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In a Foreword to Vol. I, Dr. Stanley Cobb justly calls this book 'a real contribution, a great storehouse of information about feminine psychology'. This description is even more appropriate to Vols. I and II taken together as two parts of one whole.
The major aim of the work is to explain the psychology of normal women and to indicate the modes of conflict-solution and personality development that may be regarded as typical of feminine mental health. The author uses her own vast clinical experience together with case histories supplied by other physicians and social workers, and routine hospital records, to throw the 'normal' into relief by contrast with its exaggerations in various pathological states. She attaches due importance to the interplay of biological and sociological factors in the development of feminine character but emphasizes throughout the irreducibly psychological determinants, 'the individual emotional experiences and the conflicts connected with them'. Infancy and childhood are not given special chapters but are considered in relation to the phases and problems of adolescence and adulthood. Each volume is complete in itself but the two are naturally complementary. The formal division corresponds to what the author regards as the fundamental duality of women, i.e., as person and as servant of the species.
The first volume deals with three themes: (1) the development of the distinctive 'feminine core' of personality during the transition from childhood to adulthood, (2) the analysis of this 'feminine core' and (3) the analysis of non-feminine or 'masculine' aspects of femininity. The first theme occupies Chapters I–IV, which deal with 'Pre-Puberty', 'Early Puberty', 'Puberty and Adolescence' and 'Menstruation'. Pre-puberty designates the terminal stage of the latency period (approx. ten to twelve years) which is homosexual rather than heterosexual and is characterized by a 'thrust of activity' and a 'turn toward reality'. This is the phase