| | º . º - | | | | º MIC iAN e Z # Z # Sº D -ÄS- -- FIÄ# Laſº MARRIED LOVE OR LOVE IN MARRIAGE MARRIED LOVE LOVE IN MARRIAGE BY MARIE CARMICHAEL STOPES, Sc.D., Ph.D. Wrrº Parracºs Anno Norms, ºr WILLIAM J.ROBINSON, M.D., 1918 THE CRITIC AND GUIDE COMPANY 12 MT. MORRIS PARK WEST New York Copyright, 1918. By This Carric & Guinn Co. DEDICATED TO YOUNG HUSBANDS, AND ALL THOSE WHO ARE BETROTHED IN LOVE 331764 EDITOR's PREFACE . . . . . . . . gº º ſº e º 'º AUTHOR's PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . CºArrºn I. THE HEART's DESIRE . . . . . . . . II. THE BROKEN Joy . . . . . . . . . . III. Woman’s “CoNTRARINEss” . . . . . . IV. The FUNDAMENTAL PULSE. . . . . . . V. MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT . . . . . . . . VI. SLEEP . . . . . . . . . tº e º º e e VII. MoDESTY AND RomanCE . . . . . . . VIII. ABSTINENCE . . . . . . . tº e º e > IX. CHILDREN . . . . . . . . . © C tº o ſº X. Society. . . . . . . . . . . . gº º de XI. THE GLORIous UNFolding . . . . . . 167 INTRODUCTION The truly monogamic couple, where the man and the woman go chaste to the marriage-bed, and go through life in mutual love and respect, these feelings growing stronger as the years go by, finding full satisfaction in each other, with- out any desire for any othe man or woman— what nobler, what more appealing ideal can one conjure up? Nor is it an utterly unrealizable ideal, for in spite of the sneers of the cynics, there are such couples, even at the present time and even in our largest Babylons. . . . . We cannot prevent the cynics from sneering, but even they must admit that monogamy is here, is the dominant system, is the only socially approved and legally permitted system, and we have to deal with it. And those radical sexolo- gists who do not believe that monogamy is the best system of sexual relationship, who are sure that it will not survive for all eternity, that it will be replaced in the future by a higher ad- justment, will agree, even if they do so reluc- 7 8 INTRODUCTION tantly, that for a few years to come—say five hundréd to a thousand—it will be the only feasi- ble, the only socially admissible and legally sanctioned system. This being the case, it becomes the sexolo- gist's most sacred duty to do everything in his power to make the monogamic relationship as pleasant as possible, to remove as far as possi- ble all removable causes of friction, to steer the frail matrimonial bark in safe channels, to guard it from being wrecked on the Scylla of asceticism or the Charybdis of excess; in short to help the Man and the Woman to go through life inmutual love and respect, finding full satis- faction in each other, without any desire for any other man or woman. This is the object of Dr. Stopes’ fine book. It would be too much to expect any one work to succeed in converting every home from the hell that it often is into the paradise that it should be; but if a careful reading of it preserves the temper of some men, improves the health and cures the insomnia of some women, if it saves a few homes from disruption, it will be decidedly worth while, and its author will be called blessed —and will deserve to be. INTRODUCTION 9 There is plenty of love outside of marriage; there is not enough in marriage; and they who labor to augment and intensify Love in Mar- riage are doing good pro-social work. DR. WILLIAM J. BoBINson. April 8, 1918. AUTHOR'S PREFACE MoBE than ever to-day are happy homes needed. It is my hope that this book may serve the State by adding to their number. Its object is to increase the joys of marriage, and to show how much sorrow may be avoided. The only secure basis for a present-day State is the welding of its units in marriage: but there is rottenness and danger at the founda- tions of the State if many of the marriages are unhappy. To-day, marriage is far less happy than appears on the surface. Too many who marry expecting joy are bitterly disappointed; and the demand for “freedom” grows: while those who cry aloud are generally unaware that it is more likely to have been their own ignorance than the “marriage-bond” which was the origin of their unhappiness. It is never easy to make marriage a lovely thing; and it is an achievement beyond the powers of the selfish, or the mentally cowardly. Knowledge is needed, and as things are at pres- 11 12 AUTHOR's PREFACE ent knowledge is almost unobtainable by those who are most in want of it. The problems of the sex-life are infinitely complex, and for their solution urgently de- mand both sympathy and scientific research. I have some things to say about sex, which, so far as I am aware, have not yet been said, or if said will bear repeating and reemphasizing, things which seem to me to be of profound im- portance to men and women who hope to make their marriage beautiful. This little book is less a record of a research than an attempt to present in easily under- standable form the clarified and crystallized results of long and patient investigations. Its simple statements are based on a very large number of first hand observations, on con- fidences from men and women of all classes and types, and on facts gleaned from wide reading. My original contributions to the age-long problems of marriage will be found principally in Chapter IV; also in Chapters V and VIII. The other chapters fill in what I hope is an undistorted and unexaggerated picture of the potential beauties and realities of marriage. The whole is written simply, and for the or- AUTHOR'S PREFACE 13 dinary untrained reader, though it embodies some observations which will be new even to those who have made scientific researches on the subjects of sex and human physiology. I do not touch here upon the many human variations and abnormalities which bulk so largely in most books on sex, nor do I deal with the many problems raised by incurably unhap- py marriages. In the following pages I speak to those—and in spite of all our neurotic literature and plays, they are in the great majority—who are normal and who are married or about to be married, and hope, but do not know how, to make their marriages happy and successful. To the reticent, as to the conventional, it may seem a presumption or a superfluity to speak of the details of the most complex of all human functions. They ask: Is not instinct enough? The answer is: No, instinct is not enough. In every other human activity it has been realized that training is essential to crea- tures of intellectual capacity like ourselves. As Saleeby once wisely pointed out: A cat knows how to manage her new-born kittens, how to bring them up and teach them; a human 14 AUTHOR'S PREFACE mother does not know how to manage her baby unless she is trained, either directly or by her own quick observation. A cat performs her simple duties by instinct; a human mother has to be trained to fulfill her very complex ones. And the same is true, and even to a greater extent, in the subtle complexities of sex. In civilized countries, in modern times, the old traditions, the profound primitive knowledge of the needs of both. sexes have been lost—and nothing but a muffled confusion of individual gossip disturbs a silence, shame-faced or foul. Here and there, in a family of fine tradition, a youth or maiden may learn some of the mys- teries of marriage, but the great majority of people in the English speaking countries have no glimmering of knowledge of the supreme human art, the Art of Love. And even in books on advanced Physiology and Medicine the gaps, the omissions and even the misstatements, are amazing. In my own marriage I paid such a terrible price for sex-ignorance that I feel that knowl- edge gained at such a price should be placed at the service of humanity. In this book, average, healthy, mating crea- tures who come within the limits of what may AUTHOR'S PREFACE 15 be called “normal,” will find information which should be known to every one of our race—but is not—and which may save them years of heartache and blind groping in the dark. M. C. STOPEs. LOVE IN MARRIAGE CHAPTER I THE HEART's DESTRE “She gave him eomprehension of the meaning of love: a word in many mouths, not often explained. With her, wound in his idea of her, he perceived it to signify a new start in our existenee, a finer shoot of the tree stoutly planted in good gross earth; the senses running their live sap, and the minds eompanioned, and the spirits made one by the whole-natured conjunction. In sooth, a happy prospect for the sons and daughters of Earth, divinely indicating more than happiness: the speeding of us, eompact of what we are, between the ascetic rocks and the sensual whirlpools, to the creation of certain nobler races, new very dimly imagined.”