CHAPTER XII
The Union of Three
“The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.”
In the early days of our modern civilization, that is to say within the last couple of hundred years, the treatment of women in Western Europe sank to a terribly low ebb. Although the last few years have done much to restore woman to some of her ancient rights and privileges, there are still among us a distressing proportion of ignorant, coarse and consequently ruthless men who are not debarred from becoming husbands. Such men have been in the past in the habit of “using their wives” regardless of the desires or even the actual health requirements of the unfortunate women who are tied to them, and such men have made a practice of continuing to indulge in sex union even through the later stages of pregnancy. I have heard from midwives, to my amazed horror, that some such depraved men (not bestial, for no beast behaves in such a way) have even used their wives while they are still in bed after child birth. With such I have in this volume no concern beyond the mention that they are loathsome.
Their existence, however, has had an effect on a better type and has given rise to reaction on the part of men infinitely their superiors. Women who have seen their sister women thus outraged have had the support of men of sensitive conscience and consideration when they have claimed that the mother who is carrying and nursing her child is sacred, and must not be approached by her husband at all during the whole of the child’s coming and nursing period. It has, therefore, come about that a large number of our best and most high-minded women (supported by correspondingly high-minded men, anxious to do the best that is within their power for their wives and children) hold the view that no sex union after the third month, or perhaps that no sex union at all is allowable during pregnancy.
Now this is one more matter which has not begun to receive the consideration which it deserves. When I wrote Married Love I felt that I was not entitled to decide on this subject, and I tried to hold the balance between the various opinions, and drew attention to the fact that the prospective mother of the lower creatures is always set apart. This was apparently misinterpreted by some of my readers as being a personal expression of opinion, and women wrote or spoke to me about the subject saying they were sure I was right because their husbands held the same opinion as I did, BUT the women themselves were ashamed, almost humiliated, to confess that during the carrying of their child they most ardently desired unions.
To these, as individuals, I pointed out that I was very far from expressing a definite opinion in my book on this point, and that my actual opinion indeed inclined towards thinking that restricted unions should be advantageous. In a later edition (the 7th) of my book, I enlarged on what I had to say on this subject, concluding: “There is little doubt that in this particular, even more than in so many others, the health, needs, and mental condition of women who are bearing children vary profoundly.”
Through evidences from very various types of women in the last year or two, I have now accumulated facts in sufficient numbers to begin to see something approaching a possible generalization on this subject.
One of the most striking things I noticed concerning the evidences I received was that the women who confessed to a desire for sex union while they were carrying a child were, almost without exception, the best type. A hasty generalization would have predicted that those very women with their pure attitude, their high degree of culture, their intellectual attainments, and their gracious self-restraint in outer life were just exactly those women who would maintain a fierce chastity during the nine months. These quite remarkable corresponding experiences of similarly superior women forced the matter vividly upon my attention, and I am now prepared to make a tentative generalization, coupled with the generalization to be found in Chapter [XV].
The attitude of one of the women who confessed her intimate feelings to me is typical of those of this type, and is illuminating. She is a woman of unusually gifted brain, well endowed physically and a normally healthy mother in every respect; she is noted for a peculiar beauty and sweetness of disposition, and an unusually high degree of sensitive appreciation of beauty and goodness. In conversation she said to me: “You know I feel so ashamed and degraded by myself, but just at the time when I felt I ought to be sacred from these things, I more ardently desired my husband than I had done throughout all my married life of fifteen years.” She then told me that her husband who had been truly devoted to her all his life was particularly considerate and thoughtful for her during her time of expectant motherhood, and that when she tentatively hinted at her wish for union with him he refused tenderly on the grounds that the higher standard for men was to share, however difficult it was, in the nine months of complete abstinence. He said that, for the sake of the child and herself, he must refuse. Her desire, however, again recurred, much to her own shame and mortification, because she felt that what her husband said really represented the highest accepted standard of pre-natal conduct. Quite a number of rather similar and also exceptionally endowed women have confessed to me in almost the same terms the same feeling.