That at present the majority of women neither desire freedom for creative work, nor would know how to use it, is only a sign that we are still living in the shadow of the coercive and dwarfing influences of the past.
In an interesting article on woman's intellectual work, W. Thomas (1907, "Sex and Society") says:
The American woman, with the enjoyment of greater liberty, has made an approach toward the standards of professional scholarship, and some individuals stand at the very top in their university studies and examinations. The trouble with these cases is that they are either swept away and engulfed by the modern system of marriage, or find themselves excluded in some intangible way from association with men in the fullest sense, and no career open to their talents.
He sees clearly that this is but a passing phase in the development of our society, and he advocates a wider scope for the play of married women's powers.
The practice of an occupational activity of her own choosing, and a generous attitude towards this on the part of the man, would contribute to relieve the strain and make marriage more frequently successful.
When woman naturally develops the powers latent within her, man will find at his side not only a mate, free and strong, but a desirable friend and an intellectual comrade.
The desire for freedom, both for physical and mental exploration and for experiences outside the sacred enclosure of the home, may at first sight appear to be conflicting and entirely incompatible with the ideal of closer and more perfect unity between the married pair. But this conflict is only apparent, though it is true that most writers have failed to realise this. Consequently in some sections of the writing and teaching of the "advanced" schools there are claims only for increased freedom—a freedom to wander at will—a freedom in which the wanderer does not return to his fixed centre.
On the other hand there are those who realise principally the beauty of married unity, and, concentrating on the demand for the unity and extremest stability on the part of the married pair, are very apt to ignore the enriching flow of a wide life's experiences. They try to dam up the fertilising tide of life, and thus, though they are unconscious of what they are doing, they tend to reduce the richness and beauty of marriage.
It is for the young people of the new generation to realise that the two currents of longing which spring up within them—the longing for a full life-experience and the longing for a close union with a lifelong mate—are not incompatible, but are actually both essential parts of the more perfect and fuller beauty of the future that already seeks to find its expression in their lives.
Ellen Key ("Love and Marriage") seems to fear the widening of the married woman's life, and she writes as though the aspiration to do professional and intellectual work of a high order must dwarf and sterilise the mother in the married woman.
She writes of a more northerly people, the Scandinavians, and it may be true of her countrywomen, I do not know. But it is not essentially and universally true. I am writing of the English, the English of to-day, and though we also have among us that dwarfed and sterilised type of woman, she forms in our community a dwindling minority. The majority of our best women enter marriage and motherhood, or else long for a marriage more beautiful than the warped mockery of it that is offered them.
As Mrs. Stetson says ("Women and Economics"):
In the primal physical functions of maternity the human female cannot show that her supposed specialisation to these uses has improved her fulfilment of them, rather the opposite. The more freely the human mother mingles in the natural industries of a human creature, as in the case of the savage woman, the peasant woman, the working woman everywhere who is not overworked, the more rightly she fulfils these functions.
The more absolutely the woman is segregated to sex-functions only, cut off from all economic use and made wholly dependent on the sex-relation as means of a livelihood, the more pathological does her motherhood become. The over-development of sex caused by her economic dependence on the male reacts unfavourably on her essential duties. She is too female for the perfect motherhood!
The majority of our young women, I am convinced, have in them the potentiality of a full and perfected love. So, too, have the majority of our young men. For the best type of young man to-day is tired of polygamy; he has seen enough in his father's and friends' lives of the weariness of the sinister, secret polygamy, that hides itself and rots the race under the protecting cloak of the supposed monogamy of our social system.
But as things are at present in England, the young man who marries, however much he may be in love, is generally too ignorant (as has been indicated in the preceding chapters) to give his wife all her nature requires. Then, sooner or later, comes the sequence of disappointments which culminate in the longing for a fresh adventure.
As one young husband said to me, "A decent man can't go on having unions with his wife when she obviously does not enjoy them," and so he is forced to "go elsewhere." "And they call us polygamists! We are not polygamists any longer. But marriage is a rotten failure," was his verdict.
