II. THE SEXUAL EPOCH OF THE MENACME.
By the term menacme I designate the culmination of the sexual development of woman, during which the processes of reproduction, copulation, conception, pregnancy, parturition, and lactation occur.
The processes of puberty in woman are fully completed at the age of from eighteen to twenty years, so that from this time forward she is fully equipped for the performance of her sexual duties. The first act in the fulfilment of these duties is copulation, which in civilized countries is in the great majority of women first undertaken at the commencement of married life. The average age at marriage in the women of this part of the world is 22; but marriages at an earlier age are very common, and in many circles of society the average age is as low as 20. The fullest maturity of sexual activity in women occurs, however, in the thirty-second year of life, this being the year in which on the average the maximum fertility is attained.
At the menacme, the beauty and energy of women attain their fullest evolution, her sexual characteristics their strongest development. It is this period of life, however, that entails the greatest dangers to beauty and health in connection with the functions of the genital organs. Copulation, the first act of sexual intercourse with the male, often produces in the female injuries from which she never completely recovers. Gonorrhœal infection has been a source of unspeakable miseries to women. Motherhood itself entails the risk of a great number and variety of illnesses, which, as puerperal sequelæ, affect this phase of woman’s life. The struggle for existence, in which woman at her prime is also involved, and the fulfilment of duties to husband and children, further lead to the production of a series of changes, both physical and mental, in the feminine organism, which influence all the functions.
The great characteristic of this epoch is maternity. In maternity the fully developed woman lives and has her being, but to maternity also she often succumbs as a sacrifice to the fulfilment of her natural functions. Inasmuch as in this sexual phase the functions of the genital organs are of greater importance, to the same degree is enhanced the importance of the mutual relations between these organs and the other organs of the female body.
Another influence of fundamental importance in the sexually mature woman is that of the sexual impulse, the force of which is at times overwhelming, so that its gratification is sometimes sought without regard for the consequences to married and family life.
The physiology and pathology of the menacme coincides with the normal processes and pathological changes respectively of the female genital organs consequent on their functional activity as organs of sexual sensation and of reproduction. Woman as wife and mother stands at the climax of her existence.
In a quite astonishing manner, however, many of the advocates of the modern movement for the emancipation of women contest the significance of maternity to women.
A modern authoress and supporter of women’s rights, Ellen Key, avows that she was in error when at an earlier date she “regarded maternity as the central point in woman’s existence.” She asserts that it lies within the sphere of a woman’s individual rights, as of a man’s, to reject marriage, or to accept marriage while rejecting maternity. “The grounds for the rejection of maternity may as well be deeply altruistic as deeply egoistic. It lies within the sphere of individual rights to dispense with love or with maternity when either is regarded or both are regarded from this point of view. It is entirely within a woman’s rights to transform herself into a member of the ‘third sex,’ the sex of the worker bee, of the neuter ant, if she finds therein her greatest pleasure. * * * Women exist in whom erotic feeling is totally atrophied; there are yet others who fail to find in intercourse with the modern man that soulful and deep erotic harmony which they rightly desire; and there are others still more numerous who desire love, but not maternity, which indeed they dread.”
A celebrated German authoress of the present day, Gabriele Reuter, refers in similar terms to the justifiable fear with which so many aspiring and hard-working women regard maternity, “the perpetual, watchful, emotional dread of motherhood, a dread which causes them to turn at bay. A dread, a hatred, it is, which has grown so strong, so active, that one might almost regard it as an obscure perverse instinct, awakened and developed and strengthened by bitter necessity. It is as if in the innermost recesses of their nature such women had a belief that should they pay their tribute to sex they would loose all the energy, clearness, and brightness of mind, by means of which they have raised themselves above the level of their sex. And perhaps women of a certain type are justified in this fear.”
Fortunately, however, the woman who does not prize maternity still remains an exception. The great instinct for the preservation of the species, which nature has planted deeply in every human being, still as a rule in women remains much more powerful than the instinct of self-preservation at every one else’s expense—more powerful than such self-sufficient egoism. And now as ever it is the duty of humanity to educate women for maternity from her youth upward, so that she is in every way fitted for the supreme duty of her sexual nature, the renewal of life from generation to generation.
