o technical education. It permeates
society. It is found in the home, the workshop, the factory, and in
all the ramifications of social life. The identity of boys and girls,
of men and women, is practically asserted out of the school as much as
in it, and it is theoretically proclaimed from the pulpit and the
rostrum. Woman seems to be looking up to man and his development, as
the goal and ideal of womanhood. The new gospel of female development
glorifies what she possesses in common with him, and tramples under
her feet, as a source of weakness and badge of inferiority, the
mechanism and functions peculiar to herself. In consequence of this
wide-spread error, largely the result of physiological ignorance,
girls are almost universally trained in masculine methods of living
and working as well as of studying. The notion is practically found
everywhere, that boys and girls are one, and that the boys make the
one. Girls, young ladies, to use the polite phrase, who are about
leaving or have left school for society, dissipation, or self-culture,
rarely permit any of Nature's periodical demands to interfere with
their morning calls, or evening promenades, or midnight dancing, or
sober study. Even the home draws the sacred mantle of modesty so
closely over the reproductive function as not only to cover but to
smother it. Sisters imitate brothers in persistent work at all times.
Female clerks in stores strive to emulate the males by unremitting
labor, seeking to develop feminine force by masculine methods. Female
operatives of all sorts, in factories and elsewhere, labor in the same
way; and, when the day is done, are as likely to dance half the night,
regardless of any pressure upon them of a peculiar function, as their
fashionable sisters in the polite world. All unite in pushing the
hateful thing out of sight and out of mind; and all are punished by
similar weakness, degeneration, and disease.

There are two reasons why female operatives of all sorts are likely to
suffer less, and actually do suffer less, from such persistent work,
than female students; why Jane in the factory can work more steadily
with the loom, than Jane in college with the dictionary; why the girl
who makes the bed can safely work more steadily the whole year
through, than her little mistress of sixteen who goes to school. The
first reason is, that the female operative, of whatever sort, has, as
a rule, passed through the first critical epoch of woman's