—Grosse Mrazeith, Dians of the Crossways. EveRY heart desires a mate. For some rea- son beyond our comprehension, nature has so created us that we are incomplete in ourselves; neither man nor woman singly can know the joy in the performance of all the human func- tions; neither man nor woman singly can create another human being. This fact, which is ex- 17 18 LOVE IN MARRIAGE pressed in our outward divergencies of form, influences and colors the whole of our lives; and there is nothing for which the innermost spirit of one and all so yearns as for a sense of union with another soul, and the perfecting of one- self which such union brings. In all young people, unless they have in- herited depraved or diseased tendencies, the old desire of our race springs up afresh in its pris- tine beauty. With the dreams and bodily changes of adolescence, come to the youth and maiden the strange and powerful impulses of sex. The bodily differences of the two, now accentuated, become mystical, alluring, enchanting in their promise. Their differences unite and hold to- gether the man and the woman so that their bodily union is the solid nucleus of an immense fabric of interwoven strands reaching to the uttermost ends of the earth; some lighter than the filmiest cobweb, or than the softest wave of music, iridescent with the colors not only of the visible rainbow, but of all the invisible glories of the wave-lengths of the soul. However much he may conceal it under as- sumed cynicism, worldiness, or'self-seeking, the heart of every young man yearns with a great THE HEART's DESIRE 19 longing for the fulfilment of the beautiful dream of a life-long union with a mate. Each heart knows instinctively that it is only one’s mate who can give full comprehension of all the po- tential greatness in one’s soul, and have tender laughter for all the child-like wonder that lingers so enchantingly even in the white-haired. The search for a mate is a quest for an un- derstanding soul clothed in a body beautiful, but unlike our own. In the modern world, those who set off on high endeavors. or who consciously separate themselves from the ordinary course of social life, are comparatively few, and it is not to them I am speaking. The great majority of our citizens—both men and women—after a time of waiting, or of exploring, or of oscillat- ing from one attraction to another, “settle down” and marry. - Very few are actually so cynical as to marry without the hope of happiness; while most young people, however their words may deny it and however they may conceal their tender hopes by an assumption of cynicism, reveal that they are conscious of entering on a new and glorious state by their radiant looks and the joyous buoyancy of their actions. In the 20 LOVE IN MLARRLAGE kisses and the hand-touch of the betrothed are a zest and exhilaration which stir the blood like wine. The two read poetry, listen entranced to music which echoes the songs of their pulses, and see reflected in each other’s eyes the beauty of the world. In the midst of this celestial in- toxication they naturally assume that, as they are on the threshold of their lives, so too are they in but the antechamber of their experience of spiritual unity. The more sensitive, the more romantic, and the more idealistic is the young person of either sex, the more his or her soul craves for some kindred soul with whom the whole being can unite. But all have some measure of this de- sire, even the most prosaic, and we know from innumerable stories that the sternest man of affairs, he who may have worldly success of every sort, may yet, through the lack of a real mate, live with a sense almost as though the limbs of his soul had been amputated. Ed- ward Carpenter has beautifully' voiced this longing: “That there should exist one other person in the world towards whom all openness of interchange should establish itself, from whom there should be no concealment; whose body should be as dear to one, # THE HEART'S DESIRE 21 in every part, as one's own; with whom there should be no sense of Mine or Thine, in property or posses- sion; into whose mind one's thoughts should naturally flow, as it were to know themselves and to receive a new illumination; and between whom and oneself there should be a spontaneous rebound of sympathy in all the joys and sorrows and experiences of life; such is perhaps one of the dearest wishes of the soul.” —Love's Coming of Age. - It may chance that some one into whose hands this book falls may protest that he or she has never felt the fundamental yearning to form a part of that trinity which alone is the perfect expression of humanity. If that is the case, it is possible that all unconsciously he may be suffering from a real malady—sexual anes- thesia. This is the name given to an inherent coldness, which, while it lacks the usual human impulse of tenderness, is generally quite un- conscious of its lack. It may even be that the reader's departure from the ordinary ranks of mankind is still more fundamental, in which case, instead of sitting in judgment on the ma- jority, he would do well to read some such books as those of Forel, Havelock Ellis, Bloch, or Krafft-Ebing, in order that his own nature may be made known to him. He may then discover 22 LOVE IN MARRLAGE to which type of our widely various humanity he belongs. He need not read my book, for it is written about, and it is written for, ordinary men and women, who feeling themselves incom- plete, yearn for a union that will have power not only to make a fuller and richer thing of their own lives, but which will place them in a position to use their sacred trust as creators of lives to come. *. It has happened many times in human history that individuals have not only been able to. conquer this natural craving for a mate, but have set up celibacy as a higher ideal. In its most beautiful expression and sublimest mani- festations, the celibate ideal has proclaimed a world-wide love, in place of the narrower human love of home and children. Many saints and sages, reformers, and dogmatists have modeled their lives on this ideal. But such individuals cannot be taken as the standard of the race, for they are out of its main current: they are branches which may flower, but never fruit in a bodily form. . . - In this world our spirits not only permeate matter but find their only expression through its medium. / So long as we are human we must THE HEART'S DESIRE 23 have bodies, and bodies obey chemical and |- physiological, as well as spiritual laws. If our race as a whole set out to pursue an ideal which must ultimately eliminate bodies together, it is clear that very soon we should find the conditions of our environment so altered that we could no longer speak of the human race. In the meantime we are human. We each and all live our lives according to laws, some of which we have begun to understand, many of which are completely hidden from us. The most complete human being is he or she who consciously or unconsciously obeys the pro- found physical laws of our being in such a way that the spirit receives much help and as little hindrance from the body as possible. A mind or spirit finds its fullest expression thwarted by the misuse or the gross abuse of the body in which it dwells. By the ignorant or self-in- dulgent breaking of fundamental laws, the deep- est harmonies are dislocated. The small- minded ascetic endeavors to grow spiritually by destroying his physical instincts instead of by using them. ... - But I would proclaim that we are set in the world so to mold matter that it may express 24 LOVE IN MARBLAGE. our spirit; that it is presumption to profess to fight the immemorial laws of our physical being, and that he who does so loses uncon- sciously the finest flux in which wondrous new creations take their rise. To use a homely simile—one might compare two human beings to two wires through which pass electric currents. Isolated from each other the electric forces pass uninterrupted along their length, but if these wires come into the right juxtaposition, the force is transmuted, and a spark, a glow of burning light arises be tween them. Such is love. From the body of the loved one's simple, sweetly colored flesh, which our animal instincts urge us to desire, there springs not only the wonder of a new bodily life, but also the en- largement of the horizon of human sympathy and the glow of spiritual understanding which one could never have attained alone. Many reading this may feel conscious that they have had physical union without such spiritual accompaniments, perhaps even with- out an accession of ordinary pleasure. If that is so, it can only be because, consciously or un- consciously, they have broken some of the pro- found laws which govern the love of man and THE HEART'S DESIRE 25. woman. Only by learning to hold a bow cor- rectly can one draw music from a violin. Only by obedience to the laws of the lower plane can one step up to the plane above. CHAPTER II TELE BROKEN JOY “What shall be done to quiet the heart-cry of the world? How answer the dumb appeal for help we so often divine below eyes that laugh?’”