="Nerves” Again.= Despite the organic disturbances which may beset the reproductive organs, and despite the havoc wrought by venereal diseases, it may be said with absolute assurance that the majority of feminine ills are the result neither of the natural frailty of the female body, nor even of man’s infringement of the social law, but are the direct result of false suggestion and of false attitudes toward the facts of the reproductive life.  The trouble is less a difficulty with the reproductive organs than a difficulty with the reproductive instinct.  “Something wrong” with the instinct is translated by the subconscious mind into “something wrong” with the related generative organs, and converted into a physical pain.

That this relation has always been dimly felt is shown by the fact that the early Greeks called nervous disorders hysteria, from the Greek word for womb.  It is only lately, however, that the blame has been put in the right place and the trouble traced to the instinct rather than to the organs of reproduction.

=Why Women Are Nervous.= Although women hold no monopoly, it must be conceded that they are particularly prone to “nerves.”  The reason is not hard to find.  Since the leading factor in a neurosis is a disturbance of the insistent instinct of reproduction, a disturbance usually based on repression, then any class of persons in whom the instinct is particularly repressed would, in the very nature of the case, be particularly liable to nervousness.

No one who thoroughly knows human nature would attempt to deny that woman is as strongly endowed as man with the great urge toward the perpetuation of the race, or that she has had to repress the instinct more severely than has man.  The man insists on knowing that the children he provides for are his own children.  Whatever the degree of his own fidelity, he must be sure that his wife is true to him.  Thus has grown up the insistence that, no matter what man does, woman, if she is to be counted respectable, shall control the urge of the instinct and live up to the requirements of continence set for her by society.

Unfortunately, however, there is more often blind repression than rational control.  The measures taken to prevent a girl’s becoming a tom-boy are measures of sex-repression quite as much as of sex-differentiation.  Over-reaction of sensitive little souls to lessons in modesty often causes distortion of normal sex-development.  Ignorance concerning the phenomena of life is commended as innocence, while it really implies a sex-curiosity which has been too severely repressed.  The young woman blushes at thoughts of love, while the young man is filled with a sense of dignity.  We smile at the picture of “Miss Philura’s” confusion as she hesitatingly sends up to her Creator a petition for the much-desired boon of a husband.  But really, why shouldn’t she want one?  Many a young woman, in order to deaden her senses to the unsuspected lure of the reproductive instinct by what is really an awkward attempt at sublimation, makes a fetish of dress and social position and considers only the marriage of convenience; or, on the other hand, she scorns men altogether and throws herself into a “career.”