During the four
years of her college life, her parents and the college faculty
required her to get what is popularly called an education. Nature
required her, during the same period, to build and put in
working-order a large and complicated reproductive mechanism, a matter
that is popularly ignored,--shoved out of sight like a disgrace. She
naturally obeyed the requirements of the faculty, which she could see,
rather than the requirements of the mechanism within her, that she
could not see. Subjected to the college regimen, she worked four years
in getting a liberal education. Her way of work was sustained and
continuous, and out of harmony with the rhythmical periodicity of the
female organization. The stream of vital and constructive force
evolved within her was turned steadily to the brain, and away from the
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.
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