—A. E. in The Hero in Man. DREAMING of happiness, feeling that at last they have each found the one who will give eternal understanding and tenderness, the young man and maiden marry. At first, in the time generally called the honeymoon, the unaccustomed freedom and the sweetness of the relation often do bring real happiness. How long does it last? Generally, a far shorter time than is generally acknowl- edged. - In the first joy of their union it is hidden from the two young people that they know lit- tle or nothing about the fundamental laws of each other’s being. Much of the sex-attraction (not only among human beings but throughout the whole of the animal world) depends upon the differences between the two that pair; an - 26 $ THE BROKEN JOY 27 probably taking them all unawares, those very differences which drew them together now be- gin to work their undoing. But so long as the first illusion that each understands the other is supported by the thrilling delight of ever- fresh discoveries, the sensations lived through are so rapid, and so joyous that the lovers do not realize that there is no firm foundation be- neath their feet. While even in the happiest cases there may be divergences about religion, politics, social customs and opinions on things in general, these, with good will, patience, and intelligence on either side, can be ultimately adjusted, because in all such things there is a common meeting ground for the two. Human beings, while differing widely about every con- ceivable subject in these human relations, have at least thought about them, threshed them out, and discussed them openly for generations. ſ. But about the much more fundamental and vital problems of sex, there is a lack of knowl- edge so abysmal and so universal that its mists and shadowy darkness have affected even the few who lead us, and who are prosecuting re- search in these subjects. And the two young *people begin to suffer from fundamental diver- gences, before perhaps they realize that such 28 LOVE IN MARRIAGE exist, and with little prospect of ever gaining a rational explanation of them. Nearly all those, whose own happiness seems to be dimmed or broken, count themselves ex- ceptions, and comfort themselves with the thought of some of their friends, who they feel sure have attained the happiness which they themselves have missed. It is generally supposed that happy people, like happy nations, have no history—they are silent about their own affairs. Those who talk about their marriage are generally those who have missed the happiness they expected. True as this may be in general, it is not permanently and profoundly true. There are people who , are reckoned, and still reckon themselves, hap- py, but who yet, unawares, reveal the secret disappointment which clouds their inward peace. Leaving out of account “femmes incom- prises” and all the innumerable cases of neu- rotic, supersensitive, and slightly abnormal people, it still remains an astonishing and tragic fact that so large a proportion of normal marriages lose their early bloom and are to some extent unhappy. For years many men and women have con- f THE BROKEN JOY 29 fided to me the secrets of their lives; and of all the innumerable cases in which the circum- stances are known to me, there are tragically few marriages which approach even humanly attainable joy. Many of those considered by the world, by the relatives, even by the loved and loving part- ner, to be perfectly happy marriages, are se- cret tragedies to the more sensitive of the pair. Where the bride is, as are most of our edu- cated girls, composed of virgin sweetness shut in ignorance, the man is often the first to create “the rift within the lute”: but his suffering begins almost simultaneously with hers. Un- conscious of the nature, and even perhaps of the existence of his fault, he is bewildered and pained by her inarticulate pain. It is my ex- perience, that in the early days of marriage, the young man is even more sensitive, more romantic, more easily pained about all ordinary things than the woman, that he enters marriage hoping for an even higher degree of spiritual and bodily unit than does the girl or the woman. But the man is more quickly blunted, more 'swiftly rendered cynical, and is readier to look upon happiness as a utopian dream than is his mate. ! 30 LOVE IN MARRLAGE On the other hand, the woman is slower to realize disappointment, and more often is the more profoundly wounded by the sex-life of marriage, with a slow corrosive wound that eats into her very being. Perfect happiness is a unity composed of a myriad essences: and this one supreme thing is exposed to the attacks of countless destructive factors. - Were I to touch upon all the possible sources of marital disappointment and unhappiness, this book would expand into a dozen bulky volumes. As I am addressing those who I as- sume have read, or can read, other books writ- ten upon various ramifications of the subject, I will not discuss the themes which have been handled by many writers. * In the last few years there has been such an awakening to the realization of the corrosive horror of all aspects of prostitution, that there is no need to elaborate the point that no mar- riage can be happy where the husband has, in buying another body, sold his own health, and is tainted with disease. Nor is it necessary, in speaking to well-mean- ing optimistic young couples, to enlarge upon THE BROKEN JOY 31 the obvious dangers of drunkenness, self-in- dulgence, and the cruder forms of selfishness. It is with the subtler infringements of the fundamental laws we have to deal. And the prime tragedy is that, as a rule, the two young people are both unaware of the existence of such decrees. Yet here, as elsewhere in na- ture, the law-breaker is punished whether he is aware of the existence of the law he breaks or not. In the state of ignorance which so largely predominates to-day, the first sign that things are amiss between the two who thought they were entering paradise together, is generally a sense of loneliness, a feeling that the one who was expected to have all in common, is outside some experience, some subtle delight, and fails to understand the needs of the loved one. Triv- ialities are often the first indicators of some- thing which takes its roots unseen in the pro- foundest depths of our natures. The girl may sob for hours over something that at first ap- pears so trifling that she cannot even tell a friend about it, while the young man, who thought that he had set out with his soul’s beloved upon an adventure into celestial dis- tances, may find himself apparently up against 32 LOVE IN MARRLAGE some barrier in her which appears incompre- hensible or frivolous. Then, so strange is the mystical inter-relation between our bodies, our minds, and our souls, that for crimes committed in ignorance of the dual functions of the married pair, and the laws which harmonize them, the punishments are reaped on plains quite diverse, till new and ever new misunderstandings appear to spring spontaneously from the soil of their mutual con- tact. Gradually or swiftly each heart begins to hide a sense of boundless isolation. It may be urged that this statement is too sweeping. It is, however, based on innumerable actual cases. I have heard from women, whose mar- riages are looked upon by all as the happiest possible expressions of human felicity, the de- tails of secret pain of which they have allowed their husbands no inkling. Many men will know how they have hidden from their beloved wives a sense of dull disappointment, perhaps at her coldness in the marital embrace, or from the feeling that there is in her something elusive which always evades their grasp. Now that so many “movements” are abroad, folk on all sides are emboldened to express the opinion that it is marriage itself which is at THE BROKEN JOY 33 fault. Many think that merely by loosening the bonds, and making it possible to start afresh with some one else, their lives would be made harmonious and happy. By many such re- formers it is forgotten that he or she who knows nothing of the way to make marriage great and beautiful with one partner, is not likely to succeed with another. KOnly by a reverent study of the Art of Love can the beauty of its expression be realized in linked lives...} And even when once learnt, the Art of Love takes time to practice. As Ellen Key says, “Love requires peace, love will dream; it can- not live upon the remnants of our time and our personality.” There is no doubt that Love loses, in the haste | ! | and bustle of our modern turmoil, not only much of its charm and grace, but some of its vital essence. The result of the haste which so infests and poisons us, is often felt much more by the woman than by the man. The over- stimulation of city life tends to “speed up” the man's reactions, but to retard hers. To make matters worse, even for those who have leisure to spend on love-making, the opportuni- ties for peaceful, romantic dalliance are less to-day in a city with its tubes and cinema shows 34 LOVE IN MARRLAGE than in woods and gardens where the pulling of rosemary or lavender may be the sweet ex- cuse for the slow and profound mutual rousing of passion. Now, physical passion, so swiftly stimulated in man, tends to override all else, and the untutored male sees but one thing— the accomplishment of desire. The woman, for it is in her nature so to do, forgives the crude- ness, but sooner or later her love revolts, prob- ably in secret, and then forever after, though she may command an outward tenderness, she has nothing within but scorn and loathing for the act which should have been a perpetually recurring entrancement. So many people are now born and bred in artificial and false surroundings, that even the elementary fact that the acts of love should be joyous is unknown to them. Havelock Ellis (“Psychology of Sex,” vol 6, 1913, p. 512) quotes the amazing statement of a distinguished American gynecologist, who said, “I do not be- lieve mutual pleasure in the sexual act has any particular bearing on the happiness of life.” This is, perhaps, an extreme case, yet so many distinguished medical men, gynecologists and physiologists, are either in ignorance or error regarding some of the profoundest facts of hu- THE BROKEN JOY 35 man sex-life, that it is not surprising that ordi- nary young couples, however hopeful, should break and destroy the joy that might have been their lifelong companion. CHAPTER III woman’s “costuminess” *Oh! for that Being whom I ean eoneeive to be in the world, though I shall net live to prove it. One to whom I might have recourse in all my Humours and Dispositions: in . all my Distempers of Mind, visionary Causes of Mortifiea. tion, and Fairy Dreams of Pleasure. I have been trying to train up a Lady or two for these good offices of Friendship, but hitherto I must not boast of my success.”