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.