Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

BY DR. C. W. SALEEBY
WOMAN AND WOMANHOOD
HEALTH, STRENGTH AND HAPPINESS
THE CYCLE OF LIFE
EVOLUTION: THE MASTER KEY
WORRY: THE DISEASE OF THE AGE
THE CONQUEST OF CANCER: A PLAN OF CAMPAIGN
PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE
Copyright 1911 by Mitchell Kennerley Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co. East Twenty-fourth Street New York

We are often and rightly reminded that woman is half the human race. It is truer even than it appears. Not only is woman half of the present generation, but present woman is half of all the generations of men and women to come. The argument of this book, which will be regarded as reactionary by many women called advanced —presumably as doctors say that a case of consumption is advanced —involves nothing other than adequate recognition of the importance of woman in the most important of all matters. It is true that my primary concern has been to furnish, for the individual woman and for those in charge of girlhood, a guide of life based upon the known physiology of sex. But it is a poor guide of life which considers only the transient individual, and poorest of all in this very case.
If it were true that woman is merely the vessel and custodian of the future lives of men and women, entrusted to her ante-natal care by their fathers, as many creeds have supposed, then indeed it would be a question of relatively small moment how the mothers of the future were chosen. Our ingenious devices for ensuring the supremacy of man lend colour to this idea. We name children after their fathers, and the fact that they are also to some extent of the maternal stock is obscured.