Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/105

 beautiful facts of existence. For instance: woman everywhere, and under all circumstances, is cleaner than man. Soap and water, fresh linen and free air, will always purify her, no matter what her previous state may have been. Not so with man. Let the cleanest man living wash in forty clear, pure, fresh tubs of water, one after another, and the last water will be dark and cloudy! But let a woman do so, and the thirty-five last tubs of water will be as pure and clear and free from clouds as the forty-first one, just drawn from the running brook or bubbling spring upon the hillside. Again: there is said to be ever a dirty corner in the mind of every man that treads, or has ever trodden, the earth. This is never true of woman! and doubtless never will be. That she is magnetically different from man is proved by the superior results of the care and nursing of both sexes by woman and man. In the case of man he merely allays physical anguish, while woman does that better still, and at the same time soothes the spirit, and leads back, with silken cords, the rebellious soul to virtue, truth, and God! Anatomically she differs, being wide in the pelvis, where man is narrow, and narrow in the shoulders, where man is wide. She eats the same food man does, and drinks the same general fluids; but she makes a far different use of them; for while man converts them into muscular force, woman changes them into nervous power; milk, — during lactation; and into love and affection, besides various forces that are unknown to the sterner sex. Physically, she is immeasurably inferior in strength; but in endurance, fortitude, courage to undergo, and victoriously to endure pain, she rises as far above the best man living, as the midsummer sun transcends a tallow candle! If any man were called upon to suffer one-half the physical anguish that every female has to encounter, the graveyards would overflow with their dead bodies within a single year! If men had to suffer mentally half that women do every month of their lives, the insane retreats and mad-houses would be crammed to suffocation. Let no one henceforth speak sneeringly of Woman as being "the weaker vessel."

This point will be clearer when it is understood that a woman's nerves are not only far more in number than man's, but they are infinitely finer, more subtle, sensitive, and acute; hence she is liable to a variety of diseases of a purely nervous character,