med to adapt herself to each
of the incompatibles according to circumstances. The more thoughtful woman
works out a private theory of her own. But in very many cases this
mischievous opposition exerts a subtly perverting influence on the whole
outlook towards Nature and life. In a few cases, also, in women of
sensitive temperament, it even undermines and ruins the psychic
personality.

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 ru