Always convinced of the importance of this subject, convictions have deepened to the point of dismay since learning, through this school, of the many women who have suffered and who continue to suffer, both mentally and physically, because, in early girlhood, they were not taught those finer physiological facts upon which the very life of the race depends.  Yet, strangely enough, these very victims find it almost impossible to give their children the knowledge necessary to save them from a similar fate.  It is as if the lack of early training in themselves leaves them helpless before a situation from which they suffer but which they have never mastered.

Of course such feelings, in themselves morbid, are not to be trusted.  Faced with a task like this we have only to ask ourselves not “Is it hard?” but “Is it in truth my task?” If it is, we may be sure that we shall be given strength to do it, provided only that we are sincere in our willingness to do it and do not count our feelings at all.

It is preposterous to have such feelings, in the first place.  They are wholly the product of false teaching.  For we have no right—­as we recognize when we stop to think about it in calmness of spirit, and apart from our special difficult—­to sit in scornful judgment upon any of the laws of nature.  When we find ourselves in rebellion against them, what we have to do is to change the state of our minds, for change the laws we cannot.  If we women could inaugurate a gigantic strike against the present method of bearing children—­and I imagine that millions would join such a strike if it held out any promise of success!—­we still could accomplish nothing.  To fret ourselves into a frazzle over it, is to accomplish less than nothing;—­it is to enter upon the pathway to destruction.

In teaching our children, then, we have first to conquer ourselves—­that painful, reiterated, primal necessity, which must underlie all teaching.  Having done so, we shall find our task easier than we supposed.  The children’s own questions will lead us; and if we simply make it a rule never to answer a question falsely no matter how far it may probe, we shall find ourselves not only enlightening but receiving enlightenment.  For nothing is so sure an antidote to morbidness as the unspoiled mind of a child.  He looks at the facts with such a calm, level gaze that proportions are restored to us as we follow his look.

Many of my letters show that adult women, wives and mothers, still grope for the truth that lies plain to the eyes of any simple child—­the truth that there is no such thing as clean and unclean, only use and misuse.  Others, through love, and the splendid revelations that it makes, have risen so far above their former misconceptions that they fear to tell a child the facts before he has experienced the love.  I can imagine that in an ideal world some such reticence might be good and right—­but this is far from an ideal world.  We have to train