—HERRICK. WHAT is the fate of the average man who marries, happily and hopefully, a girl well suited to him? He desires with his whole heart a mutual, lifelong happiness. He marries with the intention of fulfilling every injunction given him by father, doctor and friend. He is considerate in trifles, he speaks no harsh words, he and his bride go about together, walk together, read together, and perhaps, if they are very, advanced, even work together. But after a few months, or maybe a few years, of marriage they seem to have drifted apart, and he finds her often cold and incomprehensible. If he is a nice man, he will not acknowledge 36 WOMAN’S “CONTRARINESS’’ 37 this even to his best friend. But his heart knows its own pain. He may at times laugh, and in the friendliest spirit tease her about her contrariness. That is taken by every one to mean nothing but a playful concealment of his profound love. Probably it is. But gnawing at the very roots of his love is a hateful little worm—the sense that she is contrary. He feels that she is at times inexplicably cold: that, sometimes, when he has “done nothing” she will have tears in her eyes, irrational tears which she cannot ex- plain. He observes that one week his tender love. making and romantic advances win her to smiles and joyous yielding, and then perhaps a few days later the same, or more impassioned, ten- derness on his part is met by coldness or a forced appearance of warmth, which, while he may make no comment upon it, hurts him acutely. And this deep, inexplicable hurt is often the beginning of the end of love. Men like to feel that they understand their beloved, and that she is a rational being. * After this has continued for some time, if the man is of at all a jealous nature, he will search among his wife's acquaintances for 38 LOVE IN MAERLAGE some one whom she may have met, for some one who may momentarily have diverted her attention. For the natural man at once seeks the explanation of his own ill-success in a rival. On some occasion when her coldness puzzles him he is conscious that his love, his own de- sires, are as ardent as they were a few days before. Knowing so intimately his own heart, he is sure of the steadiness of its love, and he feels acutely the romantic passion to which her beauty stirs him. He remembers perhaps that a few days earlier his ardor had awakened a response in her. Therefore he reaches what appears to him to be the infallible logical de- duction: that either there must be some rival— or his bride's nature is incomprehensible, con- trary, capricious. Both—thoughts to madden. With capriciousness, man in general has lit- tle patience. Caprice renders his best efforts null and void. Woman’s caprice is, or appears to be, a negation of reason. And as reason is man's most precious and hard-won faculty, the one which has raised mankind from the ranks of brute creation, he cannot bear to see it a parently flouted. - That his bride should lack logic and sweet reasonableness—is a flaw it hurts him to recog- WOMAN'S “CONTRARINESS” 39. nize in her. He has to crush the thought down. It may then happen that the young man, him- self pained and bewildered at having pained his bride by the very ardor of his affection, may strive to please her by placing restraint upon himself. He may ask himself: Do not books on sex preach restraint to the man? He reads the books written for the guidance of youth, and finds “restraint,” “self-control,” generally, and often irrationally, urged in them all. His next step may then be to curtail the expression of his tender feelings, and to work hard and late in the evenings instead of kissing his bride's fingers and playing with the lace of her dress. And then, if he is at all observant, he may be aggrieved and astonished to find her again wistful or hurt. With the tender longing to understand, which is so profound a characteris- tic in all the best of our young men, he begs, implores, or pets her into telling him some part of the reason for her fresh grievance. He dis- covers to his amazement that this time she is hurt because he had not made those very ad- vances which so recently had repelled her, and had been with such difficulty repressed by his intellectual efforts. 40 LOVE IN MARBLAGE He asks himself in despair: What is a man to do? If he is intelligent, he probably devours all the books on sex he can obtain. But in them he is not likely to find much real guidance. He learns from them that “restraint” is ad- . vised by practically every author, but accord- ing to the character pf the author he will find that “restraint” means having the marriage relation with his wife not more than three times a week, or once a month—or never at all exeept for the protection of children. He finds no rational guidance based on natural law. According to his temperament then, he may begin to practice “restraint.” But it may happen, and indeed it has prob- ably happened in every marriage once or many times, that the night comes when the man who has heroically practiced restraint, accidentally discovers his wife's tears on her solitary pil- low. w * He seeks for advice indirectly from his friends, perhaps from his doctor. But can his local doctor or his friends tell him more than the chief European authorities on this subject? In Forel’s “The Sexual Question,” he reads the following advice: “The reformer, Luther, who was a practical man, laid down the average WOMAN'S “CONTRARINESS” 41 rule of two or three connections a week in mar- riage, at the time of highest sexual power. I may say that my numerous observations as a physician have generally confirmed this rule, which seems to me to conform very well to the normal state to which man" has become grad- ually adapted during thousands of years. Hus- bands who would consider this average as an imprescriptible right would, however, make wrong pretensions, for it is quite possible for a normal man to contain himself much longer, and it is his duty to do so, not only when his wife is ill, but also during menstruation and pregnancy.” Many men will not be so considerate as to fol- low this advice, which represents a high stand- ard of living; but on the other hand there are many who are willing to go not only so far, but further than this in their self-suppression in order to attain their heart’s desire, the happi- ness of their mate, and consequently their own life's joy. However willing they may be to go further, the great question for the man is: How far? *The italies are mine—M. C. S. This prenouncement of an advaneed and broad-minded thinker serves to show exeeptionally how little attention has hitherto been paid to the woman's side of this question, or to ascertaining her natural requirements. 42 LOVE IN MARBLAGE There are innumerable leaders anxious to lead in many different directions. The young husband may try first one and then the other, and still find his wife unsatisfied, incomprehen- sible—capricious. Then it may be that, dis- heartened, he gets tired and she sinks into the dull apathy of acquiescence in her “wifely duty.” He is left with an echo of resentment in his heart: if only she had not been so capri- cious, they would still have been happy, he fancies. Many writers, novelists, poets, and drama- tists, have represented the uttermost tragedy of human life as due to the incomprehensible contrariness of the feminine nature. The kind- ly ones smile, perhaps a little patronizingly, and tell us that women are more instinctive, more child-like, less reasonable than men. The bitter ones sneer or reproach or laugh at this “contrariness” in woman that they do not un- derstand, and which, baffling their intellect, ap- pears to them to be irrational folly. - It seems strange that those who search for natural law in every domain of the universe, should have so neglected the most vital subject, the one which concerns us all infinitely more than the naming of planets or the collecting of WOMAN'S “CONTRARINESS” 43 insects. Woman is not essentially capricious. Some of the laws of her being might have been discovered long ago had the existence of law been suspected. But it has been easier, has suited the general structure of society much better, for men to shrug their shoulders and smile at women as irrational and capricious creatures. Vaguely, perhaps, men have realized that much of the charm of life lies in the sea-dif- ferences between men and women; so they have snat led at the easy theory that women differ from themselves, by being capricious. More- over, by attributing to mere caprice the cold- ness which at times comes over the most ardent woman, man was unconsciously justifying him- self by coercing her to suit himself. Conditions have been såch that hitherto the explorers and scientific investigators, the his- torians and statisticians, the poets and artists have been mainly men. Consequently woman's side of the sexual life has found little or no expression. Woman has been content to mold herself to the shape desired by man wherever possible, and she has stifled her natural feel- ings and her own deep thoughts as they welled up. y - 44 LOVE IN MARBLAGE Most women have never realized intellect- ually, but many have been dimly half-conscious, that woman's nature is set to rhythms over which man has almost no more