The sexual life of woman in its physiological, pathological and hygienic aspects

by E. Heinrich Kisch

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.