Private Sex Advice to Women: For Young Wives and those who Expect to be Married — Reading Notes

A Voice Between the Clinical and the Cautionary

Armitage's narrative voice oscillates between detached scientific explanation and urgent moralizing. In the foreword, he warns that women are "handicapped" by a lack of sane information, yet he also insists that their sex-life is "fuller and more complex" than men's. This dual posture—sympathetic yet paternalistic—shapes the book's rhetorical strategy. When describing the female reproductive organs, he promises "plain facts cleanly stated in simple terms," and the anatomy lesson that follows is indeed direct, using terms like vagina, uterus, and ovaries without euphemism. But the same lesson also includes a list of uterine displacements—prolapsus, anteversion, retroversion—that reads like a diagnostic checklist, hinting at the author's clinical background. The pacing shifts abruptly between these technical passages and broader cultural commentary, as when he blames "the Reign of Prurient Prudery" for perpetuating ignorance. This alternation keeps the reader off balance: one paragraph offers a dry description of the Fallopian tubes, the next a jeremiad against Victorian silence.

Pregnancy Narrated as a Developmental Timeline

The gestation lesson is structured as a month-by-month account of fetal development, from the fertilized ovum to the "Table of the Development of the Unborn Child." Armitage uses terms like embryo, fetus, yolk-sack, allantois, placenta, and umbilical cord, explaining each in turn. The prose here is methodical, almost like a textbook, but it occasionally slips into a more narrative mode: he describes how "Nature builds up the child from the simple cell" and traces the journey of the ovum from ovary to womb. This section also includes practical advice—how to calculate the date of delivery—and a list of "Physical Signs of Pregnancy" and "Disorders of Pregnancy." The tone is reassuringly authoritative, though the reliance on nineteenth-century terminology ("umbillical cord" with two l's) dates the text. Readers expecting modern obstetrics will find the framework familiar but the details archaic, such as the emphasis on "Osmosis" as the mechanism of nutrient exchange.

Speculative Science on Controlling Sex

One of the most striking passages in the excerpts concerns the possibility of influencing the sex of offspring. Armitage reviews a theory that a physiological condition leading to sugar excretion might inhibit male-determining ova, and he notes that some practitioners recommended diabetes-like treatment to produce boys. He immediately cautions that this method "cannot be held to have been established on a scientific basis." He then quotes the biologist Doncaster at length, who argues that sex may be determined solely by the spermatozoon, but also acknowledges evidence that the ovum plays a role. Doncaster's conclusion—that "the control of sex in man" is "not entirely impossible of realization"—is presented without strong endorsement. Another unnamed writer is cited to suggest that the early embryo is sexually indifferent and can be influenced by external conditions. Armitage does not resolve these conflicting views; instead, he lets the quotations stand, leaving the reader with a sense of scientific uncertainty that contrasts with the confident tone of earlier lessons.

Readers approaching this manual should be prepared for a text that moves unpredictably between anatomical precision, moral exhortation, and speculative biology. Armitage's willingness to quote conflicting authorities on sex determination, without settling the debate, suggests a writer more interested in surveying current knowledge than in delivering a single doctrine. The book's value today lies less in its medical accuracy—much of which is outdated—than in its documentation of early twentieth-century attitudes toward marriage, female physiology, and the limits of scientific certainty.

That 1917 manual has a strange tenderness—its stiff warnings against prudery feel like someone holding your hand too tightly. It made me think of Zoonomia; Or, the Laws of Organic Life, Vol. II — Context and Discussion, another voice from that older world, trying to make sense of bodies with such earnest care. Both leave a quiet ache, like remembering a good friend’s old letters.