No. They are not polygamists, the finest young men of the present and of the future. Most men to-day are not in their heart of hearts polygamists, in spite of all the outward signs to the contrary; in spite of the fact that so few of them have remained faithful to one woman. But they are ignorant of the sex-laws and traditions, that sex-knowledge which was the heritage of much less civilised tribes, and so they have trampled and crushed out the very thing for the growth of which their hearts are aching.
Hence secretly (for in a marriage that is at least superficially happy the man seldom does this openly) the man begins to crave for another type of society and he "goes elsewhere." Not, it is true, to find, or even in the hope of finding, what he would get from a perfect marriage; but often to satisfy in some measure that yearning for fresh experience, for romance, and for that sense of fusion with another in the romantic experience which, even if it is only a delusion of the senses, is yet one of the most precious things life has to offer.
It is hard, indeed in many cases it seems impossible, for a good woman to understand what it is that draws her husband from her. Restricted by habit and convention in the exercise of her faculties, she is unaware of the ever-narrowing range of her interest and her powers of conversation. The home life tends to become that of a fenced pond, instead of a great ocean with innumerable currents. From the restricted and fenced man's instinct is ever to escape. Man's opportunities for exploration in the cities are few, and the prostitute is one of the most obvious doors of escape into new experiences.
Women feel a so righteous and instinctive horror of prostitution, and regarding it they experience an indignation so intense, that they do not seek to understand the man's attitude.
The prostitute, however, sometimes supplies an element which is not purely physical, and which is often lacking in the wife's relation with her husband, an element of charm and mutual gaiety in pleasure.
If good women realised this, while they would judge and endeavour to eliminate prostitution no less strenuously, they might be in a better position to begin their efforts to free men from the hold that social disease has upon them.
It is perhaps impossible to find the beginning of a vicious circle, but the first step out of it must be the realisation that one is within it, and the realisation of some, at any rate, of its component parts.
Man, through prudery, through the custom of ignoring the woman's side of marriage and considering his own whim as marriage law, has largely lost the art of stirring a chaste partner to physical love. He therefore deprives her of a glamour, the loss of which he deplores, for he feels a lack not only of romance and beauty, but of something higher which is mystically given as the result of the complete union. He blames his wife's "coldness" instead of his own want of art. Then he seeks elsewhere for the things she could have given him had he known how to win them. And she, knowing that the shrine has been desecrated, is filled with righteous indignation, though generally as blind as he is to the true cause of what has occurred.
Manifold and far-reaching, influencing the whole structure of society not only in this country, but in every country and at every time, have been the influences which have grown up from the root-fallacy in the marriage relation.
Then there is another cause for the dulling of a wife's bright charm—her inferior position in the eyes of the law. It is indeed a serious matter, as Jean Finot says, "that, under present conditions, the mistress keeps certain liberties which are denied to married women."
The past and its history have been studied by many, and we may leave it. What concerns the present generation of young married people is to-day and the future. The future is full of hope. Already one sees beginning to grow up a new relationship between the units composing society.
In the noblest society love will hold sway. The love of mates will always be the supremest life experience, but it will no longer be an experience exclusive and warped.
The love of friends and children, of comrades and fellow-workers, will but serve to develop every power of the two who are mates. By mingling the greatness of their individual stature they can achieve together something that, had both or either been dwarfed and puny individuals, would have remained for ever unattainable.
The whole trend of the evolution of human society has been toward an increased coherence of all its parts, until at the present time it is already almost possible to say that the community has an actual life on a plane above that of all the individuals composing it: that the community, in fact, is a super-entity. It is through the community of human beings, and not in our individual lives, that we reach an ultimate permanence upon this globe.
When our relation to the community is fully realised, it will be seen that the health, the happiness, and the consequent powers of every individual, concern not only his own life, but also affect the whole community of which he is a member.
The happiness of a perfect marriage, which enhances the vitality of the private life, renders one not only capable of adding to the stream of the life-blood of the community in children, but by marriage one is also rendered a fitter and more perfect instrument for one's own particular work, the results of which should be shared by society as a whole, and in the tempering and finishing of which society plays a part.
Thus it is the concern of the whole community that marriage should be as perfect, and hence as joyous, as possible; so that the powers which should be set free and created for the purpose of the whole community should not be frittered away in the useless longing and disappointment engendered by ignorance, narrow restrictions, and low ideals.
