Private Sex Advice to Women: For Young Wives and those who Expect to be Married

by Robert B. Armitage

The trouble about all great movements designed for the benefit of the human race is that at the beginning there is attracted to the movement, by reason of its novelty and "newness," certain elements which seize upon certain incidental features of the general idea, make them their own while excluding or ignoring the more important things, and then exploit these incidental features in a sensational way, thereby attracting public attention and gaining much undesirable notoriety, and as a consequence bringing discredit and disfavor, prejudice and misunderstanding, to the general movement.

Birth Control has passed through this apparently inevitable experience, and has suffered greatly thereby. But the Light is being thrown on the Dark Places, and the more intelligent portion of the public is beginning to realize that there is another side to the shield of Birth Control. And, as a consequence, much of the original prejudice is disappearing, and a new understanding of the subject is arising in the minds of many of the best individuals of the race. It is the purpose of this book to help to dispel the ignorance and misconception concerning this great subject of Birth Control, and to aid in presenting the higher and nobler aspects of the general movement to the attention of those who are concerned with the advance and progress of the race as a whole, and of the individual members thereof.

The student of the subject of Birth Control will fall into grievous error if he begins his consideration of the subject under the impression that the questions concerned therein are new to the world of living things. If the process of Birth Control were something which had suddenly sprung into existence in the consciousness of man, without having an antecedent activity in the history of the race, and of living creatures in general, we might well hesitate to go further in the matter without the most serious and prolonged consideration of the entire principle by the careful thought of the wisest of the race. But while such consideration is advisable, as in the case of any and all important problems presenting themselves for solution and judgment, it is found that those so considering the subject have a sound and firm foundation upon which to base their thought and to test their conclusions.

As many thoughtful students of the subject have pointed out to us, the question of Birth Control has been with the race practically since the beginning of human history; and it has its correspondences in the instinctive actions of the lower forms of life. The chief difference is that we are now seeking to deal with these problems consciously, voluntarily, and deliberately, whereas in the past the race has dealt with them more or less unconsciously, by methods of trial and error, through perpetual experiment which has often proved costly but which has all the more clearly brought out the real course of natural processes.

We cannot hope to solve problems so ancient and so deeply rooted as these by merely the rational methods of yesterday and today. To be of value our rational methods must be the revelation in deliberate consciousness of unconscious methods which go far back into the remote past. Our deliberate methods will not be sound except in so far as they are a continuation of those methods which, in the slow evolution of life, have been found sound and progressive on the plane of instinct. This is particularly true in the case of those among us who desire their own line of conduct in the matter to be so closely in accord with natural law, or the law of creation, that to question it would be impious.

It may be accepted without an extended argument or presentation of evidence that at the outset the prime object of Nature seems to have been that of Reproduction. There is evident, without doubt, an effort on the part of Nature to secure economy of method in the attainment of ever greater perfection in the process of reproduction, but we cannot deny that the primary motive seems to be that of reproduction pure and simple. The tendency toward reproduction is indeed so fundamental in Nature that it is impressed with the greatest emphasis upon every living thing. And, as careful thinkers have told us "the course of evolution seems to have been more of an effort to slow down reproduction than to furnish it with new facilities."

Reproduction appears in the history of life even before sex manifests itself. The lower forms of animal and plant life oftener produce themselves without the aid of sex, and some authorities have argued that the presence of sex differentiation serves rather to check active propagation rather than to increase it. If quantity, without regard to quality or variation, be the object of Nature, then that purpose would have been better served by withholding sex-differentiation than by evolving it. As Professor Coulter, a leading American botanist, has well said: "The impression one gains of sexuality is that it represents reproduction under peculiar difficulties."

To those who find it difficult to assimilate this somewhat startling idea, we now present a brief statement of the infinitely greater facility toward reproduction manifested by living creatures lacking in sex-differentiation as compared with those possessing it. It is seen that bacteria among primitive plants, and protozoa among primitive animals, are patterns of very rapid and prolific reproduction, though sex begins to appear in a rudimentary form in very lowly forms of life. A single infusorian becomes in a week the ancestor of millions, that is to say, of far more individuals than could proceed under the most favorable conditions from a pair of elephants in five centuries; and Huxley has calculated that the progeny of a single parthenogenetic aphis, under favorable circumstances, would in a few months outweigh the whole population of China. It must be noted, however, that this proviso "under favorable circumstances" reveals the weak point of Nature's early method of reproduction by enormously rapid multiplication. Creatures so easily produced are easily destroyed; and Nature, apparently in consequence, wastes no time in imparting to them the qualities needed for a high form of life and living.

And, even after sex differentiation had attained a considerable degree of development, Nature seemed slow to abandon her original plan of rapid multiplication of individuals. Among insects so far advanced as the white ants, the queen lays eggs at the enormous rate of 80,000 a day during her period of active life. Higher in the scale, we find the female herring laying 70,000 eggs at one period of delivery. But in both of these cases we find the manifestation of that apparently invariable rule of Nature, viz., that a high birth-rate is accompanied by a heavy death-rate, whether that high death-rate be caused by natural enemies, wars, or disease.