Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who are Creating the Future

by Marie Carmichael Stopes

Before I indicate my conclusions, let us briefly consider some of the surrounding circumstances of this problem. As I said in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, the nobler and better men have been carried away by a certain type of woman into thinking that it is man’s share of the difficulties and self-sacrifice of parenthood that he should entirely sacrifice what is spoken of as “his desires.” In my opinion, this attitude involves two profound fallacies. The first fallacy is that the act of sex union is to meet only “his desires”; it is not. Completed union is something infinitely greater: it is a consummation jointly achieved by both the man and his wife. This attitude I make clear in my book, Married Love and in my new Gospel addressed to the Bishops at Lambeth. And I must postulate in this, my present book, the far reaching effects on the bodily, spiritual and mental health of a man and woman concerned in this complex sex union. The truth is that the husband who mutually and considerately unites with his wife when she can accept him is not merely gratifying his own desire, he is enriching her whole system as well as his own through this mutual alchemy.

Before following up the logic of this paragraph, let us turn to the woman and her needs. The drain on her system of providing for another life out of her own tissues, and the substances which pass through her own body, must be very severe unless she is amply provided with all the subtle chemical compounds which are demanded of her. Now there is much evidence that in unmarried women, and in young wives who are debarred from sex union altogether, something approaching a subtle form of starvation occurs; conversely that women absorb from the seminal fluid of the man some substance, “hormone,” “vitamine” or stimulant which affects their internal economy in such a way as to benefit and nourish their whole systems. That semen is a stimulant to a woman was long ago recognized as probable, and is now the opinion of several leading doctors. Reference to this will be found in Havelock Ellis, vol. 5, 1912. See also the paper by Toff in the Centralblatt Gynakologie, April, 1903. Incidentally the converse is true, and the man who conducts himself properly during the sex union, and remains for long in contact with his wife after the ejaculation is completed, also benefits through actual absorption from his wife. For this I have the testimony of a number of men.

If, therefore, the woman who is becoming a mother, and who is supporting a second life, feels the need of union with her husband it is, I maintain, an indication that her nature is calling out for something not only legitimate but positively beneficial and required, and that it should be not only a man’s privilege, but his delight, to unite with his wife at such a time and under such circumstances.

The maintenance of the right balance of the internal secretions of the various glands which re-act on sex activity is important to women at all times, and particularly during the time when a woman is becoming a mother. One of the results of the growth of the child is the increased activity of the thyroid gland in the neck, which considerably increases in size.

A general account of the relation of such glands to a woman’s mental and physical balance is found in Blair Bell’s book (The Sex Complex, 1916), but he does not deal with the special aspect of a woman’s requirements which forms the subject of this chapter.

There is, even with the type of woman who does feel the need of, and ardently desires some sex unions with her husband during the long months, almost always a space of time, perhaps as much as two or three months consecutively, when she will have no such desires at all and there are also times of special liability to lose the child through premature birth, when unions should be avoided. Unexpected abortions most usually take place at the dates around the time which would have been a monthly period.

When I consider the evidence which I have before me, which is almost exclusively from the very best type of women, and when I observe that the most generally perfected, and finest women of my acquaintance, and they in particular, desire occasional moderate intercourse during pregnancy, I feel that one has a guide to what is best for the race. In these women and the conduct which their needs inspire, we have an indication of the truest and highest standard of all. The deviations of conduct may at last return from both the grossness of abuse and the reaction from it, and settle in the right and middle path. After the excessively virtuous, and perhaps undersexed type of woman, in contrast to the totally base attitude of the earlier and coarser type of man, has made the thoughtful speed from baseness to an ascetic absence of unions, we should be led back by these well developed and well balanced and noble minded women to the right and middle way. In this the spontaneous impulse of the responsible mother will be the guide for her husband and will benefit all three concerned.

For, let us realize what a profound mystical symbol is enacted when the union is not that of a single man and woman, but of that holy trinity the father, the mother and the unborn child. Only during these brief sacred months can the three be united in such exquisite intimacy, and during all these months when the child is forming, it is only in the few infrequent embraces of subdued passion that the husband and father-to-be can come truly close to his child, that he can, through additions to her system from his own, assist the mother in her otherwise solitary task of endowing it with everything its growth demands.

Every woman who is bearing a child by a man whom she loves deeply, longs intensely that its father should influence it as much as it is possible for him to do: in this way and in this way alone can he give it of the actual substance of his body.