Release date is 2026-04-09

The opening door of womanhood -- The origin of love -- Mating -- The proper mate -- Proper education -- The price of error -- Idealism.

Tim Miller and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

Womanhood by Gloria Goddard is a sex-education and social guidance tract written in the late 1920s. It explains the passage from girlhood to womanhood and advocates frank, science-based instruction about sex, love, and marriage, urging women’s equality and informed choice in mating.

The book moves from adolescent development and menstrual health to the origins of love—distinguishing natural, romantic, and marital forms—and adopts a psychological lens (including Freud’s stages) to frame maturation. It argues for women’s right to select partners, condemns the double standard, and urges continued “courtship” within marriage. Emphasizing wise mate selection, it promotes eugenic caution and birth control, recommends delaying marriage until emotional and physical maturity, and calls for clear sex education in schools and at home, along with practical “love education.” It warns against youthful excess, outlines risks of venereal disease, and proposes a modern sexual morality based on mutual freedom, companionate unions, and efficient, scientifically informed home and child-rearing practices, while dismantling chivalric myths that kept women ignorant and subordinate. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Girard: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1927