One Religio-Sexual Maniac

In a fragment of autobiography before me, “Ida” begins: “My idea that sex is pure must, I think, have begun in my mother's womb. My mother and father did not create me by accident but by reverent intention. They prepared their souls and their bodies before they lay down to create me; and all during the nine months that my mother carried me, she strove to think good pure thoughts so as to influence the coming child.” In the moral training from her pious mother, and in its mystical implications, we get some indication of the mother's emotional instability. “She [the mother] wished to make me an author and with that end in view, she read books with prayerful thought; she wrote much, but was a woman of very little education, having been obliged to leave school to earn her living.”

Of “Ida's” precocity, one of her mother's letters reveals this: “She read any part of the Bible at two and a half years; wrote at five—spent her whole life in studying and writing.” Evidently the mother encouraged this precocity as an overcompensation for having herself been deprived of an education, and to relieve an excessive feeling of inferiority. The mother talked to “Ida” about the beginnings of life, so that the girl acquired some general knowledge of embryology before she was out of her teens. As a mere girl, Ida is said to have been largely responsible for the agitation which opened the University of Pennsylvania to women. She was also one of its first women students. At the age of eighteen “Ida” wrote a textbook which was used in some business schools.

Her mother had brought her up with exceeding care in social matters. “She instructed me [‘Ida’] carefully that I must never allow a man to kiss me or put his arm around me, or even hold my hand—until the right man of all should come. But, for the matter of that,” so she continues, “all men were to me like shadows, as I was head over heels in love with my teacher … whom I adored. One day we had a lesson in botany which dealt with the fert