In the world the happily mated pair should be like a great and beautiful light; a light not hid under a bushel, but one whose beams shine through the lives of all around them.
We are surrounded in this world by processes and transmutations so amazing that were they not taking place around us hourly they would be scouted as impossible imaginings.
A mind must be dull and essentially lacking in wonderment which, without amazement, can learn for the first time that the air we breathe, apparently so uniform in its invisible unity, is in reality composed of two principal, and several other, gases. The two gases, however, are but mixed as wine may be with water, and each gas by itself is a colourless air, visually like that mixture of the two which we call the atmosphere.
Much greater is the miracle of the composition of water. It is made of only two gases, one of them a component of the air we breathe, and the other similarly invisible and odourless, but far lighter. These two invisible gases, when linked in a proportion proper to their natures, fuse and are no longer ethereal and invisible, but precipitate in a new substance—water.
The waves of the sea with their thundering power, the sparkling tides of the river buoying the ships, are but the transmuted resultants of the union of two invisible gases. And this, in its simplest terms, is a parable of the infinitely complex and amazing transmutations of married love.
Ellis expresses the strange mystery of one of the physical sides of love when he says:
What has always baffled men in the contemplation of sexual love is the seeming inadequacy of its cause, the immense discrepancy between the necessarily circumscribed regions of mucous membrane which is the final goal of such love and the sea of world-embracing emotions to which it seems the door, so that, as Remy de Gourmont has said, "the mucous membranes, by an ineffable mystery, enclose in their obscure folds all the riches of the infinite." It is a mystery before which the thinker and the artist are alike overcome.
To me, however, the recent discoveries of physiology seem to afford a key which may unlock a chamber of the mystery and admit us to one of the halls of the palace of truth. The hormones (see page 61) in each individual body pour from one organ and affect another, and thus influence the whole character of the individual's life processes. The visible secretions and the most subtle essences which pass during union between man and woman, affect the lives of each and are essentially vital to each other. As I see them, the man and the woman are each organs, parts, of the other. And in the strictest scientific, as well as in a mystical, sense they together are a single unit, an individual entity. There is a physiological as well as a spiritual truth in the words "they twain shall be one flesh."
In love it is not only that the yearning of the bonds of affinity to be satisfied is met by the linking with another, but that out of this union there grows a new and unprecedented creation.
In this I am not speaking of the bodily child which springs from the love of its parents, but of the super-physical entity created by the perfect union in love of man and woman. Together, united by the love bonds which hold them, they are a new and wondrous thing surpassing, and different from, the arithmetical sum of them both when separate.
So seldom has the perfection of this new creation been experienced, that we are still far short even of imagining its full potentialities, but that it must have mighty powers we dimly realise.
Youths and maidens stirred by the attraction of love, feel hauntingly and inarticulately that there is before them an immense and beautiful experience: feel as though in union with the beloved there will be added powers of every sort which have no measure in terms of the ordinary unmated life.
These prophetic dreams, if they are not true of each individual life, are yet true of the race as a whole. For in the dreams of youth to-day is a foreshadowing of the reality of the future.
So accustomed have we recently become to accept one aspect of organic evolution, that we tend to see in youth only a recapitulation of our race's history. The well-worn phrase "Ontogeny repeats Phylogeny" has helped to concentrate our attention on the fact that the young in their development, in ourselves as in the animals, go through many phases which resemble the stages through which the whole race must have passed in the course of its evolution.
While this is true, there is another characteristic of youth: It is prophetic!
The dreams of youth, which each young heart expects to see fulfilled in its own life, seem so often to fade unfulfilled. But that is because the wonderful powers of youth are not supplied with the necessary tool—knowledge. And so potentialities, which could have worked miracles, are allowed to atrophy and die.
But as humanity orients itself more truly, more and more will the knowledge and experience of the whole race be placed at the disposal of all youth on its entry into life.
Then that glorious upspringing of the racial ideal, which finds its expression in each unspoiled generation of youth, will at last meet with a store of knowledge sufficient for its needs, and will find ready as a tool to its hand the accumulated and sifted wisdom of the race.
Then youth will be spared the blunders and the pain and the unconscious self-destruction that to-day leaves scarcely anyone untouched.
