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

by Marie Carmichael Stopes

I have observed many girls, who were in every true sense of the word girls (that is unconscious of personal sex feeling, still growing in bodily stature and still developing in internal organization) until they were nearly thirty years of age. In my opinion, the girl who is thoroughly well-balanced, with an active brain, a well-developed normally sexed body, natural artistic and social instincts is not more than a child at seventeen, and to marry her at that age or anything like it is to force her artificially, and to wither off her potentialities.

The type of woman who really counts in our modern civilization is, as a rule, not of age until she is nearly thirty. Not only does she not mature sooner than a boy; she matures actually later than a large number of men. I have now accumulated a wide and varied amount of evidence in favour of the view which I here propound, namely, that there is a most highly evolved type of woman in our midst. This type, which it will be agreed is the most valuable we possess, encompasses women of a wide range of potentialities; they have beautiful entirely feminine bodies, with all feminine and womanly instincts well developed, with a normal, indeed a rather strong, sex instinct and acute personal desires which tend to be concentrated on one man and one man alone. I will provisionally call this the late maturing type, for such a woman is generally incapable of real sex experience till she is about twenty-seven or thirty. I think that she is in line with the highest branch of our evolution, that she represents the present flower of human development, and that through her and her children the human race has the best hope of evolving on to still higher planes—but, and this is very important, she is not fitted for marriage until she is at least twenty-seven, probably later, her best child-bearing years may be after she is thirty-five, and her most brilliant and gifted children are likely to be born when she is about forty.

Personal evidence, and also facts in the interesting letters sent me by my readers have brought to my knowledge the existence of an important proportion of women who are absolutely unconscious of personal localized sex feeling until they are nearly or over thirty—one woman was nearly fifty before she felt and knew the real meaning of sex union though many years married.

From outward observation of the general physique of such of these women as I have seen face to face, I may say that, as a rule, they retain their youth long; they retain also a buoyancy and vitality which, if they are properly treated, and have the good fortune to be married at the right time to the right man, may remain with them almost throughout their lives. Such women not only prolong their girlhood, they defer their age. Such women have, of course, throughout the centuries appeared from time to time, and I fancy have generally in the past, and still often in the present, suffered acutely through marrying too young. When they marry too young they tend, by the forcing of their feelings, by the deadening through habit of their potentialities, by the trampling on the unfolded possibilities within them, to be turned artificially into a “cold type of woman.”

Women now older tell me of the fact that for the first years of their married life they could give no response, but when they were respectively twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one or more, they began first to feel they were truly women. Young husbands have written to me of their distress that their wives (aged about twenty to twenty-three), delightful girls in every respect, seemed utterly incapable of any response in the marital orgasm. Sometimes this depends on her conformation, but such an incapacity I often attribute to the girl’s marriage being premature. When she is twenty-seven or twenty-eight perhaps her internal development will be complete, and she will then be ripe for the full enjoyment of marriage: but if instead of a considerate husband she marries one who merely uses her, she stands little chance ever of knowing the proper relation of wifehood and motherhood.

These facts which I could vary with details from individual experiences, in my opinion, indicate a profound truth in the development of the human race. It is this: not only do the higher races of human beings have a prolonged childhood and youth, but the most highly evolved, mentally, physically and racially, of our girls have not finished their potential growth into maturity until they are in the neighbourhood of thirty years of age.

Does this then mean that all marriage should be deferred till so late? By no means, nor is the above conclusion any reflection on the type of girl who ripens much more quickly. I fully recognize that from the point of view of their sex potentialities some girls are complete women at seventeen or eighteen, and that they may then be very strongly sexed indeed. Such women should marry young.

The marked differentiation of type of these very notably different women can be traced through many other aspects of their lives. I consider, for instance, the type of whom I spoke in Chapter [XII] (who has a natural desire for union, representing the highest and most complex human union, the union of three) belongs very frequently to the late maturing and the most highly evolved form of femininity.

It should be recognized that there are among us not only different races, but that in the same stock, sometimes in the same family of apparently no specially mixed ancestry, we may find one or more members of the late maturing, others of the early maturing type. Sometimes of two sisters, the elder may perhaps be still in mind a girl while her younger sister is a woman, as can be observed by any one with a large circle of acquaintances. It would be well, I think, if humanity, whose proper study is mankind, were at least to know themselves sufficiently well to realize the existence of such different types, and their possible potential value as well as their differing needs. The energy at present wasted in the acrid statement of conflicting views would be so much better spent on the careful recording and recognizing of varying types.

The advice to marry young, which is in every respect socially wise and physiologically correct for some, should not be hurled indiscriminately at all women, because for the late maturing such advice is socially disadvantageous and physiologically wrong.