Maidens! a word to you. Never enter into the physical relations of marriage with a man, until you have conversed with him freely and fully on maternity, and the relation that leads to it. Learn distinctly his views and feelings, and his expectations, in regard to that purest and most ennobling of all the functions of your nature, and the most sacred of all the intimacies of conjugal life. Your self-respect, your beauty, your glory, your heaven, as a wife, will be more directly involved in his feelings and views and practices, in regard to that relation, than in all other things. As you would not become a weak, a miserable, imbecile, unlovable and degraded wife and mother, in the very prime of your life, come to a perfect understanding with your chosen one, ere you commit your person to his keeping in the sacred intimacies of home. Beware of that man, who, under pretence of delicacy, modesty, and propriety, shuns conversation with you on this relation, and on the hallowed function of maternity. Concealment and mystery, in him, towards you, on all other subjects pertaining to conjugal union, might be overlooked; but if he conceals his views here, rest assured it bodes no good to your purity and happiness as a wife and a mother. You can have no more certain assurance that you are to be victimized, your soul and body offered up, _slain_, on the altar of his sensualism, than his unwillingness to converse with you on subjects so vital to your happiness. In the relation he seeks with you will he, _practically_, hold his manhood in abeyance to the calls of your nature and to your conditions, and consecrate its passions and its powers to the elevation and happiness of his wife and children? If not, your maiden soul had better return to God unadorned with the diadem of conjugal and maternal love, than that you should become the wife of such a man and the mother of his children. How much of woman’s suffering and degradation, under the horrors of an unnatural maternity, are owing to herself, I will not say. My appeal is to husbands, and I would show them the extent of their responsibility in this crime. Doubtless, woman might save herself much anguish and suffering, if she would approach man frankly, in womanly love, tenderness, and dignity, and open to him the depths of her soul in regard to Maternity, and the relation in which it originates. Men are not all below the brutes, in their nature. If woman were true to _purity_, to justice, to her own nature, and would be just and true to her husband and her children, and freely and lovingly converse with man on these relations and functions, he would, often, with manly pride and affection, respond to her. On no subject would a true and noble man respond to the words of a pure and trusting woman with more manly pride and dignity, and a more conscious self-respect, than on Maternity, and the relation that leads to it. Let wives, then, be true to themselves, if they would have their husbands true to them!