l over the country. Every
father who can afford it must give his girls the incalculable benefit of
such opportunities. The girl thus educated will glory in her womanhood,
and will help to gain for it its right estimation and position in the
state.

But it is to be pointed out that such courses as these, admirable though
they be, are yet not everything. The influence of our great national
deity, which is Mrs. Grundy, is apparent still. It is not specifically
recognized that the highest destiny of a woman is motherhood, though in
such courses as this motherhood will doubtless be served directly and
indirectly in many ways. There is, nevertheless, required something
more--something indeed no less than conscious, purposeful education for
parenthood. The chief obstacle in the way of this ideal is Anglo-Saxon
prudery, and, perhaps, the reader will not be persuaded that education
for parenthood is our greatest educational need to-day, more especially
for girls, until he or she has been persuaded of the magnitude of the
preventable evils which flow from our present neglect of this matter. In
the following chapter, therefore, one may point out what prudery costs
us at present, and indeed, the reader may then be persuaded that
education for parenthood, or, as it may be called, eugenic education,
is, perhaps, the most important subject that can be discussed to-day in
any book on womanhood.

X

THE PRICE OF PRUDERY

Just after we had succeeded in getting the Notification of Births Act
put upon the Statute Book, the present writer occupied himself in
various parts of the country in the efforts which were necessary to
persuade local authorities to adopt the provisions of that Act.
Addressing a meeting of the clergy of Islington, he endeavoured to trace
back to the beginning the main cause of infant mortality, and
endeavoured to show that that lay in the natural ignorance of the human
mother, about which more must later be said. In the discussion which
followed, an elderly clergyman insisted that the causes had not been
traced far enough back, maternal ignorance being itself permitted in
consequence of our national prudery.

Ever since that day one has come to see more and more clearly that the
criticism was just. Maternal ignorance, as we shall see later, is a
natural fact of human kind, and destroys infant life everywhere, though
prudery be or be not a local phenomenon. But where vast organizations
exist for the remed