control than he has over the tides of the sea. While the ocean can subdue and dominate man and laugh at his attempted restrictions, woman has bowed to man's desire over her body, and, regardless of its pulses, he approaches her or not as is his will. Some of her rhythms defy him—the moon- month tide of menstruation, the cycle of ten moon-months of bearing the growing child and its birth at the end of the tenth wave—these are essentials too strong to be mastered by man. But the subtler ebb and flow of woman’s \sea has escaped man's observation or his care. If a swimmer comes to a sandy beach when the tide is out, and the waves have receded, leaving sand where he had expected deep blue water—does he, balked of his bath, angrily call the sea “capricious”? . . . But the tenderest bridegroom finds onl caprice in his bride's coldness when she yields her sacrificial body while her sex-tide is at the ebb. There is another side to this problem, one woMAN’s “CONTRARINEss” 45 perhaps even less considered by society. There is the case of the loving woman whose love-tide is at the highest and whose husband does not recognize the signs of her ardor. In our anae- mic artificial days it often happens that the man's desire is a surface need, quickly satis- fied, colorless and lacking beauty, and that he has no knowledge of the rich complexities of love-making which an initiate of love's mys- teries enjoys. To such a man his wife may in- deed seem petulant, capricious, or resentful without reason. - Welling up in her are the wonderful tides, scented and enriched by the myriad experiences of the human race from its ancient days of leisure and flower-wreathed love-making, urg- ing her to transports and to self-expressions, were the man but ready to take the first step in the initiative, or to recognize and welcome it in her. Seldom dare any woman, still more seldom dare a wife, risk the blow at her heart . which would be given were she to offer charm- ing love-play to which the man did not respond. To the initiate she will be able to reveal that the tide is up by a hundred subtle signs, upon which he will seize with delight. But if her husband is blind to them, there is for her noth- 46 LOVE IN MARRLAGE ing but silence, self-suppression, and their in- evitable sequence of self-scorn followed by 're- sentment towards the man who places her in such a position while talking of his “love.” So little of the ekements of the Art of Love do many men know that the case of Mrs. G. is certainly not exceptional. Her husband was accustomed to pet her and to have relations with her frequently, but yet he never took any trouble to rouse her sex-feelings. She had mar- ried as a very innocent girl, but often vaguely felt a sense of something lacking in her hus- Nº 's love. Her husband had never kissed i her except on the lips or cheeks, but once at : the crest of the wave of her sex-tide (all un- ; conscious that it was so) she felt a yearning to feel his head, his lips, pressed against her bosom. The sensitive interrelation between a i woman's breasts and the rest of her sex-life is a well-established fact, and there is a world , of poetic beauty in the longing of a loving ; woman for the unconceived child, which melts in mists of tenderness toward her lover, the soft touch of whose lips can thus rouse her mingled joy. Because she shyly asked him, Mrs. G.'s husband impressed one short kiss on her bosom, and never repeated it. He was so WOMAN’S “CONTRARINESS’’ 47 ignorant that he did not know that the kissing A. and the tender fondling with his lips of a woman's breasts is one of the first and surest ways to make her ready for complete and satis- factory union. In this way he inhibited her hat- ural desire, and as he never did anything to stir it, she never had any physical pleasure in their relation. Such prudish or careless hus- bands, content with their own satisfaction, lit- tle know the pent-up aching, or even resent- ment, which may eat into their wife's joy." In many cases, however, the man is also the victim of the social customs which make sex- knowledge for women taboo. - It has become a tradition of our social life that the ignorance of woman about her own body and that of her future husband is a flower- like innocence. And to such an extreme is this sometimes pushed, that not seldom is a girl married unaware that married life will bring her into physical relations with her husband, fundamentally different from those with her brother.” When she discovers the true nature *To * * men and women about town, this statement may appear ridieulous, fantastic or exaggerated. But it rep- resents a true state of affairs. Girls who get married in eomplete ignorance of what the marriage relation implies still exist to-day, in the year 1918—W. J. B. - 48 LOVE IN MARRIAGE of his body, and learns the part she has to play as a wife, she may refuse utterly to agree to her husband's wishes. I know a case in which the husband, chivalrous and loving, had to wait years before his bride recovered from the shock of the discovery of the meaning of marriage, and was able to allow him a natural relation. There are known not a few cases in which the horror of the first night of marriage with a man less considerate, has driven the bride to suicide or insanity. *. That girls can reach a marriageable age with- out some knowledge of the realities of sex would seem incredible; but it is a fact. One highly educated lady whom I know intimately told me that when she was about eighteen she suf- fered many months of agonizing apprehension that she was about to have a baby, because a man had snatched a kiss from her lips at a dance. When girls.so brought up are married, it is ſrape for the husband to insist on his “marital rights” at once. It will be difficult or impos- Vºl. for such a bride ever after to experience the joys of sex-union, for such a beginning must imprint upon her consciousness the view that the man's animal nature dominates him. WOMAN'S “CONTRARINESS” , 49 In a magazine I came across a poem which vividly expresses this peculiarly feminine sor- TOW 2 / “. . . . To mate with men who have no soul about Earth grubbing; who, the bridal night, forsooth, Killed sparks that rise from instinct fires of life, - And left us frozen things, alone to fashion Our souls to dust, masked with the name of wife— Long years of youth—love years—the years of pas-, sion Yawning before us. So, shamming to the end, All shriveled by the side of him we wed, Hoping that peace may riper years attend, Mere odalisques are we—well housed, well fed.” KATHERINE NELSON. Many men who enter marriage sincerely and tenderly, may yet have some previous experi- ence of bought “love.” It is then not unlikely that they may fall into the error of explaining their wife's experiences in terms of the reac- tions of the prostitute. They argue that, be- cause the prostitute showed physical excitement, and pleasure in the sexual act, if the bride or wife does not do so, then she is “cold” or “un- dersexed.” They may not realize that often alſ the bodily movements of the prostitute are studied and simulated because her client enjoys 50 LOVE IN MARRLAGE his orgasm best when he imagines that the woman in his arms has one simultaneously. As Forel says: “The company of prostitutes often renders men incapable of understanding feminine psychology, for prostitutes are hard- ly more than automata trained for the use of male sensuality. When men look among these for the sexual psychology of woman they find only their own mirror.” Fate is often cruel to men too. It may be that after years of fighting with his hot young blood a man has given up, and gone now and then for relief to prostitutes, and then later in life has met the woman who is his mate, and whom, after remorse for his soiled past, he marries. Then, unwittingly, he may make the wife suffer either by interpreting her in the light of the other women, or perhaps (though this happens less frequently) by setting her absolutely apart from them. I know of a man who, after a loose life, met a woman whom he reverenced and adored. He married her, but to preserve her “purity,” her difference from the others, he never had sexual relations with her.” She was strangely unhappy, for she "Such cases while rare are not altogether mythical, but the eause is generally to be found elsewhere. In some qases WOMAN’S “CONTRARINESS’’ 51 loved him passionately and longed for children. She appeared to him to be pining “capricious- ly” when she became thin and neurotic. Perhaps if this man had known that some female animals suffer severely and may even die if denied sexual union,” he might have seen his own behavior in a truer light. - The idea that woman is lowered or “soiled” by sexual intercourse is still deeply rooted in some strata of our society. Many sources have contributed to this mistaken idea, not the least powerful being the ascetic ideal of the early church, and the fact that man has used woman as his instrument so often regardless of her wishes. Woman’s education and the trend of social feeling have largely been in the direc-. tion of encouraging the idea that sex-life is a low, physical and degrading necessity which a pure woman should be above enjoying. . In marriage the husband has used his “mari- the abstinence is due to nothing more nor less than aequired impotence, the man's inability to perform the act. In other cases the reason may be found in a previous venereal disease and the man’s consequent fear to infect his wife. Conseiously