In my own life, comparatively short and therefore lacking in experience though it be, I have known both personally and vicariously so much anguish that might have been prevented by knowledge. This impels me not to wait till my experience and researches are complete, and my life and vital interest are fading, but to hand on at once those gleanings of wisdom I have already accumulated which may help the race to understand itself. Hence I conclude this little book, for, though incomplete, it contains some of the vital things youth should be told.
In all life activities, house-building, hunting or any other, where intellectual and oral tradition comes in, as it does with the human race, "instinct" tends to die out. Thus the human mother is far less able to manage her baby without instruction than is a cat her kittens; although the human mother at her best has, in comparison with the cat, an infinitude of duties toward, and influences over, her child.
A similar truth holds in relation to marriage. The century-long following of various "civilised" customs has not only deprived our young people of most of the instinctive knowledge they might have possessed, but has given rise to innumerable false and polluting customs.
Though many write on the art of managing children, few have anything to say about the art of marriage, save those who have some dogma, often theological or subversive of natural law, to proclaim.
Any fundamental truth regarding marriage is rendered immeasurably difficult to ascertain because of the immense ranges of variety in human beings, even of the same race, many of which result from the artificial conditions and the unnatural stimuli so prevalent in what we call civilisation. To attempt anything like a serious study of marriage in all its varieties would be a monumental work. Those who have even partially undertaken it have tended to become entangled in a maze of abnormalities, so that the needs of the normal, healthy, romantic person have been overlooked.
Each pair, therefore, has tended to repeat the blunders from which it might have been saved, and to stumble blindly in a maze of difficulties which are not the essential heritage of humanity, but are due to the unreasoning folly of our present customs.
I have written this book for those who enter marriage normally and healthily, and with optimism and hope.
If they learn its lessons they may be saved from some of the pitfalls in which thousands have wrecked their happiness, but they must not think that they will thereby easily attain the perfection of marriage. There are myriad subtleties in the adjustment of any two individuals.
Each pair must, using the tenderest and most delicate touches, sound and test each other, learning their way about the intricacies of each other's hearts.
Sometimes, with all the knowledge and the best will in the world, two who have married find that they cannot fuse their lives; of this tragedy I have not here anything to say; but ordinary unhappiness would be less frequent than it is were the tenderness of knowledge applied to the problem of mutual adjustment from the first day of marriage.
All the deepest and highest forces within us impel us to evolve an ever nobler and tenderer form of life-long monogamy as our social ideal. While the thoughtful and tenderhearted must seek, with ever greater understanding, to ease and comfort those who miss this joyful natural development, reformers in their zeal for side-issues must not forget the main growth of the stock. The beautiful sense for love in the hearts of the young should be encouraged, and they should have access to the knowledge of how to cultivate it, instead of being diverted by the clamour for "freedom" to destroy it.
Disillusioned middle age is apt to look upon the material side of the marriage relation, to see its solid surface in the cold, dull light of everyday experience; while youth, irradiated by the glow of its dreams, is unaware how its aerial and celestial phantasies are broken and shattered when unsuspectingly brought up against the hard facts of physical reality.
The transmutation of material facts by celestial phantasies is to some extent within the power of humanity, even the imperfect humanity of to-day.
When knowledge and love together go to the making of each marriage, the joy of that new unit, the pair will reach from the physical foundations of its bodies to the heavens where its head is crowned with stars.
A curious rigidity of mental and physical capacity seems to characterise some excellent and well-meaning people, and among those whose marriages unaccountably fail to reach just that height of perfection in a physical sense which they may intellectually desire, are those who are either entirely ignorant that sex union may be accomplished in many various positions, or those who consider any other position but the most usual one to be wrong.
Yet, curiously enough, it sometimes comes to light that a pair do not even know the usual position, and in my own experience several couples who have failed to have children, or have failed to obtain the complete delight of union, have revealed that the woman did not know that it is not only her arms which should embrace her lover. Consequently, entry was to him both difficult and sometimes impossible.
