With the third and final stage, all the symptoms become acute, before dying away completely only to leave the body a mere husk of unrealised and now undesired possibilities. Discontent, unconscious or conscious, together with all kinds of troublesome, though not dangerous, disorders, gradually reduce her body and her spirit, and thus undermine her positiveness. Her temper is irascible; her periods irregular, unreliable and sometimes very painful—the sign that the body is really indignant! Costiveness and leucorrhœa set in chronically. Nobody understands either; nobody cares. The first principles of negativeness begin to creep stealthily into her once positive mind. Her features, hands and arms have lost all their bloom and roundness. With genuine alarm, one day, she suddenly recognizes that she is but a travesty, a caricature, of what she once was; and that Life itself is only a caricature of what it used to be. Now she no longer feels any real physical horror at the thought of spinsterhood, because she is not what she was when spinsterhood would certainly have filled her with horror. If she dislikes the idea of spinsterhood now, it is chiefly owing to her vanity, not to her bodily appetites. She feels that her prestige would be enhanced by the “Mrs.”—that is all! But her body has no share in this vain sentiment.
If she has once been the positive girl I describe, however, she is now filled with an indescribable feeling of burning, aching, consuming detestation of the world she once loved. Hope, trust, yea-saying have all gone. Her thwarted instincts manifest themselves in an obverse character, and she becomes misanthropic, purely negative to Man and to Life, and desiring only to end her existence in an act of revenge on man, society and her more fortunate sisters.
Only the very positive girl makes a hateful spinster, because only she has lost anything precious, only she knows what a cruel snub her sumptuous preparations once received! To have had all these preparations wasted; to have had to look on while, one by one, her charms grew so faint as no longer even to lure the guest for whom such a rich banquet had once been laid; to have been a magnet and to have watched one’s magnetism gradually vanish without having been effective—these experiences are cruel in any case; but their cruelty increases in proportion to the magnitude, wealth and beauty of the original welcome that Nature had organized.
The negative girl, to whom an atonic state of the body, irregular and painful periods, have been an ever-present and familiar condition since her earliest puberty, or the negative girl who, while suffering from none of these disorders, is yet insufficiently vigorous or sound in organic equipment to render the thwarting of her reproductive instinct a state of suffering and bitter disillusionment, may make a perfectly cheerful, engaging, companionable and even thoroughly good-natured old maid.[47]
It is an interesting fact that in France, where positiveness among girls is ever so much more general than in England, the old maid is universally unbearable, and is proverbially known to be so.
(2) But there are other agencies at work in modern society for reducing the positive English girl to negativeness, besides the unfortunate and often inevitable circumstances of an all-too-long wait. For, in England, there is extraordinarily little care taken of the female body. It should never be forgotten in this regard, that although we, as a nation, are lovers of both sport and open-air exercise, we are culpably neglectful of that hygiene which is concerned with the fundamentals of life. Genuine and gentle reverence for the body, particularly for the young female body, is startlingly rare in England. Fundamentals are not faced; they are, if possible, avoided; and frequently owing to a deliberate refusal to recognize the needs and fragility of an equipment that is vital, elaborate and easily disordered, girls are as much as possible handled and treated like boys of their own age. Positive girls, particularly, who are well built and vigorous, whose correlation of bodily parts is as near perfect as it is possible for the organs of modern people to be, have very few difficulties in early puberty. They are regular, they feel little or no inconvenience from the attending phenomena of puberty; but owing to this very freedom from morbid symptoms they are often allowed, thanks to the prevailing lack of reverence for the body, to engage in pastimes and sports—even during their moments of indisposition—which must, and undoubtedly do, ultimately induce a morbid condition if the habit is persisted in. Let me explain:—
To begin with, the very fact that anxious and almost fearful silence and secrecy are made to hang over all the manifestations of puberty in girls, is in itself an inducement for the young female to desire to behave during her moments of indisposition as much as possible like her schoolmates who are not indisposed. When, therefore, in addition to this desire, she feels and is known to feel no very marked discomfort at such moments, there is apparently nothing to prevent her from going a long walk or joining in a game of tennis, net-ball or even hockey with the rest of her friends, at a moment when violent exercise of all kinds ought to be most carefully avoided. In girls’ high schools and later on at college, such breaches of reverence towards the body are not only of constant occurrence, they may be said to be the rule where the positive girl is concerned, unless, of course, her parents have been wise enough to insist specially upon the proper precautions being observed. In the end, however, long as the period of successful resistance may be, the body must suffer from this violence, and the toll paid is then both severe and heavy.
Another very dangerous custom is that of having recreation and games directly after a meal. There is nothing objectionable in sports for girls, provided they are not too violent.[48]—On the contrary, games keep them out in the open air and exercise their bodies. But it is a risky thing, in view of the subsequent cost to the whole body and spirit, to give the alimentary canal in girls the slightest possible excuse for getting out of order; and exercise after a meal, particularly when such exercise is violent, is a potent factor in bringing about indigestion, costiveness and all their concomitant disorders. This notwithstanding, it is not uncommon, in fact it is an almost regular practice for girls in high schools and at college—often with the consent of their parents if these happen to know—to rush out directly after lunch to a game of hockey or tennis, or what not, and to engage in the most violent exercise and movements in the course of their play. This is the most unscrupulous vandalism; for, even if they are not indisposed at the time, the evil effects of such excessive activity directly after a meal are notorious. In the end costiveness must occur, not as a temporary affection, but alas! as a chronic habit; and the custom of correcting this tendency by means of constant purgation only aggravates the trouble.[49] Now constipation is in itself a bad thing. It lowers spirit, it gives rise to nervous trouble, causes auto-intoxication that saps energy and interferes with sound sleep; it also acts as a poison on the red corpuscles of the blood and reduces their number, and thus fosters the development of anæmia. But this is not all; for with constipation there is always serious infection of the lower colon, and a general loss of tone in that organ. The gravity of this condition in women cannot, however, be overrated, because the surrounding and adjacent parts are so vital and so important, that no risk that can possibly imperil their health and vigour ought ever to be run, much less therefore courted and chosen. How long it takes for an infected and atonic colon to affect the neighbouring organs, it is impossible to say; but that the atonic condition can and does spread from the original seat of the trouble to other parts is unquestioned, particularly when anæmia has reduced their resisting power; and the results are always of the worst possible nature. Very quickly, if it is not already present, that worst and most insidious of maladies, leucorrhœa, makes its first appearance, and then a vicious circle is formed which it is extremely difficult to break.
This does not pretend to be a medical work; but the consequences and symptoms of this disease, leucorrhœa, are so far reaching and generally so much ignored, that it seems imperative to speak out quite openly on the subject. All through this book, the relations of the spirit to the body is considered as being so close, so intimate, and the relation of the attitudes of the positiveness and negativeness to the state of the body is recognized as so inevitable and deep-seated, that I should be guilty of a flaw in my argument, of a grave omission in the frank array of my facts, if, particularly at this stage, I were to scout a subject which, however disagreeable and delicate, formed a necessary link in the chain of my reasoning.