woman is made for love. Not exclusively, but essentially, and a woman
who has had no love in her life has been a failure. The few exceptions
that may be mentioned only emphasize the rule.

But not only psychically is a woman's love and sex life more important
than a man's, physically she is also much more cognizant of her sex
and much more hampered by the manifestation of her sex nature than
man is. To take but one function, menstruation. From the age 13 or 14
to the age of forty-five or fifty it is a monthly reminder to woman
that she is a woman, that she is a creature of sex; and, while to many
women this periodically recurring function is only a source of some
annoyance or discomfort, to a great number it is a cause of pain,
headache, suffering, or complete disability. Man has no such
phenomenon to annoy him practically his whole life.

But more important are the results of love-union, of sex relations. A
man after a sexual relation is just as free as he was before. A woman,
if the relation has resulted in a pregnancy, which is generally the
case, unless special pains are taken it should not so result, has nine
troublesome months before her, months of discomfort if not of actual
suffering; she then has an extremely trying and painful ordeal, that
of childbirth, and then there is another trying period, the period of
lactation or of nursing and of bringing up the baby. The penalty seems
almost too great.

And when the woman is on the point of ceasing to menstruate she does
not do so smoothly and comfortably. She has to go through a period
called the menopause, which may last one or two years and which may
bring discomforts and dangers of its own. Man does not have to go
through such a distinct period of demarcation separating his sexual
from his non-sexual life. Altogether it cannot be denied that woman is
much more a slave of her sex nature than man is of his. Yes, Nature
has handicapped woman much more heavily than she has man.

In short, both in view of the fact that sexual ignorance with its
possible missteps has much more disastrous consequences for the girl
than it has for the boy, and in view of the fact that the sex instinct
and its physical and psychic manifestations occupy a much more
important part in woman's life than they do in the life of man, we
consider the necessity of sex instruction much greater in the case of
woman than in the case of man. I do not wish to be misunderstood as
underestimating th