Homosexuality, put into physical practice, definitely retards the mental growth of the person. The right sort of friendship, at this stage, can lead the girl through the period without any danger. Mothers, in general, should not encourage their daughters in friendships for older girls. It is better to drain off this urge in friendships for girls of an equal age. A great number of children actually practice onanism, or self-love, and homosexuality. In general, parents are horrified by the thought of such things. The danger arises if the child does not normally grow out of these practices. They are the lowest forms of love merely because they are obviously sterile forms. From these two stages, the normal girl or boy passes to the third when she or he reaches adolescence. This third stage, heterosexuality, is the ultimate love development, in that it signifies love for the opposite sex. The young body has at last matured and grown into harmony with natural laws. This is the highest form of bodily contact with human beings. This is the ultimate threshold of womanhood. The girl who reaches this point and goes on into life with the proper regard for the opposite sex, is a woman; those whose development is retarded and whose inclinations linger in one of the earlier stages never fully achieve true womanhood. III. MATING. _Woman’s Equality._—As we have shown before in this Little Blue Book, woman, in the dawn of man’s history, was acknowledged as superior. It was woman who mothered the race, therefore she was allowed to rule the clan. With the coming of paternal knowledge, woman sank, until in the days when civilization had reached its highest point in Greece and Rome, woman was merely a chattel. This was not wholly true, even then. In the Old Testament, lineage was always traced through the mother, showing that the matriarchal idea still lingered. In Greece, Rome and Egypt women were politically men’s equal, at least in the matter of property rights. With the coming of Christianity woman reached her lowest point in the social scale. She became hardly more than a breeder. Men ruled the world and their homes with equal rigor. But slowly, during the past hundred years, woman has been winning back her rightful position. The very nature of woman’s duty, her motherhood, may keep her from ever fully sharing all of man’s activities, but she can and will be equal in importance and in power. The first thing for her to realize is that she must concentrate on shining in those lines of endeavor where she has supremacy, and leave to men the other fields of endeavor. Man has built up a civilization of dollars and things. It remains for women to reconstruct this to a civilization of persons. Millions of dollars are spent yearly to produce better cattle, and almost nothing is spent for better babies. It remains for the women to see that this condition is altered.