established and normal. To higher beings that looked
down upon human life as we do upon flowers, these would be the most
interesting and beautiful hours of blossoming. With more self-knowledge
women will have more self-respect at this time. Savagery reveres this
state and it gives to women a mystic awe. The time may come when we must
even change the divisions of the year for women, leaving to man his week
and giving to her the same number of Sabbaths per year, but in groups of
four successive days per month. When woman asserts her true physiological
rights she will begin here, and will glory in what, in an age of
ignorance, man made her think to be her shame. The pathos about the
leaders of woman's so-called emancipation, is that they, even more than
those they would persuade, accept man's estimate of this state."[27]

These wise words cannot be too deeply pondered. The pathos of the
situation has indeed been--at all events in the past for to-day a more
enlightened generation is growing up--that the very leaders of the woman's
movement have often betrayed the cause of women. They have adopted the
ideals of men, they have urged women to become second-rate men, they have
declared that the healthy natural woman disregards the presence of her
menstrual functions. This is the very reverse of the truth. "They claim,"
remarks Engelmann, "that woman in her natural state is the physical equal
of man, and constantly point to the primitive woman, the female of savage
peoples, as an example of this supposed axiom. Do they know how well this
same savage is aware of the weakness of woman and her susceptibility at
certain periods of her life? And with what care he protects her from harm
at these periods? I believe not. The importance of surrounding women with
certain precautions during the height of these great functional waves of
her existence was appreciated by all peoples living in an approximately
natural state, by all races at all times; and among their comparatively
few religious customs this one, affording rest to women, was most
persistently adhered to." It is among the white races alone that the
sexual invalidism of women prevails, and it is the white races alone,
which, outgrowing the religious ideas with which the menstrual seclusion
of women was associated, have flung away that beneficent seclusion itself,
throwing away the baby with the bath in an almost literal sense.[28]

In Germany Tobler has investigated the menstr