good deal of their lives
paying a penalty merely for being women. Brought up to believe
themselves heirs to a curse laid on the first woman, they accept their
discomforts with resignation and try to make the best of a bad
business.

="Since the War."= Nothing is quite the same since the war. Among
other things we have learned that many of our so-called handicaps were
nothing but illusions,--base libels on the female body. Under the
stern necessity of war the women of the world discovered that they
could stand up under jobs which have until now been considered quite
beyond their powers. Society girls, who were used to coddling
themselves, found a new joy in hard and continuous work; middle-aged
women, who were supposed to be at the time of life when little could
be expected of them, quite forgot themselves in service. Ambulance
drivers, nurses, welfare workers, farmerettes, Red-Cross workers,
street-car conductors and "bell-boys," revealed to themselves and to
the world unsuspected powers of endurance in a woman's body. Although
some of the heavier occupations still seem to be "man's work," better
fitted for a man's sturdier body, we know now that many of these
disabilities were merely a matter of tradition and of faulty training.

There still remains, however, a goodly number of women who are
continuously or periodically below par because of some form of
feminine disability. Some of these women are suffering from real
physical handicaps, but many of them need to be told that they are
disabled not by reason of being women but by reason of being nervous
women.

="Nerves" Again.= Despite the organic disturbances which may beset the
reproductive organs, and despite the havoc wrought by venereal
diseases, it may be said with absolute assurance that the majority of
feminine ills are the result neither of the natural frailty of the
female body, nor even of man's infringement of the social law, but are
the direct result of false suggestion and of false attitudes toward
the facts of the reproductive life. The trouble is less a difficulty
with the reproductive organs than a difficulty with the reproductive
instinct. "Something wrong" with the instinct is translated by the
subconscious mind into "something wrong" with the related generative
organs, and converted into a physical pain.

That this relation has always been dimly felt is shown by the fact
that the early Greeks called nervous disorders _hysteria_, from the
Greek