ovaries and their accessories. The result of this sort of education
was, that these last-mentioned organs, deprived of sufficient
opportunity and nutriment, first began to perform their functions with
pain, a warning of error that was unheeded; then, to cease to
grow;[14] next, to set up once a month a grumbling torture that made
life miserable; and, lastly, the brain and the whole nervous system,
disturbed, in obedience to the law, that, if one member suffers, all
the members suffer, became neuralgic and hysterical. And so Miss
D---- spent the few years next succeeding her graduation in conflict
with dysmenorrhoea, headache, neuralgia, and hysteria. Her parents
marvelled at her ill-health; and she furnished another text for the
often-repeated sermon on the delicacy of American girls.

It may not be unprofitable to give the history of one more case of
this sort. Miss E---- had an hereditary right to a good brain and to
the best cultivation of it. Her father was one of our ripest and
broadest American scholars, and her mother one of our most
accomplished American women. They both enjoyed excellent health. Their
daughter had a literary training,--an intellectual, moral, and
æsthetic half of education, such as their supervision would be likely
to give, and one that few young men of her age receive. Her health did
not seem to suffer at first. She studied, recited, walked, worked,
stood, and the like, in the steady and sustained way that is normal to
the male organization. She _seemed_ to evolve force enough to acquire
a number of languages, to become familiar with the natural sciences,
to take hold of philosophy and mathematics, and to keep in good
physical case while doing all this. At the age of twenty-one she
might have been presented to the public, on Commencement Day, by the
president of Vassar College or of Antioch College or of Michigan
University, as the wished-for result of American liberal female