Against the significance and importance of maternity to woman, the mountainous waves of the movement for the emancipation of women dash themselves as vainly as against the solid rock. Much justification may be found for the efforts of women in modern civilized communities to engage in departments of activity to which hitherto men only have been admitted; and as regards the intellectual capacity of women we may acknowledge their competence for the higher scientific professions; but while admitting this we must hold firmly to the physiological standpoint and must more especially bear in mind the sexual life of woman. Such professions only are suitable for a woman as do not entail a restriction of the sphere of her reproductive activity, a hindrance to her principal duty, that of maternity, an interference with the discharge of her obligations to husband and children, or a diminution of her domestic value and an evasion of her responsibilities in family life. As L. von Stein so justly remarks, the woman who spends the whole day at a desk, in the law courts, or in a house of assembly, may be a most honorable and most useful individual, but she is no longer a woman, she cannot be a wife, she cannot be a mother. In the condition of our society, the emancipation of woman is in its very nature the negation of marriage.
We may not agree with the great misogynist, Schopenhaur, in his depreciation of the female sex, or in his assertion that woman exists simply and solely for the propagation of the species, and that “her life should therefore flow more quietly, more inconspicuously, and more gently than that of man toward its goal;” nor need we regard as justified the severe sentence of the philosopher, E. von Hartmann, that from the moral standpoint, “the greater number of women pass the whole of their lives in a state of minority, and, therefore, to the end stand in need of supervision and guidance;” but the statement made by Friedr. Nietsche in his book Also sprach Zarathustra deserves acceptation, “Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman has its answer: it is called pregnancy,” and again, “For woman, man is only the means; the end is always the child.”
Unsearchable in its judgments, nature has imposed on woman alone the consequences of the act of generation; man has the pleasure, but not the labor and the pain. We might indeed regard as highly unjust the distribution of the rôles in the process of reproduction, were it not that in a mother’s love and a mother’s joys, woman finds a compensatory solace. The man’s part is a much easier one and costs far less than that of woman; with the gratification of his sexual desire, man shakes off any further responsibility, whereas the woman’s body becomes the workshop in the wonderful act of creation of a new human life.
Maternity, says Lombroso, is the characteristic function of the female sex, upon which rests her whole organic and physical variability, and this function is indeed throughout of an altruistic nature. Although there is a certain antagonism between the sexual impulse and maternity—according to Icard, the sexual impulse is extinguished in women during pregnancy,—still, maternity appears to depend upon sexual perceptions. For instance, the act of suckling the infant often arouses voluptuous sensations, and Icard mentions a case in which a woman permitted fertilization to occur solely on account of the pleasure obtained by suckling. The anatomical cause of this fact is to be found in the connections between the nipple and the uterus by way of the sympathetic nervous system. * * * It is likewise probable that in the happy feeling of maternity there intermingle very gentle voluptuous sensations derived from the genital organs. According to Bain also, very delicate sensations of contact form an element in maternal love.
The epoch of the menacme is that in which, independently of maternity, the sexual impulse often becomes so powerful in woman as to be entirely dominant. The problems relating to marriage and to the sexual position of woman, so widely discussed at the present day, are, therefore, of especial importance in regard to women at this period of life. The forcible repression and control of the sexual impulse inculcated by moral and religious ordinances are now, according to the modern leaders, both male and female, of the woman’s movement, to be abandoned; and it is loudly asserted that every woman has the same right as man to physical love and the happiness it produces. Hence, free love is demanded. “Freedom in love, freedom for love—this is what the dignity of the human race demands,” asserts the authoress of a book recently published (Elisabeta von Steinborn, The Sexual Position of Woman). With laws for the regulation of marriage, this section of the women’s rights party will have nothing to do. A truly good and honorable man, they contend, has as little need of laws to regulate his amorous relations as he has of laws against murder and theft. In the first place, love, the sexual relation between man and woman, must be free, and humanity, freed from vexations and needless control, will then seek and find the proper path, even if at the expense of a few errors by the way. Only after this unrestrained sexual intercourse has lasted for a long time, will free marriage become the rule. “Out of this phase will develop the monogamic system willed by God, for which, in its most ideal form, we are not yet sufficiently ripe.” It is hardly necessary to discuss in detail the general deleterious influence of such unlimited, unregulated free love upon the community, upon human society as a whole, to describe the results of free love, to attempt to realize the chaos which it would bring about in the social relations of civilized humanity. We must rather indicate it as desirable from the medical standpoint also, that such a change in general domestic economy shall be aimed at as will enable the great majority of women to share in married life and family happiness, and thus making allowance both for human nature and the demands of social life, to effect a true harmony between sexual morality and sexual practice.
