tisfaction from the mature being, at the peril of severe physical and
mental suffering.

The age of sexual ripeness differs according to individuals, climate and
habits of life. In the warm zone it sets in with the female sex, as a
rule, at the age of eleven to twelve years, and not infrequently are
women met with there, who, already at that age, carry offspring on their
arms; but at their twenty-fifth or thirtieth year, these have lost their
bloom. In the temperate zone, the rule with the female sex is from the
fourteenth to the sixteenth year, in some cases later. Likewise is the
age of puberty different between country and city women. With healthy,
robust country girls, who move much in the open air and work vigorously,
menstruation sets in later, on the average, than with our badly
nourished, weak, hypernervous, ethereal city young ladies. Yonder,
sexual maturity develops normally, with rare disturbances; here a normal
development is the exception: all manner of illnesses set in, often
driving the physician to desperation. How often are not physicians
compelled to declare that, along with a change of life, the most radical
cure is marriage. But how apply such a cure? Insuperable obstacles rise
against the proposition.

All this goes to show where the change must be looked for. In the first
place, the point is to make possible a totally different education, one
that takes into consideration the physical as well as the mental being;
in the second place, to establish a wholly different system of life and
of work. But both of these are, without exception, possible for all only
under _wholly different social conditions_.

Our social conditions have raised a violent contradiction between man,
as a natural and sexual being, on the one hand, and man as a social
being on the other. The contradiction has made itself felt at no period
as strongly as at this; and it produces a number of diseases into whose
nature we will go no further, but that affect mainly the female sex: in
the first place, her organism depends, in much higher degree than that
of man, upon her sexual mission, and is influenced thereby, as shown by
the regular recurrence of her periods; in the second place, most of the
obstacles to marriage lie in the way of women, preventing her from
satisfying her strongest natural impulse in a natural manner. The
contradiction between natural want and social compulsion goes against
the grain of Nature; it leads to secret