There is little doubt that menstruation, as it occurs to-day in the vast majority of cases, is somehow pathological and out of the order of nature. In animals the periodic loss is so small as to be scarcely noticeable, and among primitive races of mankind it is as a rule markedly less than among the higher and later races. We may therefore suppose that its present excess is attributable to certain conditions of life which have prevailed for a number of centuries, and which have continuously acted to bring about a feverish disposition of the sexual apparatus, and an hereditary tendency to recurrent manifestations of a diseased character. Among conditions of life which in all probability would act in this way may be counted (1) the indoor life and occupations of women, leading to degeneration of the neuro-muscular system, weakness, and inflammability; (2) the heightening of the sex-passion in both men and women with the increase of luxury and artificialism in life; (3) the subjection of the woman to the unrestrained use and even abuse of the man, which inevitably took place as soon as she—with the changes in the old tribal life—became his chattel and slave; and which has continued practically ever since. These three causes acting together over so long a period may well seem sufficient to have induced a morbid and excessive habit in the female organism; and if so we may hope that with their removal the excess itself and a vast amount of concomitant human misery and waste of life-power will disappear.
PAGE [62].—“Natural Desires.”
“Although I agree with Malthus as to the value of virtuous abstinence, the sad conviction is forced upon me as a physician that the chaste morality of women—which though it is certainly a high virtue in our modern States is none the less a crime against nature—not unfrequently revenges itself in the cruellest forms of disease.”—Dr. Hegerisch, translator of Malthus.
PAGE [64].—“They Must Learn to Fight.”
“Women have as little hope from men as workmen from the middle classes.”—Bebel, “Woman,” p. 72.
PAGE [66].—Sexual Selection Exercised by the Female.
“Hunger—that is to say, what we call economic causes—has, because it is the more widespread and constant, though not necessarily the more imperious instinct, produced nearly all the great zoological revolutions. * * * Yet love has, in the form of sexual selection, even before we reach the vertebrates, moulded races to the ideal of the female; and reproduction is always the chief end of nutrition which hunger waits on, the supreme aim of life everywhere.”—“Evolution in Sex,” p. 12.
PAGE [72].—“The Features of a Grander Type.”
“Towards the Future I look and see a greater race to come—of beautiful women, athletic, free, able in mind and logic, great in love and in maternal instincts, unashamed of their bodies and of the sexual parts of them, calm in nerve, and with a chronic recognition of Spiritual qualities—a race of men, gentle, strong, courageous, continent, affectionate, unselfish, large in body and mind, full of pluck and brawn, able to suffer, clean and honest in their animal necessities, self-confident, with no king or overseer.”—Miriam Wheeler Nicol.