Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/140

 "Why, I mean that it isn't the presence of sexual characteristics and impulses in an adolescent or in an adult that renders him or her 'not nice.' That is a part of nature and of humanity. What is not nice is perpetual preoccupation with these impulses. And perpetual preoccupation with them results from isolation with them, and exclusion from anything else of equal or superior interest. I am convinced that many of your 'modern' girls are discovering that fact for themselves. And it is because they dread the bondage and guess the degradation of confinement to a single instinct—it is because of this that they are groping so eagerly for other interests. For many of them, bobbed hair and cigarettes are signs that they are filling and freeing their minds with advertising, real estate, journalism, medicine, law, field geology, geographical exploration, and political organization."