I remember when in my early teens a schoolfellow of about fifteen confided in me that ‘a man’--he was a harmless boy of about twenty--had kissed her hand when passing her a tennis racquet. She drew her hand indignantly away, and said: ‘How dare you insult me!’ then left the tennis court and refused to play any more. I do not think many girls are so silly as this, but the incident illustrates the general tone inculcated at that school. And it shows what an emphasis on sex matters the girl’s mind had received, when she saw an insult in a perfectly innocent and courteous act of admiring homage. What a harmful preparation for life such training must be! This is the kind of teaching that results in those wretched honeymoons which one occasionally hears of in secret, and which produces unwilling wives whose disdainful coldness is their husbands’ despair. This lack of feeling and lack of comprehension of the needs of stronger, warmer natures is one of the deepest and most incurable causes of married misery. Let us teach our girls to regard sex as a _natural_ and _ordinary_ fact, and the infinite evils which spring from regarding it as extraordinary and repulsive will thus be avoided. Let us bring them up to think that loving wifehood, passionate motherhood are the proper expression of a woman’s nature and the best possible life for her. In a very interesting book called _Woman in Transition_, recently published, this view of woman’s destiny is repeatedly scoffed at. The writer, Annette B. Meakin, is a fellow of the Anthropological Institute, and evidently widely read and travelled. I will give a few quotations: ‘In the happy future when higher womanly ideals have spread around us we shall all realise, no matter to which sex we belong, that to hold unqualified motherhood before every girl’s eyes as her highest ideal is to play the traitor to our race and to humanity.’ . . . ‘English Head Mistresses--though often unmarried themselves--still consider it their pious duty to tell their pupils that motherhood is woman’s highest destiny, and the pupils . . . make marriage their first aim, and other success in life has consequently to take a second place.’ . . . ‘Some very good women in England are still telling our young girls that motherhood is, for every woman, the worthiest goal, without suspecting that the doctrine they preach is dangerously conducive to that legal prostitution euphemistically known as loveless marriage, if not to greater evils.’ . . . ‘How can any girl who has been taught that maternity is woman’s only destiny dare to run the risk of losing it?’