Experienced physicians maintain that the larger part of married women, in the cities especially, are in a more or less abnormal condition. According to the degree of the evil and the character of the couple, such unions can not choose but be unhappy, and, they give the husband the right, in public opinion, to allow himself freedoms outside of the marriage bed, the knowledge of which throws the wife into the most wretched of moods. Furthermore the, at times, very different sexual demands of one party or the other give occasion to serious friction, without the so much wished-for separation being possible. A great variety of considerations render that, in most cases, out of all question.
Under this head the fact may not be suppressed that a considerable number of husbands are themselves responsible for certain serious physical ailments of their wives, ailments that these are not infrequently smitten with in marriage. As consequences of the excesses indulged in during bachelorship, a considerable number of men suffer of chronic sexual diseases, which, seeing these cause them no serious inconvenience, are taken lightly. Nevertheless, through sexual intercourse with the wife, these diseases bring upon her disagreeable, even fatal troubles of the womb, that set in, soon after marriage, and often develop to the point of rendering her unable to conceive or to give birth. The wretched woman usually has no idea of the cause of the sickness, that depresses her spirits, embitters her life, and uproots the purpose of marriage. She blames herself, and accepts blame for a condition, that the other party is alone responsible for. Thus many a blooming wife falls, barely married, a prey to chronic malady, unaccountable to either herself or her family.
"As recent investigations have proved, this circumstance—that, as a result of gonorrhea, the male sperm no longer contains any seed-cells, and the man is, consequently, incapacitated for life from begetting children—is a comparatively frequent cause of matrimonial barrenness, in contradiction to the old and convenient tradition of the lords of creation, who are ever ready to shift to the shoulder of the wife the responsibility for the absence of the blessing of children."[91]
Accordingly, a large number of causes are operative in preventing modern married life, in the large majority of instances, from being that which it should be:—a union of two beings of opposite sexes, who, out of mutual love and esteem, wish to belong to each other, and, in the striking sentence of Kant, mean, jointly, to constitute the complete human being. It is, therefore, a suggestion of doubtful value—made even by learned folks, who imagine thereby to dispose of woman's endeavors after emancipation—that she look to domestic duties, to marriage,—to marriage, that our economic conditions are ever turning into a viler caricature, and that answers its purpose ever less!
The advice to woman that she seek her salvation in marriage, this being her real calling,—an advice that is thoughtlessly applauded by the majority of men—sounds like the merest mockery, when both the advisers and their claqueurs do the opposite. Schopenhauer, the philosopher, has of woman only the conception of the philistine. He says: "Woman is not meant for much work. Her characteristicon is not action but suffering. She pays the debt of life with the pains of travail, anxiety for the child, subjection to man. The strongest utterances of life and sentiment are denied her. Her life is meant to be quieter and less important than man's. Woman is destined for nurse and educator of infancy, being herself infant-like, and an infant for life, a sort of intermediate stage between the child and the man, who is the real being.... Girls should be trained for domesticity and subjection.... Women are the most thorough-paced and incurable Philistines."
In the same spirit as Schopenhauer, who, of course, is greatly quoted, is cast Lombroso and Ferrerro's work, "Woman as a Criminal and a Prostitute." We know no scientific work of equal size—it contains 590 pages—with such a dearth of valid evidence on the theme therein treated. The statistical matter, from which the bold conclusions are drawn, is mostly meager. Often a dozen instances suffice the joint authors to draw the weightiest deductions. The matter that may be considered the most valuable in the work is, typically enough, furnished by a woman,—Dr. Tarnowskaja. The influence of social conditions, of cultural development, is left almost wholly on one side. Everything is judged exclusively from the physiologico-psychologic view-point, while a large quantity of ethnographic items of information on various peoples is woven into the argument, without submitting these items to closer scrutiny. According to the authors, just as with Schopenhauer, woman is a grown child, a liar par excellence, weak of judgment, fickle in love, incapable of any deed truly heroic. They claim the inferiority of woman to man is manifest from a large number of bodily differences. "Love, with woman, is as a rule nothing but a secondary feature of maternity,—all the feelings of attachment that bind woman to man arise, not from sexual impulses, but from the instincts of subjection and resignation, acquired through habits of conformancy." How these "instincts" were acquired and "conformed" themselves, the joint authors fail to inquire into. They would then have had to inquire into the social position of woman in the course of thousands of years, and would have been compelled to find that it is that that made her what she now is. It is true, the joint authors describe partly the enslaved and dependent position of woman among the several peoples and under the several periods of civilization; but as Darwinians, with blinkers to their eyes, they draw all that from physiologic and psychologic, not from social and economic reasons, which affected in strongest manner the physiologic and psychologic development of woman.
