Confidential Chats with Girls

by William Lee Howard

From the time you first realize that you are no longer a little girl, but growing into a woman, you should commence to take the best of care of the ovaries and the monthly flow. These ovaries hang in the body by very tender and delicate ligaments. Never mind the names the doctors call these cords or other ligaments; we are always going to speak in the simplest language, so that you may get a clear understanding for the advice I shall give you. These ovaries are sensitive to all movements of the body and to your emotions. Anger, outbursts of indignation and wrong reading, all these produce an effect upon the ovaries, especially so when your period is in full activity.

You may be a romping, strong girl with well-developed muscles and bones and never had to be careful of what you did. But when the age approaches where you begin to feel strange, somewhat timid, and have new ideas and peculiar thoughts, when the old kind of rough exercise tires your back, it means that your ovaries and womb are receiving more than the usual amount of blood and are in no condition to be harshly knocked about. At this time there may be slight bleeding from the nose, for the first time a soreness of the breasts and nipples, a light feeling in the head and a disposition to easily get out of patience with your companions and things about you. When these many different feelings come you may know that the ovaries are getting ready to prove that you are a woman in the making.

Now remember that the monthly flow of blood does not come from the ovaries, but from the inside of the womb. The ovaries make the eggs and send these eggs down into the womb, as I have told you. When you are married these eggs are made alive by the husband’s germ of life and remain in the womb, growing for nine months, when the little babe is old enough to be born and make you the happiest woman alive—that is if you are in good health. As long as you are a virtuous girl the womb cleanses itself every month. Of course this does not take place after you are married, for if so, you can readily see that the blood would carry away the egg. And it will do this even after you are married and have a little live egg in you, if you have not taken care of both womb and ovaries. This condition may become a regular habit, and then you end in being the most miserable woman on earth.

Because these things have not plainly been told the girls is the cause for so much injury being done to the womb and ovaries while growing. You have not been warned that you should cease all rough play, active sports, should not stand all day upon your feet nor dance late into the night. Some girls have been brought up to be over-active at this time just to prove that they will not acknowledge that there is any change or difference in them. Nature always punishes such an insult to her laws, and the teacher who places such ideas in the girl’s mind is generally one whom Nature has already punished by denying her any of the sweet and powerful instincts of woman. Have nothing to do with these unfortunate and harmful creatures. You must assist Nature in her attempts to make you a complete woman; give in to her by keeping quiet, not fretting nor getting angry because you have to give up some dance or basketball game. If you do not give up many of these pleasures when you are a growing girl, you will have to give them up later on in life; give them up forever.

For the first two years from the commencement of your first monthly period you should be quiet, obtain plenty of sleep and good food and take no exercise except walking, swimming and bending of the body in your room night and morning. Skating is not injurious if it is not overdone and you keep your feet dry and warm. Some girls have been injured for life—though they did not know it at the time—by sliding downhill on sleds. They were tossed off or ran into some post or fence and were slightly bruised. Such a slight accident caused a rupture or strain on the ovaries or womb, perhaps the tender ligaments were stretched and the ignorant girl continued her play with them in this condition.

Much of this advice may seem old-fashioned to you, but in all truth it is advice founded upon the NEW experience and knowledge of all physicians who have seen the havoc wrought by carelessness and ignorance in these matters.

The womb, hanging by its delicate cords, is at this time in the girl’s life growing rapidly and consequently receiving plenty of new blood. It has not reached full development and it takes but little to put it out of place and have it stay there. The ovaries may be so twisted and put out of order that nothing can be done for them in later life but to cut them out with a knife; then you are ruined as far as womanhood is concerned.

Young age has wonderful powers of repairing injuries. If it were not so, but few would ever reach full growth. But there are some injuries youth cannot correct, and these are the distortions and displacements of woman’s sex organs—the internal ones. If you jar or tear these organs, the ovaries and womb, while you are growing, you do not know of the injury at the time. Everything at this age is strange to you in feeling and function, and slight pains in the back or groin, irregularity or too little flow, you think is nothing. But it is EVERYTHING to you when you reach the marriageable age, or when your time comes to become a mother.

The womb is pear-shaped, big end upwards. It should hang nearly straight in the body. The small end is the outlet which opens at the time the baby is to be born. It also opens slightly every month to let out the blood, then closes when it has emptied itself. Now you can readily see that if it is twisted, tipped backwards or otherwise out of shape, birth can only be given at great risk to both the babe and its mother. It may be out of place so that nothing but an operation will save life. It may be so turned backward that the child is smothered while trying to grow, and then must come a horrible operation. Even the unmarried woman will suffer from any of these misplacements of the womb. Every month the blood tries to pass off it finds obstruction; pains, griping pains occur, sometimes the blood cannot pass away but remains to cause inflammations and tumors, and unless corrected by an operation the poor woman’s life is one of torture and invalidism.