Fig. [48].—The female pudendum, or vulva, with the labia majora. The vulval cleft. Female perineum. Mons veneris, with the pubic hair. (From Toldt: Atlas of Human Anatomy.—Rebman Company, New York.)
We must point out that in so far as the modern woman’s movement aims at dispensing with man and at basing the entire life of woman upon the independent ego, that movement is in opposition to nature and its eternal laws. A woman who thus seeks the solution of the woman’s question in the direction of freedom and independence is one who endeavors to avoid the burthen of womanhood. She desires to escape, always from guardianship, often from maternity, and usually from the restrictions, the unselfishness of womanhood. But none the less does she remain unable to escape from her femininity.
Fig. [49].—Vestibule of the vagina, with the labia minora or nymphæ, the vaginal and urethral orifices, and the glans clitoridis. (From Toldt: Atlas of Human Anatomy.—Rebman Company, New York.)
“The true significance of woman,” insists Laura Marholm in opposition to the modern tendency, “has at all times consisted rather in what she is than in what she performs, and it is precisely in the former point that the women of the present day seem so unusually wanting. Their performances are indeed many and various, they study and they write innumerable books, they are the directors or principals of all possible concerns and collect funds for every possible object, they wear doctors’ gowns, conduct agitations, and found clubs, and they come continually more and more into publicity. And yet their public significance is after all diminished. The greater the influence of woman in the mass and as a numerical majority, the less is her influence as an individual, the smaller is the triumph of her sex. She herself has induced man to sound the trumpet note of the abhorrence of women. Tolstoi in The Kreuzer Sonata, Strindberg in numerous dramas, Huysmans in En Ménage, write in this strain; and in the works of many lesser luminaries we encounter this mistrust of love. * * * The modern system of education for girls, with its polyglossia and polymathy, favors a superficial development of the understanding, and produces women who are pretentious without being profound.”
Feminine beauty suffers during the menacme from the stress of the demands made on the sexual activity as well as on the functional capacity of the individual. Repeated, rapidly succeeding pregnancies and confinements impair the beauty of the breasts and the abdomen, the figure and the carriage. In consequence of suckling, the breasts, hitherto firm and elastic, usually become more or less pendent and wrinkled, sometimes also flabby and inelastic, sometimes nodular. Diseases of the genital organs and the disorders of the general health dependent thereon, leave disfiguring wrinkles in the face and other traces in the whole structure of the body. Toil, anxiety, and grief also write their horrible marks deeply on the appearance. The mature working-class woman, through sharing in masculine labors, through long-continued muscular exertion, and through neglect of bodily care, frequently assumes in her features, her carriage, her figure, and her whole appearance, a rather masculine type.
The beauty and the youthful freshness of girls belonging to the labouring classes seldom endure for long after the menarche, and in cases in which the environment is one of poverty, they last through a very short part only of the epoch of the menacme. The early appearance of wrinkles in the face, the stiff, angular character of the movements, the ungraceful carriage of the body, all these combine to make a woman of five-and-twenty who groans under the burthen of toil appear at the first glance an elderly woman, and a closer investigation shows what damage has been wrought to the attributes of beauty, how the breasts are flabby and flattened, the belly prominent, the buttocks pendulous, the arms muscular.
In the well-to-do classes, again, at this period of life, when generous diet combines with insufficient exercise, an abundant deposit of adipose tissue may already have occurred, resulting in a great impairment of beauty, the body and limbs being enlarged, the gait and the carriage correspondingly altered for the worse—changes which seem desirable only to those orientals to whom such obesity, such exaggeration of femininity, is sexually stimulating. If, however, this deposit of fat is not excessive, this it is which endows women during these years of fullest development with an imposing appearance and buxom form. In favourable circumstances, beauty of this type may persist to the fortieth year of life and even beyond, and it is of such a character as to justify the proverb that woman’s first sexual epoch is dedicated to love, her second to voluptuousness.
