Excerpt from Educational Problems, Vol. 2

The dressmaker or milliner age - Changes in appetite - Interest in the other sex - Love Of secrets - Aflectations - Imitation - Dramatic gifts - Thoughts of death - Glad she is a girl - Studies seem shopworn and are far outside the center of her interests - Why and how she likes her studies - The unreligious age - Reasons for teaching sex early - Degenerate young girls - Those at the bottom of the social and moral scale - Advantages of knowledge of the way of life prop erly obtained - Periodic withdrawal - Minor abnormalities coming at this age.

Backfisch is a colloquial German term for a girl in the very earliest teens, and I use it here because I know of none in English or any other language so expressive, and be cause the age is as unique as the name. It is better than the French tendron or the English bud. It means a fresh fish, just caught but unbaked, though fit and ready for the process. The naiveté of instinctive, unconscious childhood, like the glinting sheen of sea hues, is still upon the Backfisch. Save for a little mechanical drill and breaking into a few of the most rudimentary conventionalities, of learning and con duct, her real nature is wild with a charming, gamey flavor. She is unspoiled by any of the recipes given in the cook books of pedagogy and society, for making human nature more appetizing to their highly artificial tastes. Girls with hair demurely braided down their backs, and skirts just beginning to lengthen toward their ankles are buds that should not blossom for some time, but should be kept as long as possible in the green stage; or, to change from a floral to a fauna] trope, they are only squabs and not yet doves, maturing pupa and not yet butterflies, and this calf or filly stage should be prolonged by every artifice. She is no longer a little girl.

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