What a Young Wife Ought to Know

by Emma F. Angell Drake

Fix also the fact that the marriage relation is not one of license, but of liberty—liberty for both equally. Not liberty for one, and the grossest bondage for the other. Nowhere does the wife’s opinion deserve greater respect and tolerance than here. Nowhere should her negative be so willingly accepted.

There is a higher plane of loving and living than the sexual nature furnishes. This has, we doubt not, been proven to most married people during those weeks and months when continence has been necessary. Then why should this overmaster other and higher considerations?

That many marriages are little better than licensed prostitution, seems a hard thing to say; but when the lower nature is petted and indulged at the expense of the higher, it is a just thing to say, however harsh it may seem. In such cases the higher nature becomes more and more dwarfed, the animal nature more and more dominant. Let the husband learn the sweetness of conquest, in the love he bears his wife, in the tender consideration for her comfort and wishes.

There is a vast amount of vital force used in the production and expenditure of the seminal fluid. Wasted as the incontinence of so many lives allows it to be, and prostituted to the simple gratification of fleshly desire, it weakens and depraves. Conserved as legitimate control demands it to be, it adds so much, and more to the mental and moral force of the man, because it lifts him to a higher plane of being, and gives to the mental and moral the vital force otherwise wasted.

Rightly conceived and lived, the marriage relation rounds out and completes character as nothing else can. It gives ample room for the cultivation of all the gifts and graces, it discourages selfishness, it mellows and softens and beautifies the individual, and gives a broader outlook on life. Wrongly conceived and lived, its results are the opposite. It narrows the life and takes all the sweetness out of it. And the products of loveless marriages, what of them? How can the children of such parents be other than disinherited from birth? Out of their lives has gone the sweetness and tender loveliness that comes of true mating, true living.

The world is full of dwarfed minds and bodies, dwarfed by their loveless and unwilling conception; paranoiacs, cranks, feeble-minded, idiotic, epileptic, diseased children, for whom their parents are in great measure responsible. And this state of things will obtain just as long as marriage is made a marketable thing, and not the heart union of two lives.

I am well aware that many writers do not agree with me in these stronger sentiments, but studying the question in the light of creative purpose I feel certain the arguments in favor of unbridled license in these things cannot be justified.

Further, there are times when by common consent there should be no amorous approaches made to the wife, and when none should be invited. Study the question as I will, I can see no law or reason which justifies the husband in approaching the wife for the purpose of sexual gratification, at any time during pregnancy. It cannot but be a drain upon the strength of the wife, and certainly can have no wholesome influence upon the unborn child, and assuredly not upon the love and respect which the wife feels for the husband.

I cannot forbear quoting an “illustrative case” entire, from Dr. Holbrook’s book entitled, Stirpiculture: “How great is the influence on unborn offspring of the mother’s mental condition, as well as the effect over them of pleasant surroundings, is shown by the following case. A young girl attracted attention by her beauty and by the superiority of the type she exhibited over that of either of her parents, and on her mother being spoken to on the subject she remarked: ‘In my early married life my husband and I learned how to live in holy relations, after God’s ordinance. My husband lovingly consented to let me live apart from him during the time I carried this little daughter under my heart, and also while I was nursing her. These were the happiest days of my life. Every day before my child was born, I could have hugged myself with delight at the prospect of becoming a mother. My husband and I were never so tenderly, so harmoniously, or so happily related to each other, and I never loved him more deeply than during those blessed months. I was surrounded by all beautiful things, and one picture of a lovely face was especially in my thought. My daughter looks more like that picture than she does like either of us. From the time she was born she was like an exquisite rosebud—the flower of pure, sanctified, happy love. She never cried at night, was never fretful or nervous, but was all smiles and winning baby ways, filling our hearts and home with perpetual gladness. To this day, and she is now fourteen years old, I have never had the slightest difficulty in bringing her up. She turns naturally to the right, and I never knew her to be cross or impatient or hard to manage. She has given me only comfort; and I realize from an experience of just the opposite nature that the reason of all this is because my little girl had her birthright.’”

The future experience of this lady was however of a very different nature. She added: “A few years later I was again about to become a mother, but with what different feelings! My husband had become contaminated with the popular idea that even more frequent relations were permissible during pregnancy. I was powerless against this wicked sophistry, and was obliged to yield to his constant desires. But how I suffered and cried; how wretched I was; how nervous and almost despairing. Worst of all, I felt my love and trusting faith turning to dread and repulsion.