In addition to this, the encouragement of that spontaneous movement which comes so naturally to those who are highly stirred, needs in far too many of our moderns to be cultivated. A pair should, impelled by the great wave of feeling within them, be as pliable as the sea-plants moved by the rushing tides, and they should discover for themselves which of the innumerable possible positions of equilibrium results in the greatest mutual satisfaction. In this matter, as in so many others of the more intimate phases of sex life, there should not harden a routine, but the body should become at the service of intense feeling a keen and pliable instrument.
It must be remembered that the parallel of the more primitive creatures cannot be pressed too far, because in a thousand ways we highly civilised human beings have developed in fresh directions away from our ancestral habits. This question, of whether or not it is right and wise to have sex unions during pregnancy, is one on which scientific research should be undertaken. Far too few men and women are clean-minded and frank enough to record their feelings in this connection, and far too few medical men delicately sympathetic enough to elicit the facts even from those women who are personally conscious of them. The little evidence which I have acquired through direct personal confidences about this subject points in absolutely conflicting directions, and there is little doubt that in this particular, even more than in so many others, the health, needs, and mental condition of women who are bearing children vary profoundly. From one distinguished medical specialist I have acquired the interesting suggestion that in one or two cases among his own patients, where the prospective mother had desired unions and the husband had denied them thinking it in her interest, the doctor had observed that the children seemed to grow up restless, uncontrollable, and with an unduly marked tendency to self-abuse. On this most suggestive and important idea, I would gladly obtain evidence from parents and the medical profession, for only from a large number of cases can reliable conclusions be drawn. But just as in popular opinion it is good for the child and the woman to gratify any harmless fancy for food which she may develop, so, in my opinion, it seems probable that any desire for moderate and careful sex union between the prospective mother and the father of the coming child should be gratified in the interests of all three. But this opinion is expressed merely provisionally, and largely in response to a number of inquirers who have asked me about this point. Immoderate and excessive sex union must undoubtedly be looked upon as an unfavourable symptom, and a practising doctor should be consulted about it.
A woman who is bearing a child by the man she deeply loves, has an intense longing that he should share, so far as is possible, in influencing that child while it is coming, and that he should be as near and as close to it and to her as is possible. The basis of this longing we may well imagine may be not only a tender sentiment of the brain, but may depend on that fine sensual interchange of ultra-microscopic particles which must take place between skin and skin during physical contact, the idea of which is so beautifully foreshadowed in Carpenter's "Love's Coming of Age."
A woman who is bearing a child should not—indeed, she cannot—have the intensest form of muscular orgasm, but this subtler and deeper sweetening and harmonising union has not only a romantic justification, but will, I think, be proved by Science, when Science becomes sensitive enough to handle such delicate things, to have a real bio-chemical basis.
As so many people lack a due visualising imagination, perhaps I should add that the ordinary position of union is not suitable—indeed, may be very well most harmful—to a woman during this time; but she and her husband can easily so intertwine themselves that the weight of both is lying upon the bed or upon pillows, and so no pressure falls upon the woman.
Although it is out of the province of this book to give advice about the more material and better-known details of the general management of the health of the prospective mother, yet there are one or two very important points generally overlooked which profoundly affect both the woman's health and happiness, and may affect also the child. For instance, leading medical experts are in the habit of considering the "morning sickness" which is so usual in the early months of pregnancy as a "physiological process," and to look upon it complacently as perfectly normal and to be endured as a matter of course. This marks a deplorably low standard of health. Why should this comparatively small but nauseating experience accompany what should be among the most rapturously beautiful months of a woman's life? In my opinion there is no reason for this at all, except that medical men have been blind leaders of the blind; accustomed always to deal with invalids or semi-invalids, they have lost the instinct to demand of humanity a high and buoyant state of health, while women so harried by the undue drains of unregulated sex experience, with vitality so lowered by "civilised" life, have seen one another suffering on all sides until they too have lost the racial memory of radiant bodily beauty and health.
Here and there an exceptional woman has gone through the months of pregnancy with no handicap, with not even morning sickness. Instead of looking upon her as an enviable exception, as all do now, look upon her as the normal standard which all should attain! One of the aids to attaining this standard for every prospective mother would be the knowledge by all adult women that, directly they know they are bearing a child, they should instantly discard not only all corsets, but all clothes of every kind which are heavy and close or which have any definite bands or tight fastenings. Specialists are content to say no harm accrues if a woman wears "comfortable" corsets until the third or fourth month. I denounce this as misleading folly. The sensitiveness to pressure, often unconscious, at such a time is extraordinary, and the penalty of even the lightest pressure is the morning sickness. The standard of clothing should be so light, so loose, that a butterfly could walk upon the bare skin beneath the clothes without breaking its wings. This may seem exaggerated to nearly everyone, but it is a very profound truth.
