Sex instruction; Women social reformers -- United States -- Biography
Every girl should know that to hold in check the sexual impulse, to
absorb this power into the system until there is a freely conscious
sympathy, a confidence and respect between her and her ideal, that this
will go toward building up the sexual impulse and will make the purest,
strongest and most sacred passion of adult life, compared to which all
other passions pale into insignificance.
CHAPTER V.
REPRODUCTION—PART I.
In teaching children or young persons the process of reproduction one of
the cleanest, most natural and beautiful methods of doing this is to
tell them the process which goes on in the various forms of life in the
flower, fish, frog, bird and to lead up to the highest and most complex
of all living creatures—man.
They watch the butterfly and bee carry a load of pollen from the father
buttercup to fertilize the seeds within the mother flower. They watch
Mr. and Mrs. Frog awaken from their long winter nap, and stirred by the
life-giving impulse within them, start for the breeding pond. They watch
Father Thrush win his mate and patiently stand guard over her during the
tedious hatching days. They are told and see that the flowers depend
upon outside forces to bring the pollen from the male to the female to
fertilize the seeds before the seeds could grow. They are taught that
the mother fish lay her eggs in the water first and that the father
fish, unlike the flowers, being able to move about, carries the pollen
(which is now a fluid) to the seeds himself. They are told that Father
Frog, being a higher creature, fertilized the eggs before they reached
the water, and Father Thrush being still higher in the scale fertilized
the eggs before they left the mother's body. That the higher the species
was, the greater the care required to preserve that species.
In this way the mind is prepared for the information which should
follow.
The girl at puberty should be taught this process and something of what
goes on within the womb after the ovum has been fertilized. She should
know that all organic life is the result of a simple cell; that man is a
community of cells, banded together and depending upon each cell to
carry on its work, for the benefit of the whole.
Let us first, then, get an idea of a cell and what it is and what it
does. A cell is a tiny portion of living matter having in its center a
spot or nucleus which represents the point of germination; it is
separated from its sister cells by partitions of cell membrane.
A simple cell is formed by the fusion of two germ cells when they meet
to exchange nuclear elements. After this fusion they are able to proceed
with fission, which means splitting into parts, and it is the subsequent
cellular growth of the fused germ-cell that constitutes reproduction.
There are two kinds of reproductive cells, the ova in the female and the
spermatozoa in the male.
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