Confidential Chats with Girls

by William Lee Howard

Ignorant, never having been told of these important matters, you may have tried to vault in the gymnasiums, played a fierce game of basketball or gone to a dance when your flow was on. This, strange as it may seem to some, is the most frequent cause of “Women’s Troubles,” “Female Weakness,” etc. Now there is absolutely no reason for a woman to have “troubles” or “weakness.” Nature has so made woman that in reality she can stand much more strain and endurance of a certain kind than man can. At the start she is possessed of everything which makes a strong and well being throughout all her life. She has to be of this nature, for just think, she does the work of two beings. While the child is growing in the womb she has to watch and feed herself to give the little one good blood—HER blood. When it is born, she has to do the same thing—give it good, health-giving milk. Then as the child leaves her breasts, she has to watch and care for all its growing years. Besides all these cares she has her household, her husband, her hundred and one duties to perform. Surely all this requires a strength of body, a determined will and an all-absorbing love. No man could or would do all this—Never!

A perfectly well woman, a woman whose sexual parts are in their places and strongly attached there, does all this tremendous work happy, smiling, and reaches the grandmother’s chair with the sweetest countenance to be seen on a human face.

It used to be so; we see but few happy and uncomplaining mothers now. And there is but one cause for all the present misery and race suicide.

Ignorance of sex laws and prudery in all the most vital matters pertaining to young girls is the reason and cause.

No exercise which puts a strain on the body should ever be taken by the growing girl. Especially true is this when you are having your menstrual period, for then you should be as quiet as possible. In many cases it would be best for the girl to remain away from school. If you have to go to school, that is if you cannot make your mother understand the matter, you should be allowed to sit and not stand at your lessons. Every girl should be placed in the unembarrassing position to leave and go home at any time during school hours.

Thousands of girls have been ruined in health because their male teacher or gymnasium instructor could see only a pupil and not a growing woman, because a condition which should excuse one girl or make allowance for another, or a state of sexual nervousness which means the girl ought to be sent home at once, are subjects that are not talked over between a male principal and a woman teacher—that is, not as they should be talked over. It is an old story to the doctor, these nervous and sexually-ill young women. Taken unwell in school, perhaps suffering pains caused by a previous “standing it out,” the poor girl increases the injury to her organs, and besides being unable to put her mind upon her school work, she suffers the humiliation of a low mark.

But we cannot do these necessary things at the public schools, girls so often tell me. Well, there is but one answer to such a complaint. If the schools are so regulated that a growing girl cannot have the best of care, consideration and instruction in these vital matters, we had better close them all—every one. But what we can do is to have schools for girls only, and these must have teachers whose first thoughts are the physical welfare of all the pupils and who are thoroughly conversant with sex hygiene and all this means to the future women of our land.

I have to speak of this most important matter to you girls because in a few years most of you will have daughters to send to school, and as it is almost a hopeless task to bring the present generation out of their mucilaginous prudery, YOU must take hold as mothers and demand that such care and instruction will be given your girls that we shall no longer have this sad condition of suffering and childless women as has existed the last forty years or so. You will find the young men of your generation aiding and forcing these common-sense forms of education, for they, too, are being instructed in the matter from their side of the question.

I remember a beautiful girl of fifteen years of age, who was brought to me suffering from a nervous breakdown. There was nothing the matter with her except everything. Never having had that care and instruction she should have had, one day in school her pains became unbearable. She cried, and when she went to ask her teacher to excuse her, this misfit of a teacher sent the embarrassed girl to the PRINCIPAL. Of course she would not go and tell HIM what the trouble was; she left of her own accord and was marked for it. But this was not the worst of it; some evil-minded boys in her class laughed at her when she returned a few days afterwards and uttered those despicable hints which go straight to a good girl’s heart. And she never told her mother, because her mother had never told her anything. A girl in the school—oh, there are a lot of these kinds, I dare say you all know one or two of them—told her what to do to keep the monthly flow away.