Another aid to buoyant health during this time is to add to the diet the largest possible amount of uncooked fruit, particularly oranges, plums, and apples.
Various books have been written on the health in pregnancy, though few of these are enlightened. Although one must deplore the many mistakes in elementary chemistry which are made therein, by far the best of the books on this subject known to me is Dr. Alice Stockham's "Tokology." In this book it is only such comparative trifles as the calling of carbonaceous material carbonates which, though sufficient to prejudice the scientific mind against the rest of her work, does not really affect the profound truth of the gist of her message—a message which was first given to the public by a wise old Englishman long ago.
Owing partly to the incredible ignorance of our bodily structure in which it is possible for a grown man or woman not only to enter marriage but to be married for years, sometimes apparently childless unions are not in any sense due to the incapacity of either partner for parenthood, but are due sometimes to trifling impediments which can easily be removed, or to trifling peculiarities of construction which can very simply be overcome.
While the great majority of married couples are actually suffering, or would suffer, without the exertion of definite control, from too many pregnancies there are still—particularly in the middle and upper classes—many would-be parents who long for children but seem to be mysteriously deprived of them. Doctors may have examined both the man and the woman, and pronounced them perfectly normal, perfectly healthy, and perfectly capable of having children together, and yet children do not come. Sometimes this is caused by an undue activity of a slightly acid secretion on the part of the woman, a secretion doing her no harm and of which she is quite unconscious, but which may be sufficient to render the active sperm impotent. Sometimes, therefore, it is sufficient to ensure conception for the woman to syringe the vagina with a little weak neutralising solution such as sodium carbonate shortly before sex union. Another cause which sometimes operates against the vital sperm penetrating to the waiting ovum is an excess of mucus at the mouth of the womb. In such a case it is important that a really complete and muscularly energetic orgasm should be achieved by the woman, not before but coincident with or after the sperm has been ejaculated. It is often argued that it makes no difference whether or not the woman has a complete orgasm, for so many cases are recorded in which women who have never experienced an orgasm have had many children; but it is generally forgotten that women are of many different types, and while one type of woman, the very fruitful mother with a wide vagina and but slight internal mucus, may conceive a dozen times without an orgasm, the more highly nervous, equally perfect, woman may only conceive on the occasion when she experiences an orgasm whilst the sperm are actually in the vagina.
Another slight obstacle to conception on the part of a woman which is not infrequent is the position of the mouth of the womb and the relation of the vaginal canal, which may be such that the spermatic fluid tends to be lost without any of it penetrating the orifice of the womb itself. To overcome this it is often sufficient for the woman to turn over directly the act of union is complete and lie face downwards for a few hours.
Without any question, all women have times of greater or less reproductive vitality, but in some women this is less marked than in others, and with some conception may take place at almost any date in the menstrual month; but with other women there is a group of days ranging from three or four to a dozen or more, in which conception seems to be impossible; while, on the other side of this group of neutral days, the days grade upwards towards a date of greater reproductive potency. Therefore, a woman and her husband who desire children, but have not after some years of marriage had the good fortune to attain parenthood, should choose for their acts of union those days on which conception is most likely. It is generally found that the most certain date for conception is—with very few exceptions—about the last day of the monthly period, or the day or two immediately after it; so that the husband who ardently desires his wife to conceive should, with her consent, concentrate their unions so far as possible on such dates.
