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.