Is it I? A book for every man.

by Horatio Robinson Storer

In former days, or in distant lands, husbands have held for their wives the tenure of life or death; were they disobedient, or their fidelity even questioned, the bowstring or sack of the Bosphorus, or being built aside by masonry while still alive, in countries perhaps nominally Christian, are but a portion of the penalties that were meted them. In what, save in being easier to bear, do these differ from enforced seclusion, as in private lunatic asylums not so very many years ago, or the still more dreadful divorce, where not desired and not deserved, with all its attendant publicity?

In by-gone times, and among heathen, as at present in a remote valley of our own great land, so jealous of the honor of its people, and so lenient towards their crimes, women have been openly held as concubines, to possess an abundance of whom were as worthy as to number one’s children. What variance in this from the secret amours and liaisons of our own time, so easy to indulge in, so difficult to detect, in consequence of the almost universal knowledge of the means of preventing or escaping the natural consequences of illicit sexual indulgence?

In days long past, and in tribes far down in ignorance and superstition, it has been the custom to slaughter new-born infants, to avoid the trouble of their support, or to appease the gods. In Sparta, it was alleged that such destruction of the puny or deformed was justified for the sake of preserving the race in all its pristine beauty and vigor. Is such a deed, at the hands of even a heathen Greek, to be compared for wickedness with the pre-natal murders of the present day, daily in occurrence, fashionable even, and bepraised by professing Christians, repeated over and over again by the same married woman and mother? You will exclaim with horror that it is not! And yet, in a very large proportion of instances, this shocking and atrocious act is advised and abetted, if not compelled, by the husband—by us men. Who enjoys asking now, “Is it I?”

For the woman, enfeebled perhaps by too excessive child-bearing, for which her husband is generally wholly responsible, for few of our wives do not become, sooner or later, virtually apathetic; for the woman, timid, easily alarmed, prone to mental depression or other disturbance, and dreading the yet safe and preferable labor that awaits her, and withal under that strange and mastering thraldom of fashion, there is a certain measure of excuse. For her husband, none.

This is a matter concerning which the public mind is now undergoing a radical change. Slow to set in motion, but every day gaining more rapidly in force, the world’s revival proceeds. In “Why Not?” or “Why should women not commit this crime?” I have sounded almost a trump to awake the dead. Would, indeed, that it might arouse a better life in every man who reads these words: “Of the mother, by consent or by her own hand, imbrued with her infant’s blood; of the more guilty father, who counsels or allows the crime; of the wretches who, by their wholesale murders, far out-Herod Burke and Hare; of the public sentiment which palliates, pardons, and would even praise this, so common, violation of all law, human and divine, of all instinct, all reason, all pity, all mercy, all love, we leave those to speak who can.”[33]

What, then, I repeat, do husbands usually claim? The right to their wives’ persons, to use or abuse at their pleasure; the right to their wives’ happiness, and to endanger or destroy it, as they may choose; the right to their wives’ lives and those of their offspring, and to destroy these also, the latter directly, the former thus indirectly, and at times also, by their physical violence or their persistent though petty cruelties, very directly too.

Formerly men had control, exclusive and entire, of any possessions their wives might bring them. Now, and with us at least, the law has very materially curtailed the husband’s power in this respect, save it be granted him by the wife’s consent. Will the time come, think ye, when husbands can no longer, as they now frequently do, commit the crime of rape upon their unwilling wives, and persuade them or compel them to allow a still more dreadful violence to be wreaked upon the children nestling within them—children fully alive from the very moment of conception, that have already been fully detached from all organic connection with their parent, and only re-attached to her for the purposes of nutriment and growth, and to destroy whom “is a crime of the same nature, both against our Maker and society, as to destroy an infant, a child, or a man”?[34]

I cannot be too emphatic upon these points. It is of no use to say that I am straining them to conclusions that are forced and unwarranted. That these are in accordance with fact must be allowed by every medical man at all familiar with the practice of his profession, and indeed by every layman who will for a moment think of the matter. It is one of the simplest common sense, as well as in unison with the teachings of the purest science, and its results are already showing themselves in the ill health of our women and in the gradual dying out of our native population, just as some of the means for preventing pregnancy are evincing themselves to the practised eye in the dyspepsias, the unsteady step, gray hairs, and premature decrepitude of many of our men.

In pointing out the physical diseases resulting to woman from intentional abortion, I instanced insanity, of which at that time several cases, thus occasioned, had come under my observation. To this, as to some other of my views concerning the causation of insanity in women, many psychologists have been inclined to take exception. One of the most influential asylum superintendents in the country (I refer to Dr. John P. Gray, of the New York State Asylum at Utica), has lately given most emphatic approval of my views. In his Report for the present year, just published, Dr. Gray devotes several pages to this special question, taking occasion to speak very kindly of “Why Not?” and using the following impressive language: “All must admit the corrupting tendency of vice in any of its shades, and especially when in intent or fact it seeks to thwart, by actual violence, the beneficent laws of our being, and turn the purposes of God, in ordering the ‘holy estate of matrimony,’ into the basest species of prostitution. The existence of this horrid, unnatural, secret crime, carried out, often, by the mutual consent and connivance of husbands and wives, is not new. Its terrible prevalence has steadily increased. I have for many years received and treated patients whose insanity was directly traceable to this crime, through its moral and physical effects.” And again: “I need not here discuss at length the disorders consequent on this crime, in any and all of its shades, but I deem it no less than my duty to declare, as already stated, that it is, directly and indirectly, one of the causes of insanity.”[35] This being the case, well might I preface one of my earlier works by the following quotation from Granville’s Treatise on Sudden Death: “Let the legislator and moralist look to it, for as sure as there is in any nation a hidden tampering with infant life, whether frequent or occasional, systematic or accidental, so sure will the chastisement of the Almighty fall on such a nation.”[36]

I pass now to discuss these rights of the husband still further, and to see whether they are unaccompanied, or not, by obligations which should control them.