HEALTH OF WOMEN.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXII, Issue 8881, 5 August 1907, Page 4

HEALTH OF WOMEN.

Dr R, B, Rentoul, in an address recently, made a vigorous attack on the national neglect of woman’s health, which, he says, is our greatest national asset. “ Man,” he’ declared, “ by failing to give the order of merit to the right woman, has produced a type of female who is a compound of the hysterical, neurotic, degenerate, and sometimes criminal. . The childhating married woman (a not insignificant quantity) whose demoralised desires ate limited to a rich husband, a flat, a poodle dog, and a male hanger on, a product of our modern civilisation and a menace to cur race. “The woman who deserves the order of merit is the physically and mentally healthy woman, who represents the best thing in life motfierhood.”

He suggested that if the law raised the ago of marriage to twentyfive years in the man, twenty-one in the woman, required a prenuptial certificate of good health, made it illegal for the diseased to marry, abolished actions for breach of promise where existing disease could be proved, prohibited paupers and vagrants from marrying, taxed bachelors and reduced taxation to those who had largo families, it would go a long way to increase the sum total of human happiness, and there would be fewer separations, rawer squalid homes, and fewer degenerate children.