timate medical practice has grown with such enormous
strides, or is as remunerative to the ordinary physician as the
department of "diseases of women."

FEMALE DISEASES ARE AVOIDABLE.--If, as has been asserted, the great
majority of these ailments are traceable to causes which are avoidable,
what is the remedy? In one word it is "Enlightenment." We must educate
the ordinary mother who is so busy over her wash tubs and babies that
she has no time to seek information upon subject which she doesn't even
know exist, who does not even know how to feed her baby as well as the
scrubbiest cat does her kitten, who does not know what eugenics means
and is interested in it even less. We must stop limiting our talks to
theorizing in clubs and societies. We must carry the tidings to the
firesides of those hundreds of thousands of women who would listen and
act, but who do not know what to do or how to correct their faults.

There is another feature of this subject which should be recalled in
this connection. It has already been gone into in detail in the article
on eugenics. There are many thousands of women who are compelled to
fight the battle of life, upon whom an unjust disease has been grafted,
which is sapping their strength and vitality, and which they do not
appreciate or understand. Husbands infect wives unwittingly, wreck their
constitutions, blast their hope of ever having a child, and then heap
upon them abuse for an inability for which they are themselves directly
responsible. Many homes are desecrated in this way and the real culprit
is never suspected. Many women, who begin their married life under the
most auspicious conditions so far as physical fitness or temperamental
quality is concerned, have their health, and happiness, and success
utterly ruined, and after spending a miserable, wretched existence, have
their hope of maternity forever blasted on the operating table. The
story of "the wife" has never been told. It is God's riddle.

WOMEN WHO DON'T WANT CHILDREN.--Sometimes the woman is at fault. Many
young wives begin married life with the intention of not having a child
for a year or two. They don't want to be tied down too soon. They want
some fun themselves. They are willing to become the legal mistress of a
man, but they are not willing to assume the responsibilities of married
life. It is difficult to understand the ethics of this type of morality.
I have always given these young wives credit with simply n