The Romantic Movement—Rise of a New Feeling in Regard to Nakedness—The Hygienic Aspect of Nakedness—How Children May Be Accustomed to Nakedness—Nakedness Not Inimical to Modesty—The Instinct of Physical Pride—The Value of Nakedness in Education—The AEsthetic Value of Nakedness—The Human Body as One of the Prime Tonics of Life—How Nakedness May Be Cultivated—The Moral Value of Nakedness.

The discussion of the value of nakedness in art leads us on to the allied question of nakedness in nature. What is the psychological influence of familiarity with nakedness? How far should children be made familiar with the naked body? This is a question in regard to which different opinions have been held in different ages, and during recent years a remarkable change has begun to come over the minds of practical educationalists in regard to it.

In Sparta, in Chios, and elsewhere in Greece, women at one time practiced gymnastic feats and dances in nakedness, together with the men, or in their presence.[40] Plato in his Republic approved of such customs and said that the ridicule of those who laughed at them was but "unripe fruit plucked from the tree of knowledge." On many questions Plato's opinions changed, but not on this. In the Laws, which are the last outcome of his philosophic reflection in old age, he still advocates (Bk. viii) a similar co-education of the sexes and their cooeperation in all the works of life, in part with a view to blunt the over-keen edge of sexual appetite; with the same object he advocated the association together of youths and girls without constraint in costumes which offered no concealment to the form.

It is noteworthy that the Romans, a coarser-grained people than the Greeks and in our narrow modern sense more "moral," showed no perception of the moralizing and refining influence of nakedness. Nudity to them was merely a licentious indulgence, to be treated with contempt even when it was enjoyed. It was confined to the stage, and clamored for by the populace. In the Floralia, especially, the crowd seem to have claimed it as their right that the actors should play naked, probably, it has been thought, as a survival of a folk-ritual. But the Romans, though they were eager to run to the theatre, felt nothing but disdain for the performers. "Flagitii principium est, nudare inter cives corpora." So thought old Ennius, as reported by Cicero, and that remained the genuine Roman feeling to the last. "Quanta perversitas!" as Tertullian exclaimed. "Artem magnificant, artificem notant."[41] In this matter the Romans, although they aroused the horror of the Christians, were yet in reality laying the foundation of Christian morality.

Christianity, which found so many of Plato's opinions congenial, would have nothing to do with his view of nakedness and failed to recognize its psychological correctness. The reason was simple, and indeed simple-minded. The Church was passionately eager to fight against what it called "the flesh," and thus fell into the error of confusing the subjective question of sexual desire with the objective spectacle of the naked form. "The flesh" is evil; therefore, "the flesh" must be hidden. And they hid it, without understanding that in so doing they had not suppressed the craving for the human form, but, on the contrary, had heightened it by imparting to it the additional fascination of a forbidden mystery.