The modern woman seeking accomplishment of the positive type, scorns the negative superiority which sickness and invalidism assure to neurotics. She has acquired a more scientific knowledge of sex matters and the superstitious fears surrounding menstruation no longer affect her.
From my own clinical experience, I am compelled to agree heartily with Dr. Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury, who in their very fine and practical book "Outwitting our Nerves" state that "ninety-five out of a hundred cases of painful menstruation are caused by fear and expectation of pain."
The Passing of the Doll. The modern woman, active, self reliant, honest and healthy, will force out of existence a type which has lent much picturesque charm to social gatherings and to pictorial art, the doll type of woman, prettiness incarnate, of rose leaf charm, unfit for any biological function except the mild lovemaking, not so much of a husband, as of a lover. Tuberculous poets and composers of the Musset and Chopin type, affected pictorial artists like Helleu, will deplore her disappearance. Man, put at his ease by the modern woman, who does not require constant protection, mental and physical, will find the doll "too much trouble."
Only the very stupid and unmanly man will cultivate her for she will not throw his physical shortcomings into too striking relief and it will not require any mental exertion on his part to converse with her.
The Passing of the Flirt. The flirt is doomed. The flirt is a rather unintelligent woman with a mild prostitution complex. She has been trained from infancy to consider a woman's career as successful when the woman fastens to herself a breadwinner whom she holds by his physical desire of her body. Having never acquired any market value outside of the sexual field, she must constantly test her powers and reassure herself by leading all sorts and conditions of men, for whom she may never experience even the slightest fancy, into consequential overt acts revealing that she has awakened their eroticism.
Anyone will do, provided she reads in his eyes the verdict: I am still attractive.
The terror of growing old is not so overwhelming to the modern woman who has acquired a non-sexual market value. She tests herself thru positive accomplishment, leadership, principally, and does not need to keep her eye constantly on the sex thermometer.
Modesty, Old and New. Knowledge which dispels physical ghosts and a positive self-valuation based on accomplishment will cause the modern woman to discard the old fashioned modesty which was supposed to be her greatest attraction, and which husbands, while being obviously attracted by immodest women, encouraged in their wives as a bulwark against the advances of other men.
Havelock Ellis in his "Impressions and Comments" contrasts cleverly thru two striking illustrations the old-fashioned type, worshipping at the altar of false modesty, and the modern type, who is no longer ashamed of her body or her sex:
"In one of my books I had occasion to mention the case, communicated to me, of a woman in Italy who preferred to perish in the flames, when the house was on fire, rather than shock her modesty by coming out of it without her clothes. So far as it has been within my power I have always sought to place bombs beneath the world in which that woman lived, so that it might altogether go up in flames. I read of a troop ship torpedoed in the Mediterranean and almost immediately sunk within sight of land. A nurse was still on deck. She proceeded to strip, saying to the men about her: 'Excuse me, boys, I must save the Tommies.' She swam around and saved a dozen of them. That woman belongs to my world. Now and again I have come across the like, sweet and feminine and daring women who have done things as brave as that, and even much braver because more complexly difficult and always I feel my heart swinging like a censer before them, going up in a perpetual fragrance of love and adoration.