The joint authors also touch upon the vanity of woman, and set up the opinion that, among the peoples who stand on a lower stage of civilization, man is the vain sex, as is noticeable to-day in the New Hebrides and Madagascar, among the peoples of the Orinoco, and on many islands of the Polynesian archipelago, as also among a number of African peoples of the South Sea. With peoples standing on a higher plane, however, woman is the vain sex. But why and wherefor? To us the answer seems plain. Among the peoples of a lower civilization, mother-right conditions prevail generally, or have not yet been long overcome. The role that woman there plays raises her above the necessity of seeking for the man, the man seeks her, and to this end, ornaments himself and grows vain. With the people of a higher grade, especially with all the nations of civilization, excepting here and there, not the man seeks the woman, but the woman him. It happens rarely that a woman openly takes the initiative, and offers herself to the man; so-called propriety forbids that. In point of fact, however, the offering is done by the manner of her appearance; by means of the beauty of dress and luxury, that she displays; by the manner in which she ornaments herself, and presents herself, and coquets in society. The excess of women, together with the social necessity of looking upon matrimony as an institute for support, or as an institution through which alone she can satisfy her sexual impulse and gain a standing in society, forces such conduct upon her. Here also, we notice again, it is purely economic and social causes that call forth, one time with man, another with woman, a quality that, until now, it was customary to look upon as wholly independent of social and economic causes. Hence the conclusion is justified, that so soon as society shall arrive at social conditions, under which all dependence of one sex upon another shall have ceased, and both are equally free, ridiculous vanity and the folly of fashion will vanish, just as so many other vices that we consider to-day uneradicable, as supposedly inherent in man. Schopenhauer, as a philosopher, judges woman as one-sidedly as most of our anthropologists and physicians, who see in her only the sexual, never the social, being. Schopenhauer was never married. He, accordingly, has not, on his part, contributed towards having one more woman pay the "debt of life" that he debits woman with. And this brings us to the other side of the medal, which is far from being the handsomer.
Many women do not marry, simply because they cannot. Everybody knows that usage forbids woman to offer herself. She must allow herself to be wooed, i. e., chosen. She herself may not woo. Is there no wooer to be had, then she enters the large army of those poor beings who have missed the purpose of life, and, in view of the lack of safe material foundation, generally fall a prey to want and misery, and but too often to ridicule also. But few know what the discrepancy in numbers between the two sexes is due to; many are ready with the hasty answer: "There are too many girls born." Those who make the claim are wrongly informed, as will be shown. Others, again, who admit the unnaturalness of celibacy, conclude from the fact that women are more numerous than men in most countries of civilization, that polygamy should be allowed. But not only does polygamy do violence to our customs, it, moreover, degrades woman, a circumstance that, of course, does not restrain Schopenhauer, with his underestimation of and contempt for women, from declaring: "For the female sex, as a whole, polygamy is a benefit."
Many men do not marry because they think they cannot support a wife, and the children that may come, according to their station. To support two wives is, however, possible to a small minority only, and among these are many who now have two or more wives,—one legitimate and several illegitimate. These few, privileged by wealth, are not held back by anything from doing what they please. Even in the Orient, where polygamy exists for thousands of years by law and custom, comparatively few men have more than one wife. People talk of the demoralizing influence of Turkish harem life; but the fact is overlooked that this harem life is possible only to an insignificant fraction of the men, and then only in the ruling class, while the majority of the men live in monogamy. In the city of Algiers, there were, at the close of the sixties, out of 18,282 marriages, not less than 17,319 with one wife only; 888 were with two; and only 75 with more than two. Constantinople, the capital of the Turkish Empire, would show no materially different result. Among the country population in the Orient, the proportion is still more pronouncedly in favor of single marriages. In the Orient, exactly as with us, the most important factor in the calculation are the material conditions, and these compel most men to limit themselves to but one wife. If, on the other hand, material conditions were equally favorable to all men, polygamy would still not be practicable,—for want of women. The almost equal number of the two sexes, prevalent under normal conditions, points everywhere to monogamy.
As proof of these statements, we cite the following tables, that Buecher published in an essay.[92]