Confidential Chats with Girls

by William Lee Howard

Avoid all women who scoff at motherhood, who deride the domestic life for women, who stand and shout their demands in public places instead of sweetly using their influence for a better condition for men and women so that the future babies will have a proper birthright. No discussion or knowledge which will make better fathers and mothers can be wrong, but every attempt to ignore the subject is sinful.

There is nothing to be ashamed of in maternal feeling and impulses; what a girl is to be blamed for is a want of control over these natural instincts and giving way to them. The care of the company she keeps, the kind of thoughts she lets get into her mind and the way she cares for her body, are the factors which make for a good and chaste girl or otherwise.

But how can we blame all those girls who accidentally go wrong? I certainly do not. They have never been told just what to do, where the danger lurks and all the consequences. Should we blame and shun the girls who have been sent out into the world amid the dangers and snares laid for them; young women who see chastity mocked, virtue a thing to bargain for, the glitter of gold pouring into the laps of those thousands who find “the easiest way” out of their poverty and struggles?

Yet the truth is, hard as it may seem and as often as it has been told to you, that virtue and chastity in deeds and thoughts DO bring rich awards. These awards may be a long and tedious time in coming and the struggle is hard, but in the end all this will be proven to have been worth while.

As I have told you, the monthly period should come and go without much physical pain. It should last from four to five days and be regular in recurring about every twenty-eight days. But it is seldom so normal in the average American girl, the girl who has been left alone to solve her own mysteries and go her own way. This is equally true of the high-school girl or the working girl. And why? Because she has been brought up through her early developing days to go on and disregard all her sex functions—the greatest factor in all life. The high-school girl has been mixed up with all kinds of youths and not kept away from tantalizing and embarrassing conditions. The shop and working-girl has been forced to do her work, day in and out, standing upon her feet or working at a machine while the sensitive and full-blooded womb was trying to empty itself.

Let us first consider the girl whose monthly flow is scanty or entirely absent. She has arrived at the age of sixteen years and has not “seen anything.” But every month, for a year or so, she has had headaches, felt extremely nervous, had some pains, the breasts have felt tender and sore, and altogether she has had a miserable twelve months of these symptoms, but no relief from a flow. What is the matter with such a girl?

Remember I told you that the womb was pear-shaped, the small end hanging down. Here is a little opening, through which the menstrual blood flows, and then out of the body. The womb is in reality only a big bunch of muscles so arranged that it can relax and empty itself and then tightly close. In the unmarried woman, or before one has given birth to a child, this little opening is completely closed except during the period. Even then it is only very slightly opened, but open and shut it must if a girl is to be in good health.

A girl may have over-exercised or injured herself when she was twelve years of age or thereabouts, and brought about a little inflammation, which at the time she knew nothing about. The womb was already getting prepared to do its monthly work, and as the weeks went on the inflammation increased. Inflammation always means some kind of an extra growth at the injured spot; like a scar, for example, after a wound has healed up.

The womb itself is not a sensitive organ to the touch or to slight inflammations at the lower end, hence the little girl does not, at the time, feel any pain. She may feel uncomfortable in that region, but as she has been brought up NEVER to mention any matters concerning her sex organs, of course she keeps silent while the injury goes on. The little inflammation heals up, but in healing what does it do? Leaves a scar, of course. Now this scar may be big enough to have CLOSED the outlet for the monthly flow—to have made the entrance of the womb grow together. It is under these circumstances a sealed bag; nothing can come away from it.

The girl’s time comes, but the blood does not. All the other signs being present, she watches and worries. Sometimes, alas, too many times, she has never been told just what should happen. Backache troubles her, headaches often drives her to take some harmful drug, she becomes fretful, loses control of her temper in the simplest things and finally loses friends because she “is so horrid, says so many cutting things.”