Fig. [50].—The uterus, the left Fallopian tube and the left ovary, in their connection with the broad ligament of the uterus, which has been fully unfolded. Seen from behind. From a virgin, aged nineteen years. (From Toldt: Atlas of Human Anatomy.—Rebman Company, New York.)
“Bountiful nature,” writes Mantegazza, regarding woman at this sexual epoch, “sends to woman an ingenious engineer, who enlarges the hills to mountains and fills up the valleys with a soft alluvium of fat. The commencing wrinkles disappear, being smoothed out under the beneficial influence of this plastic material; the slender, elastic palm-tree stems are converted into majestic columns of Parian marble; quality is replaced by quantity, and if the eye has lost a few provinces, the hand has gained just as many. * * * A certain number of chosen women understand how to preserve for as long as ten years the unstable equilibrium of the period which separates these two ages of life. There are divine beings who with every oscillation of their tresses or rocking of their hips, with every undulation of their bosom, every serpentine movement of their limbs, instil desire. * * * They constitute our most intense delight, and our intensest torment, they make our life a blessing or a curse, they are the uttermost goal of human passion, of human voluptuous desire.”
Fig. [51].—Female internal genital organs in the fully developed state. (From Toldt: Atlas of Human Anatomy.—Rebman Company, New York.)
Among the injuries to beauty effected by pregnancy, one above all evident to the eye is the almost invariably ensuing change in the skin, principally taking the form of a change in pigmentation, with the appearance of spots varying in size and tint, on the face and especially on the lips and the forehead; there is greatly increased pigmentation also of the areola mammæ and the linea alba, and in addition of the labia majora and minora and of the anal region. It is not certain whether this chloasma uterinum is dependent, as Jeamin assumes, on the discontinuance of menstruation, or, as Virchow believes, on changes in the blood and the blood-pressure. Sometimes also, in pregnant women, we observe on the face, chiefly on the nose and the cheeks, dilatations of the small cutaneous vessels, often associated with acne nodules.
A permanent disfigurement is caused by the lineæ (vel striæ) albicantes, white lines or streaks of varying length and resembling scar tissue in appearance on the skin of the abdomen, the adjoining parts of the buttocks and thighs, the lower part of the front of the thorax, and the mammæ. They are not true scars, not being new formations of connective tissue, being on the contrary dependent on solutions of continuity, on relative diminution, that is to say, of the connective tissue layer of the skin. They are formed in consequence of the fact that the connective tissue bundles are not able to keep pace in their superficial enlargement with the necessarily rapid extension of the cutis, hence great meshes appear in the former, situate in the direction of the greatest tension of the skin. (Spietschka and Grünfeld).
Transiently during pregnancy, but in some cases permanently also, the beauty of the lower extremities is apt to be impaired by enlargements of the veins, the formation of varices, and sometimes also by œdema; these conditions depend upon the hindrance to the venous return caused by the pressure of the pregnant uterus. Thick, vermicular, bluish strings or nodular enlargements appear in the course of the great veins, with consequent eczema and ulceration. In pregnant woman, eczema is common in other regions, on the face, the hands, the forearms, and the genitals; also erythema, urticaria, and the pustular eruption known as impetigo herpetiformis.
Parturition and lactation entail further disfigurement of the skin through the production of various lesions, such as cracks and fissures of the skin of the breast, dermatitis due to venous thrombosis in the lower extremities, scarring of the breast after mastitis, etc.
In the description of the sexual life of woman in the epoch of the menacme, we shall consider at some length copulation and conception, the relations of fertility and sterility, the important topic of the use of measures for the prevention of pregnancy, and the interesting subject of the determination of sex; on the other hand, pregnancy, parturition, and the puerperal state, since these subjects are specially treated in the ordinary textbooks on midwifery, we shall discuss only in so far as certain relations between these reproductive processes and the organism as a whole and its functions, appear to us especially worthy of note.