or unconsciously the man makes a virtue eut of necessity. —W. J. R. *See Marshall, Quarterly Journal Microscopic Science, Wol. 48, 1904, p. 323. - 52 LovE IN MARRIAGE tal right”" of intercourse when he wished it. Both law and custom have strengthened the view that he has the right to approach his wife whenever he wishes, and that she has no wishes and no fundamental needs in the matter at all. . That woman has a rhythmic sex-tide which if its seasons were obeyed would ensure not only her enjoyment, but would explode the myth of her capriciousness, seems not to be sus- ected. We have studied the wave-lengths of water, of sound, of light: but when will the sons and daughters of men study the sex-tide woman and learn the laws of her Periodicity of Recurrence of Desire? - *“Conjugal Rights.” Notes and Queries. May 16th 1891, p. 383. “S. writes from the Probate Registry, Somerset House: “Previous to 1733 legal proceedings were recorded in Latin and the word then used where we now speak of rights was obsequies. For some time after the substitution of English for Latin, the term rites was usually, if not invariably, adopted; rights would appear to be a comparatively medera error.” y y “Mr. T. E. Paget writes . . . "Romeo and Juliet,” Aet W. Seene III: - What eursed foot wanders this way to-night Te cross my obsequies, and true lovers’ riteſ Well may Lord Esher say he has never been able to make out what the phrase “eonjugal rights’ means. The origin of the term is now clear, and a blunder which was first made perhaps by a type-setter in the early part of the last eentury, and never exposed until now, has led to a vast amount of misap- prehension. Here, too, is another proof that Shakespeare was exceedingly familiar with ‘legal language.’” CHAPTER IV TELE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE, “The judgments of men concerning women are very rarely matters of cold scientific observation, but are eoloured both by their own sexual emotions and by their own moral attitude teward the sexual impulse . . . [Men’s]. Statements about the sexual impulses ef women often tell us less about women than about the persons who make them.”—B. ELLs. By the majority of “nice” people woman is supposed to have no spontaneous sex impulses. By this I do not mean a sentimental “falling in love,” but a physical, a physiological state of stimulation which arises spontaneously and quite apart from any particular man. It is in truth the creative impulse, and is an expression of a high power of vitality. So widespread in Anglo-Saxon countries is the view that it is only depraved women who have such feelings (es- pecially before marriage) that most women would rather die than acknowledge that they do at times feel a physical yearning indescrib- able, but as profound as hunger for food. Yet many, many women have shown me the truth of 53 54 LOVE IN MARRLAGE their natures when I have simply and naturally assumed that of course they felt it—being nor- mal women—and have asked them only: When? From their replies I have collected facts which are sufficient to overturn many ready-made theories about women. Some of the ridiculous absurdities which go by the name of science may be illustrated by the statement made by Windscheid in the Cen- tralblatt für Gynākologie: “In the normal woman, especially of the higher social classes, the sexual instinct is acquired, not inborn; when it is inborn, or awakens by itself, there is ab- normality. Since women do not know this in- stinct before marriage, they do not miss it when they have no occasion in life to learn it.” (El- lis’ translation.) The negation of this view is expressed in the fable of Hera quoted by Ellen Key. Hera sent Iris to earth to seek out three virtuous and perfectly chaste maidens who were unsoiled by any dreams of love. Iris found them, but could not take them back to Olympus for they had already been sent for to replace the superan- nuated Furies in the infernal regions. Nevertheless it is true that the whole educa- tion of girls, which so largely consists in the TEIE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE' 55 concealment of the essential facts of life from them; and the positive teaching so prevalent that the racial instincts are low and shameful; and also the social condition which places so many women in the position of depending on their husband's will not only for the luxuries but for the necessities of life, have all tended to inhibit natural sex-impulses in women, and to conceal and distort what remains. It is also true that in our northern climate women are on the whole naturally less persist- ently stirred than southerners; and it is further true that with the delaying of maturity, due to our ever-lengthening youth, it often happens that a woman is approaching or even past thirty before she is awake to the existence in her of the sex-urge. For many years before that, how- ever, the unrealized influence, diffused through- out her very system, has profoundly affected her. It is also true that(partly due to the inhibit- ing influences of our customs, traditions and so- cial code) women may marry before it wakes, and may remain long after marriage entirely uñconscious that it exists subdued within them. For innumerable women too, the husband's reg- ular habits of intercourse, claiming her both when she would naturally enjoy union and when 56 LOVE IN MARRIAGE / it is to some degree repugnant to her, have tended to flatten out the billowing curves of the line of her natural desire. One result, appar- ently little suspected, of using the woman as a passive instrument for man's need has been, in effect, to make her that and nothing more. Those men—and there are many—who complain of the lack of ardor in good wives, are often themselves entirely to blame for it. When a woman is claimed at times when she takes no natural pleasure in union, it reduces her vital- ity, and tends to kill her power of enjoying it when the love season returns. It is certainly true of women as they have been made by the inhibitions of modern civili- zation, that most of them are only fully awake to the existence of sex after marriage. As we are civilized human beings, the social, in- tellectual, spiritual side of the love-choice have tended to mask the basic physiological aspect of women’s sex-life. To find a woman in whom the currents are not all so entangled that the whole is inseparable into factors, is not easy, but I have found that wives (particularly happy wives whose feelings are not complicated by the stimulus of another love) who have been sepa- rated from their husbands for some months THE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE 57 through professional or business duties—whose husbands, for instance, are abroad—are the women from whom the best and most definite (ºr: of a fundamental rhythm of feeling can be obtained. Such women, yearning daily for the tender comradeship and nearness of their husbands, find in addition, at particular times, an accession of longing for the close physical union of the final sex-act. Many such separated wives feel this, and those I have asked to keep notes of the dates, have, with re- markable unanimity, told me that these times came specially just before and a week or so after the close of menstruation, coming, that is, about every fortnight. It is from such women. that I got the first clew to the knowledge of . I call the Law of Periodicity of Recur- ence of desire in women. This law it is possible to represent graphi- cally as a curved line; a succession of crests and hollows as in all wave-lines. Its simplest and most fundamental expression, however, is gen- erally immensely complicated by other stimula- 'tions which may bring into it diverse series of waves, or irregular wave-crests. We have all, at some time, watched the regular ripples of the sea breaking against a sand-bank, and noticed 58 LOVE IN MARRLAGE that the influx of another current of water may send a second system of waves at right angles to the first, cutting athwart them, so that the two series of waves pass through each other. Woman is so sensitive and responsive an in- strument, and is so liable in our modern civil- ized world to be influenced by innumerable sets of stimuli, that it is perhaps scarcely surpris- -ing that the deep, underlying waves of her prim- itive sex-tides have been obscured, and en- tangled so that their regular sequence has been masked in the choppy turmoil of her sea, and their existence has been largely unsuspected, d apparently quite unstudied. JFor some years I have been making as scien- tific and detailed a study as possible of this ex- tremely complex problem. Owing to the frank d scientific attitude of a number of women, and the ready and intimate confidence of many more, I have obtained a number of most inter- esting facts from which I think it is already pos- sible to deduce a generalization which is illu- minating, and may be of great medical and so- ciological value. It is first necessary to consider several other features of woman’s life, however. The obvious moon-month rhythm in woman, ; } THE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE. 5s so obvious that it cannot be overlooked, has been partially studied in its relation to some of the ordinary functions of her life. Experiments have been made to show its influence on the rate of breathing, the muscular strength, the tem- perature, the keenness of sight, etc., and these results have even been brought together and pictured in