Is it I? A book for every man.

by Horatio Robinson Storer

“Another safeguard is to be found in the cultivation of a just perception of the true relation of the sexes. Let the young man cherish a high estimate of, and a reverence for, the character of the true and pure woman, and a corresponding detestation and horror of her who abuses and prostitutes the privileges of her sex. Such a view of this relation as has been inculcated, if it be fully appreciated and heartily received, will lead him to regard a legitimate and permanent union with one of the other sex as the most desirable object in life, and will fill him with a loathing for any other than such a union. The young man who looks forward with honorable feelings to such a connection with a congenial and virtuous woman, will find in the hopes and prospects which it opens to him in life the surest defence against the temptations which continually assail him.”[40]

Reasoning from the above, I endeavored to show that while very early marriages were probably contracted at the expense of the vigor of their offspring, it was yet well to begin to found one’s home while young, and pointed out that a house was never a home till it contained one’s children. The rights of the husband, alleged and actual, were then discussed; and it was proved to a demonstration that so far from being absolute, these rights are all of them reciprocal with duties, and that in their assertion and realization reason rather than mere instinct must govern us. From this point, glancing at its relations to divorce, as affording arguments and counter arguments, I have come to the recapitulation, which, rightly weighed, of itself affords one of the strongest of pleas for woman.

She pleads for what? For undue power in public life, for undue control in domestic affairs, for privileges not justly her own? The true wife desires none of these. Suffering through the centuries, and the varying phases of social civilization, she has been consecutively man’s slave, his idol for the moment, his toy. If recognized at all as in equality of rights, it has been in the right to suffer, and lest by nature she should not possess enough of this, woes unnecessary, unmentionable, innumerable, have been heaped upon her. Every one knows this, whether man or woman, and if woman’s voice has till now been nearly silent, she will none the less value these words of grateful appreciation, of sympathy, and of appeal to my fellows. We owe kindness to her for her kindness to us; we owe it, that we may still possess her to comfort and to cheer us; we owe it, for the sake of our children, that they may be healthy and well cared for, that indeed they may be born. The terrible fashion now so prevalent, of slaughtering the innocents while still in nature’s lap, is, in great measure, attributable to our own apathy, our own neglect, our own teachings, our own cruelty, and it behooves every one of us to make such amends as he best can. By his own life and his own example every man can show his detestation of that depravity of spirit which would turn a woman’s purity into an offence, and would nail to the block of sensuality and licentiousness the wings of angels,—so much chaster are women than ourselves. Woe unto those of us by whom such offences come.

As very pertinent to this especial point, I shall here present portions of a private letter, written to me by a lady of great intellectual and moral worth, well known indeed throughout the country.[41] Her remarks are of a kind to rivet attention, plain spoken and yet delicate as they are. “I have just laid down,” she says, “your ‘Book for Every Woman,’ and I want to thank you with all my heart for having written it. I was very slow to be convinced that any woman of decent character would consciously perpetrate an abortion; still slower to see how any woman calling herself pure minded could so degrade the sanctities of marriage as to make steady and persistent attempts to prevent impregnation,—and yet I had for many years felt sure that a great many so-called ‘female diseases’ were incited and developed by the luxurious and indolent habits of our women, which permit them, when neither cultivated nor philanthropic, to become conscious of every phase of gestative action or sexual excitement. To live straight on is the only wholesome way to live, and I could see that women were not doing this, but watching themselves in a morbid fashion sure to make mischief.

“When my friend, Dr. E. H. C., had opened my eyes to the actual fact, I felt so disgusted that I could have prayed to die. Since I could not do that, I did not hesitate to speak with unction to the large class of women who privately appealed to me, and to whose plain language I had not before known how to return any adequate answer.

“Will you believe me, when I say that I usually find it easier to induce the victim of seduction to take the consequences of her weakness than to persuade the fashionable woman to refrain from crime? The nether millstone is not so hard as the heart of a worldly woman. You will hardly concede to me the right to speak to you upon the matter in a physiological way, but will you overlook the seeming want of modesty which permits me to say that there is one argument which has weight with this class of women that has not been appealed to? From the moment that I understood the frequency of the attempts made to prevent impregnation and induce abortion, I felt that I had a key to the loss of beauty, of expression, and the sweet maternal charm, which every one who thinks must miss in this generation of women.

“You speak feelingly of the large families which used to make the homestead charming and attractive, but you say nothing of that element of motherliness, which I have missed for years, and especially of that genial, loving, thoughtful grandmother who used to be the beneficent fairy of childhood.

“I despised myself for it, but I did look in women’s faces to see what marks their lives had left, and I tell you that it is a simple fact, that women who habitually prevent impregnation grow cold, debased, unlovely in their expression, and that those who resort to abortion become sharp, irritable, and ungenial, everything, in short, that we mean by unmotherly.

“Now we may predict disease and death to these fashionable women forever in vain. They will not believe; they are sure they shall escape whoever else is lost; but if you tell them that they are destroying all sweetness, grace, and charm, and that this innermost secret of their lives is written plain on lip and brow for him who runs to read, the mirror itself will bear witness to them. And if to their startled consciousness you go on to urge the loveliness which wraps that woman round who gives herself gracefully to this, the highest function of her life, not merely loving him who gives her children to her, but loving them so much that she would rather live on the simplest food, and wear the plainest dress, draped and crowned with this maternal honor, than have all luxury and all power, about an unlovely and lonely way,—I think one often may, through woman’s very weakness, appeal to and touch the most sacred impulses of her nature.

“But the book needs a counterpart addressed to men. Till they are willing to spend as freely for wife and children as for the mistress, hidden but a few doors off, women will hardly be free agents in this matter. No woman dreads her travail, as she dreads the loss of what she calls, in her unhappy ignorance and blindness, her husband’s love. O, that we could restore the happy simplicity of thirty years ago, when there were homes where we now have houses, mothers and housekeepers in the place of lady patronesses, fathers and husbands instead of loungers at the club! But the world moves onward, never backward, and you must ring the bugle call again and again, till it brings conscience and harmony into the irregular and ‘purposeless’ march.”