experience and high authority.

In this connection I may state that the leading obstetricians believe
that the woman of to-day has a harder time in labor than her
predecessors. Aside from the more or less mythical stories of the savage
women who deliver themselves on the march, there seems to be no
reasonable doubt that in an increasing civilization and feminization,
woman becomes less able to deliver herself, especially at the first
birth.

Why is this? After all, it is a fundamental matter. And moreover it is
more often the tennis-playing, horseback-riding, athletic girl who
falls short in this respect than the soft-limbed, shrinking,
old-fashioned girl. Does a strenuous existence make against easy
motherhood? It would seem so; it would seem the more masculine the
occupations of woman become, the less able are they to carry out the
truly female functions. But this is a digression from our point.

A retroverted uterus, a lacerated perineum, such minor difficulties as
flat feet, such major ones as valvular disease of the heart, are causes
of ill health to be ruled out before "nervousness" (or its medical
equivalents) is to be diagnosed.

It is superfluous to say that we have here briefly considered only a few
of the types specially predisposed to difficulty. Moreover men and women
do not readily fall into "types." A woman may be hyperæsthetic in one
sphere of her tastes and as thick-skinned as a rhinoceros in others. She
may squirm with horror if her husband snores in his sleep, but be
willing to live in an ugly modern apartment house with a poodle dog for
her chief associate. Or the overconscientious woman may expend her