a single curved diagram supposed to show the variability in woman's capacities at the different times in her twenty-eight-day cycle. But it brings home to one how little original work even in this field has yet been done, that the same identical diagram is repeated from book to book, and in Marshall’s “Physiology” it is “taken from Sellheim,” in Havelock Ellis “from Van Ott,” and in other books is re-copied and attributed to still other sources. This diagram appears to be the only one of its kind, and is reproduced by one learned au- thority after another, yet nearly every point on which this curve is based appears to have been disputed. t According to this curve, woman’s vitality rises during the few days before menstruation, N sinks to its lowest ebb during menstruation an rises shortly after, and then runs nearly level 60 LOVE IN MARRLAGE till it begins to rise again before the next men- strual period. This simple curve may or may not be true for woman's temperature, muscular strength, and the 'other relatively simple things which have been investigated. My work, and observations on a large number of women, all go to show that this curve does not represen the waves of woman's sex-tides. - The whole subject is so complex and so little studied that it is difficult to enter upon it at all without going into many details which may seem remote or dull to the general reader. Even a question which we must all have asked, and over which we have probably pondered in vain, namely: What is menstruation? camot yet be answered. To the lay mind it would seem that this question should be answerable at once by any doctor; but many medical men are still far from being able to reply to it even approximately correctly. There are a good many shight variations among us, ranging from a three to a five week “month,” but the majority of the women of our race have a moon-month of twenty-eight days, once during which comes the flow of menstrua- tion. If we draw out a chart with succeeding periods of 28 days each, looking on each period THE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE 61 as a unit: When in this period is it that a normal healthy woman feels desire, or any up- welling of her sex-tides? The few statements which are made in gen- eral medical and physiological literature on the subject of sex feeling in women, are generally very guarded and vague. Marshall (“Physiol- ogy of Reproduction,” p. 138) for instance, says: “The period of most acute sexual feeling is generally just after the close of the menstrual period.” Ellis speaks of desire being stronger before and sometimes also after menstruation, and appears to lean to the view that it is natural for desire to coincide with the menstrual flow. After the most careful inquiries I have come to the conclusion that the general confusion re- garding this subject is due partly to the great amount of variation which exists between dif- ferent individuals, and partly to the fact that very few women have any idea of taking any scientific interest in life, and partly to the fact that the more profound, fundamental rhythm of sex desire which I have come to the conclu- sion exists or is potential in every normal woman, is covered over or masked by the more superficial and temporary influences due to a great variety of stimuli or inhibitions in mod- 62 LOVE IN MARRIAGE Kern life. For the present consideration I have tried to disentangle the profound and natural rhythm from the more irregular surface waves. Chart No. I may assist in making graphically clear what has been said in these last few pages. It is compounded from a number of individual records, and shows a fair average chart of the rhythmic sequence of superabundance and flag- ging in woman's sex-vitality. The tops of the wave-crests come with remarkable regularity so that there are two wave-crests in each twenty-eight day month. The one comes on the two or three days just before menstruation: the other after; but after menstruation has ceased there is a nearly level interval, bringing the next wave-crest to the two or three days which come about eight or nine days after the close of menstruation, that is, just round the fourteen days, or half the moon month, since the last wave-crest. If this is put in its simplest way, one may say that there are fortnightly pe- riods of desire, arranged so that one period comes always just before each menstrual flow. Upon her vitality at the time, and the general health of the woman, the length of each desire- period, or, as we might say, the size and com- plexity of each wave-crest, depends. Sometimes ©e º: º ** § - & § § § § § §: % § º i : ; º:". -§: * ; i º• *$ ; -º -# # ;: As -: ; %; - ; • * * * w x as a 2% art a sºo 5 to w no as as # 2, we 2 s a set w 2 row a w & w as as as at as so a se s 61 rºo CHART I Curve showing the Periodicity of Recurrence of natural desire in healthy women. Various causes make slight irregu- larities in the position, size and duration of the “wave-crests,” but the general rhythmic sequence is apparent. ºſseto-eaga gųųą go geoțđu eų ſó requunu pus qų8țøų ºlų ſą uwoqº ºſ ſąſtºſſa gegeerºuſ eqq, ºqºețqus eq} ;0 43||Teſſa 9q3 peromsø i Ips ouțary v \søla øqa go guipſ 9q) ºuļump pus ºrogºq &quoqs ºu IIIºa-dm quºpuer, pus eſqeex • ſq 4 ſuo pºquesºudou o 4seno ºſłow.load puu omºguļ go … sąsajo-aawa,, eqq uo ¿qoºgº ºuţssandoq eqq $uſa oqº eaumo : II LÄHVHO What generally happens in marriage where this is not thought of is that one of the very earliest unions results in the fertilization of the wife, so that the young pair have a baby nine months, or a little more, after marriage. i CHILDREN 127 Whereas, were they wise and did they real- ize the full significance of what they were doing, they would allow at least six months or a year to elapse before beginning the supreme task of their lives, the burden of which falls mainly upon the woman. For many reasons it is more ideal to have the children spontaneously and early; but if economic conditions are hard, as they so often are in “civilized” life, it may be better to marry and defer the children rather than not to marry. If the pair married very young, and before. they could afford to support children, they might wait several years with advantage. An exceptional case is one of the happiest mar- riages I know. The pair married while they were young students in the University, and fourteen years later they had their first child, a splendidly healthy boy. Though such a long interval is certainly not to be universally recom- mended, as it is said that it may result in steril- ity [preventive measures in themselves never lead to sterility. W. J. R.], in this instance it was triumphantly better for the two to have lived normally satisfied happy lives than to have waited for fourteen years, and risked the man's “fall.” f 128 LovE IN MARRIAGE There are many reasons, both for their own and for the child's sake, why the potential par- ents should take the wise precaution of delay, unless owing to special circumstances they can- not expect to live together uninterruptedly. The child, conceived in rapture and hope, should be given every material chance which the wisdom and love of the parents can devise. And the first and most vital condition of its health is that the mother should be well and happy and free from anxiety while she bears it. The tremendous and far-reaching effects of marriage on the woman's whole organism make her less fitted to bear a child at the very com- mencement of marriage than later on when the system will have adjusted itself to its new con- ditions and she will have regained her poise and normal health. Not only for the sake of the child, however, should the first conception be a little delayed, but also to secure the lasting happiness of the married lovers. It is generally (though per- haps not always) wise thoroughly to establish their relation to each other before introducing the inevitable dislocation and readjustment ne- cessitated by the wife's pregnancy and the birth of a child. CHILDREN 129 In this book I am not speaking so much of the universal sex relation, as to those who find themselves to-day in the highly civilized, arti- ficial communities of English speaking people: and in our present society there is little doubt that the early birth of a child demands much self-sacrifice and self-restraint from the man, one of the reflex vibrations of which is his un- definable sense of loss and separation from his bride. . This has been confided to me by many men who have been generous enough to trust me with some of the secrets of their lives. Mr. C. is typical of many others of his class. He was quiet and refined with a strong strain of romantic love, which was entirely centered in his bride. He was manly and sufficiently virile to feel the need of sex intercourse, but he was unaware (as are so many men) of the woman's corresponding need; and he did not give his wife any orgasm. She took no pleasure therefore in the physical act of union, which for her was so incomplete. - Very shortly after marriage she conceived, and a child was born ten months after the wed- ding day. . ë - For two years after the birth of the child her vitality was so lowered and the sex act was * 130 LOVE IN MARRIAGE to her so repugnant that she refused her hus- band any union; and it was thus three years after their marriage before they met in any- thing like a normal way. By that time the long separation from sex-life, and the strain on the man, coupled with daily familiarity at