What Women Should Know/Preface

I never expected to write a book of this character. If any one had foretold the fact three days before the work was actually commenced, I should have indignantly denied the possibility. I had even grave doubts of the propriety of such books, for I feared that the motive which led to their perusal was often a bad rather than a good one.

But a short conversation on certain subjects with a friend set me to thinking one day. From thinking I went to writing. And from that writing this book has gradually developed, first in doubt and hesitancy, and then, as I progressed, and the urgent need of such a work was made plainer and plainer to me, with full faith and courage.

During its writing, I have fully realized what I only partially comprehended before-the utter, lamentable ignorance of women as a class on certain ​subjects of vital importance to them. And no books which I have yet seen seem fully adapted to enlighten this ignorance. Their authors take for granted too much knowledge on the part of the reader, in the first place; they omit many things as too trivial, in the second; and in the third, being of the masculine sex, they are by no means infallible in such matters.

As questioner after questioner has come to me for needed knowledge during the writing of this book, all unknowing of the task upon which I was engaged, and I have answered them singly, I have become convinced that what I could thus impart to individual women with the desire of benefiting them, I might with equal propriety say to women in the aggregate with the same purity of motive, and with a like beneficial result.

If any turn to this book with motives other than pure and honest ones, I hope they will not discover the mistake they have made in thinking to gratify an evil curiosity until they have read far enough to find something especially suited to them, the reading of which will do them good.