Running parallel with the effects of mistaken education, are the no less serious effects of mistaken or imperfect physical culture upon the purpose of Nature. All physicians are agreed that the preparation of woman for her calling as mother and rearer of children leaves almost everything to be wished. "Man exercises the soldier in the use of his weapons, and the artisan in the handling of his tools; every office requires special studies; even the monk has his novitiate. Woman alone is not trained for her serious duties of mother."[87] Nine-tenths of the maidens who marry enter matrimony with almost utter ignorance about motherhood and the duties of wedlock. The inexcusable shyness, even on the part of mothers, to speak with a grown-up daughter of such important sexual duties, leaves the latter in the greatest darkness touching her duties towards herself and her future husband. With her entrance upon married life, woman enters a territory that is wholly strange to her. She has drawn to herself a fancy-picture thereof--generally from novels that are not particularly to be commended--that does not accord with reality.[88] Her defective household knowledge, that, as things are to-day, is inevitable, even though many a function, formerly naturally belonging to the wife, has been removed from her, also furnishes many a cause for friction. Some know nothing whatever of household matters: They consider themselves too good to bother about them, and look upon them as matters that concern the servant girl; numerous others, from the ranks of the masses, are prevented, by the struggle for existence, from cultivating themselves for their calling as householders: they must be in the factory and at work early and late. It is becoming evident that, due to the development of social conditions, the separate household system is losing ground every day; and that it can be kept up only at the sacrifice of money and time, neither of which the great majority is able to expend. Yet another cause that destroys the object of marriage to not a few men is to be found in the physical debility of many women. Our food, housing, methods of work and support, in short, our whole form of life, affects us in more ways than one rather harmfully than otherwise. We can speak with perfect right of a "nervous age." Now, then, this nervousness goes hand in hand with physical degeneration. Anaemia and nervousness are spread to an enormous degree among the female sex: They are assuming the aspect of a social calamity, that, if it continue a few generations longer, as at present, and we fail to place our social organization on a normal footing, is urging the race towards its destruction.[89]