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]