word for womb. It is only lately, however, that the blame has
been put in the right place and the trouble traced to the _instinct_
rather than to the _organs_ of reproduction.

=Why Women Are Nervous.= Although women hold no monopoly, it must be
conceded that they are particularly prone to "nerves." The reason is
not hard to find. Since the leading factor in a neurosis is a
disturbance of the insistent instinct of reproduction, a disturbance
usually based on repression, then any class of persons in whom the
instinct is particularly repressed would, in the very nature of the
case, be particularly liable to nervousness.

No one who thoroughly knows human nature would attempt to deny that
woman is as strongly endowed as man with the great urge toward the
perpetuation of the race, or that she has had to repress the instinct
more severely than has man. The man insists on knowing that the
children he provides for are his own children. Whatever the degree of
his own fidelity, he must be sure that his wife is true to him. Thus
has grown up the insistence that, no matter what man does, woman, if
she is to be counted respectable, shall control the urge of the
instinct and live up to the requirements of continence set for her by
society.

Unfortunately, however, there is more often blind repression than
rational control. The measures taken to prevent a girl's becoming a
tom-boy are measures of sex-repression quite as much as of
sex-differentiation. Over-reaction of sensitive little souls to
lessons in modesty often causes distortion of normal sex-development.
Ignorance concerning the phenomena of life is commended as innocence,
while it really implies a sex-curiosity which has been too severely
repressed. The young woman blushes at thoughts of love, while the
young man is filled with a sense of dignity. We smile at the picture
of "Miss Philura's" confusion as she hesitatingly sends up to her
Creator a petition for the much-desired boon of a husband. But really,
why shouldn't she want one? Many a young woman, in order to deaden her
senses to the unsuspected lure of the reproductive instinct by what is
really an awkward attempt at _sublimation_, makes a fetish of dress
and social position and considers only the marriage of convenience;
or, on the other hand, she scorns men altogether and throws herself
into a "career."

Young men are not so often taught to repress, but neither are they
taught to swing their vital energies into