It may be said, and with truth, that the present incompetent training of girls is likely to continue so long as the mothers of girls are content to demand nothing better.  It may also be said, with even greater truth, that there is much that concerns the knowledge of sexual relationships which the mother herself may most properly impart to her daughter.  It may further be asserted, most unanswerably, that the art of love, with which we are here more especially concerned, can only be learnt by actual experience, an experience which our social traditions make it difficult for a virtuous girl to acquire with credit.  Without here attempting to apportion the share of blame which falls to each cause, it remains unfortunate that a woman should so often enter marriage with the worst possible equipment of prejudices and misapprehensions, even when she believes, as often happens, that she knows all about it.  Even with the best equipment, a woman, under present conditions, enters marriage at a disadvantage.  She awakes to the full realization of love more slowly than a man, and, on the average, at a later age, so that her experiences of the life of sex before marriage have usually been of a much more restricted kind than her husband’s.[382] So that even with the best preparation, it often happens that it is not until several years after marriage that a woman clearly realizes her own sexual needs and adequately estimates her husband’s ability to satisfy those needs.  We cannot over-estimate the personal and social importance of a complete preparation for marriage, and the greater the difficulties placed in the way of divorce the more weight necessarily attaches to that preparation.[383]

Everyone is probably acquainted with many cases of the extreme ignorance of women on entering marriage.  The following case concerning a woman of twenty-seven, who had been asked in marriage, is somewhat extreme, but not very exceptional.  “She did not feel sure of her affection and she asked a woman cousin concerning the meaning of love.  This cousin lent her Ellis Ethelmer’s pamphlet, The Human Flower.  She learnt from this that men desired the body of a woman, and this so appalled her that she was quite ill for several days.  The next time her lover attempted a caress she told him that it was ‘lust.’  Since then she has read George Moore’s Sister Teresa, and the knowledge that ‘women can be as bad as men’ has made her sad.”  The “Histories” contained in the Appendices to previous volumes of these Studies reveal numerous instances of the deplorable ignorance of young girls concerning the most central facts of the sexual life.  It is not surprising, under such circumstances, that marriage leads to disillusionment or repulsion.

It is commonly said that the duty of initiating the wife into the privileges and obligations of marriage properly belongs to the husband.  Apart, however, altogether from the fact that it is