Out of Girlhood into Wifehood.—The Setting up of a New Home.—Woman’s Exalted Place.—Earlier Influences.—Importance of Intelligence.—Woman Fitted by Creator for Wifehood and Motherhood.—The Position of Reproductive Organs in the Body.—Dangers of Crowding Contents of Abdomen.—What all Young Wives Need to Know.—Premium Previously set upon Ignorance.—Heredity.—Failures and Successes of our Ancestors.—Faults and Virtues Transmitted through Heredity. What a young wife ought to know is a large question, and one which we neither hope nor expect to answer fully in this little book, but if what we shall say shall set our girls to thinking a little more seriously and more exaltedly, of the great possibilities which await them: if it shall prepare them to enter the sacred realm of marriage with holier thoughts of the high duties they are assuming, we shall be content, feeling we have accomplished our purpose. Out of girlhood into wifehood, seems a short step, but it is one fraught with grave responsibilities. If all along your girlhood way, your aspirations have been high, and you have been living for the best, you are prepared for the new life and its duties; if, on the other hand, you have been drifting thoughtlessly, as so many girls are allowed to do, you will have little conception of what the future holds for you. A new home at your touch is to be called into being; a new altar reared, upon which the sacrificial offerings shall be those of love, and confidence, and life, and mutual endeavor, and work, not for self, but for that other self whom you have chosen out of all the world to be the sharer of everything that life means and that you hold dear. “And the Lord said, it is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.” And have you ever thought that in all these years we have made the mistake of writing these words together as one? We lose half of the designed meaning when we do this. “Meet means to have bestowed upon or sent to one: to have befall one, to have happen appropriately or deservedly. How full of meaning with this definition do the two words become. As if the Creator left the calling into life of woman, until he saw the great need, and then bestowed her as a blessing upon man: that goodness was only accomplished when he made woman to be a helper to man.” We are very sure that there was nothing in the creative thought, of degradation, in this giving of woman to man. Nothing of degradation in the thought of her sphere and work. It is a work distinct from that of man, and yet supplemental to it; in many ways unlike his and yet not inferior to it. It is a large half of the work of the great busy world—a work that is beautiful, noble, helpful, uplifting; and when done in the spirit of love and willingness that should always characterize it, it beautifies and ennobles the worker.