With reduced values of that Reproductive function it is modesty's province to defend, the attribute of modesty declines.
The girls and women of old Sparta, as ignorant of biology as women are to-day, made a cult of athletics—good and zealous, but mistaken patriots!—for the express purpose of mothering a fine, athletic race. These high and praiseworthy aims failed signally. For Sparta, with all her zeal of racial improvement (so drastic in its methods that she killed her weakly girl-infants) fell upon decline and degeneracy. Noble civilisation that she had been, she died in decadent corruption.
And showing the relation between athletic pursuits and extinction of womanly qualities, the Spartan cult of Maleness led to such decay of modesty that it became the custom for women to run with the men in The Games, naked as they. A custom that sprang less from actual immodesty than from lapse of that normal Sex-specialisation, whence arises the normal sex-consciousness which engenders wholesome reserve between the sexes. Modern developments of a similar extinction of womanly modesty are seen in the conduct of latter-day girls and women in public parks and elsewhere; in the unseemly familiarities of mixed bathing; in the decadent, unduly-familiar or frankly indecent dances, and the frankly indecent modes of dress just now in vogue. As too in that so-called "candour" which permits women of culture to talk openly of the most intimate physiological functions, and, without sense of shame, to discuss across the dinner-table prurient scandals and other unsavoury topics.
The mystery of the creative powers of Life occulted in her has ever invested woman, for man, with glamour and reverence, enhancing a thousandfold her charm and appeal to his chivalry and tenderness. In stripping herself of womanly reserve and dignity, alike in demeanour and dress, she shatters her mystery for him and forfeits her supremest claim upon his manhood; while robbing him of his fairest illusions and most inspiring incentives.
III
In cases of sex-transformation in the lower creatures, the lapse to a masculine type is found to be accompanied by atrophy of reproductive glands. As recorded in a previous chapter, investigations by Rörig show that when the ovaries of female deer atrophy from any cause, male antlers develop.
Mannish sex-characteristics in women are as abnormal and as unnatural, and arise from a similar cause as do male antlers in female deer.
With the wane of parental power, normal to middle-age, there occurs a like—but in such case a natural—atrophy of glands. And this it is that causes some women to acquire masculine traits at this epoch.
Degrees, greater or less, of such a decline (natural to middle-aged women) are being artificially, and prematurely, induced in our girls and young women. Some of them become actually sterilised, and are wholly incapable of reproduction. The greater number are only partially sterilised. They are capable still of being mothers. But the function, in place of being the crown and the fulfilment of their natures, is a disability; is more or less of a morbid process, indeed. And their offspring are more or less deteriorate. Not a few, after marriage—called upon to fulfil functions the resources whereof have been sapped by other and abnormal activities—become invalids; a number require surgical treatment.
Non-development, similar atrophy, or other deterioration of the mammary glands precludes the vast majority of our young mothers from nourishing their babes—a deplorable injury to these as well as to the mothers themselves; physical and psychical function being closely and subtly allied.