On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that the effect on the whole nervous system of the desire to conceive is very great. A too frantic desire, which leads to too frequently repeated unions, will probably defeat itself, because it is not the mere coalescence of the sperm with the ovum which completes conception, it is also the attachment of that impregnated ovum to the wall of the womb, and intense nervous excitement may prevent that. Indeed, it has been stated by a medical man of considerable weight in the last century that there are women among those races to whom sex-knowledge is not taboo who can voluntarily control conception at will and consciously expel an impregnated ovum by mere exercise of nervous force. A woman in modern society who is in a highly nervous condition, which may find expression in her constant need of cigarettes or excitement, may be (though this is by no means universally true) frequently impregnated and at the same time continually throwing off the impregnated ovum before the settling down of that ovum, which results in true conception, can take place. If, therefore, the woman who urgently desires to be a mother finds herself continuously smoking, or notes in herself any other indication of a lack of placidity in her nerves, she would do well—not merely to restrict her smoking, which is nothing but a symptom of a deeper need—but she would do well to restore so far as possible a calm poise to her whole system by longer sleep, more country air, plenty of fresh butter, or whatever simple remedy it may be that will supply her nerves with something lacking, and for which she is unconsciously craving.
Although to many it may seem incredible, yet it is not so rare as might be supposed, that the adult pair may be married for years, and the wife still physically a virgin owing to neither of the pair knowing that penetration must be effected. Amazing as it may seem, four or five such cases, all of intelligent apparently average people, have come to my direct knowledge in the course of one year alone. Another cause, less extreme, is due to the woman making full entry difficult or impossible by not taking up a proper position during union. (See also p. 114.) In such cases a knowledge of the true details involved may speedily bring the desired conception.
These very simple suggestions are of the kind often overlooked by the medical specialist, to whom a woman goes tremblingly asking if she is abnormally formed in any way, because she does not get the children she so much longs for. Such advice, of course, will apply only to people who are essentially normal and without deformity. For more serious obstructions to parenthood, the pair, and not the woman only, should seek medical advice.
Note 1.—(See p. 24.)
For suffering and even death of unmated females, see e.g. MARSHALL, in Quarterly Journal Microscopical Society, Vol. 48, 1904, p. 323.
PARSONS, in British Medical Journal, October, 1904.
Note 2.—(See p. 31.)
A frequent mistake (made even by gynæcologists) is to confuse menstruation with the "period of desire," which is generally called "heat" in animals. Even in the most authoritative recent text books, such phrases as "heat and menstruation" are very common, thus coupling heat and menstruation as though they were equivalents, while the older books quite explicitly look on the menstrual period in women as corresponding to desire of "heat" in animals. This error has even been repeated very recently in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine.[13]
Some physiologists have studied this subject in several of the higher animals, and now realise that the time of desire is physiologically distinct from the phase which is represented by menstruation in women. It seems to be fairly well established that in women menstruation is caused by an internal secretion of the ovaries (c.f. p. 61), and is not directly due to ovulation, though it must have some connection with it.[14]
The most that modern science appears to have attained is briefly summarised in the following quotation from Marshall ("The Physiology of Reproduction," p. 69): "According to Martin and certain other writers, the human, female often experiences a distinct post-menstrual œstrus [Modern research has recognised a period when the female animal is ready for impregnation, which is called the œstrus, and a preparatory series of physiological changes called the pro-estrous phase.—M.C.S.], at which sexual desire is greater than at other times; so that, although conception can occur throughout the intermenstrual periods, it would seem probable that originally coition was restricted to definite periods of œstrus following menstrual or pro-estrous periods in women, as in females of other mammalia. On this point Heape writes as follows: 'This special time for œstrus in the human female has very frequently been denied, and, no doubt, modern civilisation and modern social life do much to check the natural sexual instinct where there is undue strain on the constitution, or to stimulate it at other times where extreme vigour is the result. For these reasons a definite period of œstrus may readily be interfered with, but the instinct is, I am convinced, still marked.'"
In nearly all wild animals there is a definite period for sexual excitement, very commonly just at that time of the year which fits into the span of gestation, so that the young are born at the season which gives them the best chance to grow up. In animals the period of desire, the ovulation (or setting free of the female germ or unfertilised egg-cell) and the time of the birth of the young, are all co-related harmoniously. The male animal is only allowed to approach the female when the natural longing for union is upon her. Among human beings, the only race which seems to have long periods of sexual quiescence at all comparable with those natural to the animals are the Esquimaux, who appear to pass many months without any unions of the men and women.
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By the same Author
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London: A. C. Fifield, 13 Clifford's Inn, E.C. 4