'Ethel Mannin was an exceptionally liberated letter-sorter's daughter, an early reader of Freud who made something of a career championing sexual freedom in the popular press. But when she approached the subject as a girl, she was far more fearful than informed: "At the board school all the girls were morbidly interested in parturition, menstruation, and procreation... We raked the Bible for information, and those of us who came from homes in which there were books made endless research, looking up in encyclopaedias and home medical works, such words as 'confinement', 'miscarriage', 'after-birth'... We were both fascinated and horrified. At the age of twelve I ploughed through a long and difficult book on embryology"... She copied passages from The Song of Songs into her commonplance book, but was disgusted when she came across the phrase, "Esau came forth from his mother's belly": "It seemed unspeakably dreadful, conjured up visions of sanguinary major operations. I was very miserable...".'