Hygiene During the Menacme.
During the sexual epoch of the menacme a woman’s principal hygienic need is marriage completely satisfactory alike to body and to mind. It cannot be denied that sufficient sexual gratification, regular, of course, and free from all excess, such as is usually experienced in married life, is very advantageous to the health of a woman who has attained sexual maturity—even though we admit that the drawbacks of sexual abstinence, regarded as a cause of disease of the female genital organs and the nervous system have been as a rule greatly exaggerated.
The inability to marry always makes a deep impression on the mental life of woman, and in many cases also gives rise to burning desire and tormenting yearning of an erotic nature. The unmarried miss life’s true goal and fail to enjoy the natural exercise of their functional capacities; alike in the cultured lady and in the poor working woman who has failed to marry, the thoughts and feelings return again and again to her own condition in a self-tormenting manner.
The physical and mental disadvantages entailed by sexual gratification when obtained by an unmarried woman, one who, according to modern phraseology, “wishes to secure her natural share of the joys of love,” and who regards voluntary chastity as “a sacrifice to meaningless prejudices”—need not be more particularly described.
Free love, moreover, is the most important disseminator of gonorrhœal infection. “In any future commonwealth,” says Runge, “in which marriage is abandoned in favour of the general practice of free love, the human race will be overwhelmed by gonococci in a manner now hardly conceivable, and the reproductive capacity in both sexes will be diminished by the results of gonorrhœa to a very serious extent.”
Frequently enough, also, free love leads to prostitution, which at the present day is so widely prevalent. Various reasons have been suggested to account for the increase of prostitution. Among these are: The growth of modern industry, with the consequent aggregation of the population in large towns; the decline in the marriage rate; the postponement of marriage; universal military service; the freer mutual companionship of the sexes; and many others. At any rate, the fact would appear to be established, that in the case of woman the determining cause of prostitution is hunger rather than the sexual impulse. The worst paid classes of workwomen are shown by official statistics to furnish the largest number of recruits to the ranks of prostitutes; and it is during times of deficient employment that the number of women practicing occasional prostitution increases. Thus, material need is the most important of the causes of prostitution.
This remains true even though the doctrine of Lombroso and Tarnowsky should find fuller justification, the doctrine that the practice of prostitution by women is the natural expression of a congenital morbid predisposition, “which impels them, in defiance of their direct advantage, of reason, and of all counter-advice, to adopt this accursed mode of life.” Prostitution, in this view, is to be regarded as the inevitable outcome of congenital moral insanity. This is certainly true of a small proportion of prostitutes, but is as certainly false of the great majority, in whom unfavorable, difficult conditions of life form the determining cause. A certain inherited or acquired mental disposition may, indeed, be assumed to exist in these cases also—an unstable moral equilibrium, an insufficient development of the force of the will and of the power of resistance.
The hygienic requirement of married life for woman during the menacme is undoubtedly sometimes hard to fulfil in our day, when the more elaborate and expensive standard of life has increased the difficulty of supporting a family; but from the medical point of view it is necessary to insist forcibly on this categorical imperative, in opposition to the view advanced by the modern women’s rights’ party, that “love is moral also in the absence of legal marriage” (Ellen Key); in opposition to the yet more extreme opinion of George Sand and of Almquist, who, regardless of consequences, declare marriage to be immoral; and, finally, in opposition to the advocates of “free love,” who wish woman to be as free as man in sexual relations.
Much as we may wish that man and wife should be in complete harmony in marriage, and that they should feel themselves to be firmly united alike by mutual love and by a reciprocal sense of duty, none the less we must consider the modern maiden ripe for marriage as unjustified in demanding, before undertaking marriage, “perfect love as typifying the inner yearning of two beings to become one;” and we must regard the latter-day woman as extravagant in insisting that the man shall enter upon marriage in a condition as virgin as that of his contemplated wife. “Perfect love” is as rare and as little to be expected as perfect beauty; and the sexual life of man differs entirely in nature and in the course of its development from the sexual activity of women.
Doubtless they spring deep from the soul of woman, the demands expressed by the writer of the book “Vera” and by her numerous imitators, the apostles of “Veraism,”—the demands of the maiden entering upon marriage that her husband shall be as chaste and sexually as unspotted as herself. Difficult of fulfilment as they are, if fulfilment is even possible, these demands must none the less be regarded as characteristic of the sexual life of modern womanhood. “Is man’s sexual honor,” exclaims Vera, “then altogether different from that of woman? Is not the alleged necessity for sexual gratification in youth either a well-organized fraud or an enormous error on the part of physicians? Is it possible that chastity can entail diseases as terrible, as destructive to life and happiness as those that result from unchastity? And is it not a crying sin, even if some of these fears are justified, to ruin both mentally and physically the whole race of women? * * * Man demands from the girl of his choice, not chastity alone, but an absolutely unblemished character. And rightly so. But the wife must share her husband with street-walkers? She must bear the pangs of maternity, while fortified by the terrible knowledge that the father of her children has wasted his youthful virility in purchased embraces, that he has not recoiled from impurity, that he has exposed himself to the risk of infection with the most horrible diseases, that he has squandered his virginity in the most bestial sensuality? * * * We girls must also be granted the right to demand from the man of our choice the same purity, the same unspottedness by sensuality, that he so rigorously demands from ourselves! We must no longer content ourselves with the remnants that are left for us by others! We must no longer be satisfied with man’s moral inferiority! Then there will be more happiness, more love, more health and joy of life!”