The first three or four months following the first confinement is the second important period in the young wife's life. In one sense it is the most critical period. The first important period you will remember we stated to be the first few months after marriage. During these months the young wife passed through the period of adaptation. She found out that matrimony was not all sunshine and happiness. She learned that her husband was not the paragon she had idealized. She discovered his human side. She met daily trials and annoyances incident to domestic life. She found her level, and, in finding it, she discovered herself. She is not very safely anchored yet but she is trying to succeed and the future promises well. Some day she awakes to the knowledge that she is pregnant and a multitude of new speculations enter into the situation. She finds she must go on striving and hoping and praying that she may have the strength and courage to do her part. Time passes, and if she is an ordinary woman she scarcely does justice to herself. Her duties are exacting, and her physical condition is not given the study and care which she ought to give it. She does not understand the importance of the hygiene of pregnancy, and the day of the confinement finds her more or less exhausted, and worn out. She passes through the crisis of maternity, however, and spends the customary ten days in bed. At the end of that period the nurse and physician leave her to face the most important problem of life alone. She is a mother, and has in her exclusive charge a human life. Let us exactly understand what the real situation is. It would not further the object of this book or help in the solution of the problem the author has in mind to depict a false situation. We must concede the following[132] facts to be true, if we understand the subject: 1. That the mothers of the human race are, in the vast majority, the poor. 2. That they are uneducated in the sense that they are not versed in the science of hygiene and sanitation, and consequently health preservation. 3. That even the fairly well educated are innocently ignorant of the science of heredity, environment, hygiene, sanitation and health preservation. 4. That to benefit the majority we must depict conditions as they exist among the poor, and reason from that standard. Such books as have been written on this subject have based their facts upon too high a plane. Their remedies are beyond the means and the understanding of the average poor mother. Their analogies are based upon conditions that exist among the better class. The average poor housewife gets no practical assistance or help from their deductions, because her environment precludes any utilization of the data furnished; the data is not practical in her particular case.