Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/245

 No, the objection to periodical rest does not come from the teacher nor primarily from the mother, but from the girl herself. Yet if our thoughtful mothers could be convinced that "the health of a girl for her whole life depends upon her normalizing the lunar month," to employ a phrase of President Hall's that I have quoted before, they would bring about the best order of things. But most mothers honestly believe that no great care is necessary. They expect their daughters to get along about as well as they did and they suppose that about so much pain is necessary for women. Mothers could hardly escape being convinced of the great responsibility that is upon them at this time if all the evidence that exists on the subject could be brought to their attention.

It is undoubtedly true that each month in a woman's life is a continuous wave with a regularly recurring succession of phases and this continuity of change makes an ingenious argument that a woman does not need especial rest at any particular time of the month. But my own observation would have convinced me that it is supremely worth while to guard an adolescent girl from nervous strain during the days when the wave of her vitality is at its lowest point even if physicians and educators had not spoken so strongly in favor of the custom. Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, in the monograph which she wrote to show that there is nothing in the physical nature of the adult woman to incapacitate her periodically for work, says nevertheless, "In adolescence and during the first years that the reproductive wave of nutrition is being formed mental work exacted in excess of the capacity of the individual may seriously derange the nutrition"; and elsewhere in the same paper she says, "It is curious to note how the effects of misery and the effects of luxury during the childhood of a girl are found so often to result in an identical mode of stunting during adolescence."

Much that has been written on the subject of puberty in girls has been printed only in medical and educational journals. Perhaps some women of delicacy may say that the discussion of such a matter is properly confined to medical journals. To a certain extent this is undoubtedly true; the trouble is that the average mother does not have easy access to those files. Therefore it seems worth while to quote at some length in this paper.

The idea that a girl needs especial care at her time of maturing is not a new fad of educators. In the time of Hippocrates it was noted that the period of puberty was very critical for the development of the nervous system. The rites enjoined by Moses provided for the care of the girl at this crisis and a similar provision appears in the code of Zoroaster. Savage nations today prescribe and protect by their superstitions definite observances for the woman at every period of her sex-life from the beginning to the end. The women of the North American Indians, always regarded chiefly in reference to their utility,