home, had dimmed, if not completely destroyed, his sense of romance. The natural stimulation each should exert on the other had faded, so that they never experienced the mutual glow of intense rapture in their sex-union. Another pair suffered similarly: Mr. and Mrs. D. were prevented for several years by the wife's real and fancied ill-health from hav- ing any intercourse. When, after that time, she recovered and passionately desired the true marriage relation, the husband felt it to be im- possible. To him it would have been, as he expressed it, “like raping his sister.” Once such a thought has grown into a maa's mind it is very difficult “to recapture the first early rapture.” And with the loss of that early rapture the two lose, for the rest of their lives, the irradiating joy which is priceless not only for its beauty, but for the vitality with which its wings are laden. - On the other hand, if by waiting some months CHILDREN 131 \ (or even years if they are young) the mated pair have learnt to adjust themselves to each other and have experienced the full and su- preme rapture of complete love-making, the disturbance which is caused by the birth of the child is in no sense a danger to their happiness, but is its crown and completion. A man once said to me—one can endure any- thing for the sake of a beloved wife. But the wife is only utterly beloved when she and her married lover have not only entered paradise together, but when she fully realizes, through insight gained by her own experiences, the true nature of that of which she is depriving her husband so long as her bodily condition makes sex-unions with him impossible. Much has been written, and may be found in the innumerable books on the sex-problems, as to whether a man and woman should or should not have relations while the wife is bearing an unborn child. In this matter experience is very various, so that it is difficult or impossible to give definite advice without knowing the full circumstances of each case. When, however, we observe the admirable sanctity of the pregnant females of the wood- land creatures, and when we consider the ex- 132 IOVE IN MARRIAGE traordinary ignorance and disregard of wom- an’s needs which mark so many of our modern customs, we cannot but think that the safe side of this debatable question must be in the com- plete continence of the woman for at least six months before the birth of the child. I have heard from a number of women, however, that they desire union urgently at this time, and from others that the thought of it is incredible. [To demand complete continence for at least six months before the child is born is entirely too severe a requirement. As a woman should for several reasons wait six weeks or two. months after the birth of the child before re- suming sex relations, it follows that with each pregnancy the husband would have to be absti- nent for a period of about eight months. Such complete abstinence would be for some hus- bands difficult, for some unbearable. For some it might result in very unpleasant complica- tions. Nor is it so easy for all wives during the acme of their sex lives to abstinent for eight months, especially if we bear in mind that with some women the sex-urge is extremely in- sistent during pregnancy. No, such abstinence is unnecessary. Six weeks to two months of abstinence before and the same period after the CHILDREN 133 birth of a child is quite sufficient, and proper, and will not injure husband, wife or child.-See Chapter: Intercourse During Pregnancy in the Editor’s “Women—Her Sex and Love Life.” W. J. R.] Tolstoy strongly condemned any sex-contact while the wife was pregnant or nursing and blamed the husband who “puts upon her the unbearable burden of being at one and the same time a mistress, an exhausted mother, and a sickly, irritable, hysterical individual. And the husband loves her as his mistress, ignores her … as a mother, and hates her for the irritability and hysteria which he himself has produced and produces.” His view is taken by many of our noblest men. While the wife feels that she cannot allow her husband to enter the portals of her body when it has become the sacred temple of a developing life, she should also consider the perpetual strain which nature imposes upon him; and the tender and loving wife will readily find some means of giving him that physical relief which his nature needs. * The exquisite unselfish tenderness which is aroused in a man by the sense of mental and spiritual harmony with a wife who sympathizes 134 LOVE IN MARRLAGE with, because she understands his needs, is one of the loveliest things in marriage. A wife who knows how to waken this tenderness in a man raises him out of the self-centered slough in which so many men wallow unhappily. With an ardent man, wholly devoted to his wife and long deprived of her, the time will come when it will be sufficient for him to be near her and caress her for relief to take place without any physical connection, if, as every wife should, she has retained after marriage that dainty modesty which renders the sight of her bosom and of her beauty a privilege and a joy to her husband. After the birth of the first child the health of the mother and of the baby both demand that there should be no hurried beginning of a sec- ond. At least a year should pass before the second little life is allowed to begin its unfold- ing, so that a minimum of about two years should elapse before the second child is born. The importance of this, both for the mother and for the child, is generally adequately rec- ognized by medical specialists, and some distin- guished gynecologists advocate as much as three or five years between the births of successive children. While in the whole human relation CHILDREN 135 there is no slavery or torture so horrible as co- erced, unwilling motherhood, there is no joy and pride greater than that of a woman who is bear- ing the developing child of a man she adores. It is a serious reflection on our poisoned “civili- zation” that a pregnant woman should feel shame to appear in the streets. Never will the race reach true health till it is cured of its prurient sickness, and the prospective mother can carry her sacred burden as a priestess in a triumphal procession. Of the innumerable problems which touch upon the qualities transmitted to the children by their parents, the study of which may be cov- ered by the general term Eugenics, I shall here say nothing: nor shall I deal with the problems of birth and child-rearing. Many writers have considered these subjects, and my purpose in this book is to present aspects of sex-life which have been more or less neglected by others. While throughout I have omitted the consid- eration of abnormalities, there is one condition , which verges on the abnormal but yet touches the lives of some married people who are indi- vidually both normal and healthy, about which a few words need to be said. It not infrequently happens that two healthy 136 LOVE IN MARRLAGE loving people, for no apparent reason, seem un- able to have a child. The old-fashioned view was that the fault lay with the woman, and the reproach of being a barren woman is one which has brought untold anguish to many hearts. It is now beginning to be recognized, however, that in a childless union, the “fault,” if fault it be, is as often the man's as the woman's, particularly where the husband is a brain worker in a city. Though it is natural that there should not be the same joy for the pair in a child which had not arisen from their own supreme fusion, nevertheless, the man who is generous and broad-minded might find much joy in a child of his wife's, were the obtaining of this child not coupled with the yielding of her body to the embrace of another man, which is so gen- erally and naturally repugnant to a husband. "Nevertheless, now that women have been suc- cessfully impregnanted by means of injected semen, a new possibility has arisen for any in- dividual pair who are childless and who long for a little one.” Where the injection is under- *This was done by the famous Dr. Hunter at the end of the eighteenth century, and since then various doctors have employed this method. An aecount of some eases is given by { CHILDREN 137 täken by a woman doctor, the husband need have no feeling that his wife has been violated. And while it is not certain that this method would succeed in giving the child she longs for to the woman, yet there are sufficient records in the medical profession of successful artificial insemination for it to offer much hope to a pair who have been denied perfectly normal parent- hood either through the husband's actual steril- ity or the lack of mutual adjustment in their organs, or from an ill-understood lack of chemi- cal affinity. While in such an event the husband would have no bodily part in the heritage of this child, *—º. in the creation of its spirit he could play a profound part, the potentialities of which ap- - pear to be almost unrecognized by humanity. [I regret having to disillusion the reader on the subject of artificial impregnation. Many attempts at artificial impregnation of the hu- man female have been made, but the successes have been so few and far between, that the method is never likely to acquire a great vogue. For some centuries to come we will have to depend upon the old-fashioned natural meth- Heape in the Prºceedings of the Royal Society, 1897; see also Marshall's text book of “Physiology of Reproduction,” 1919. 138 LOVE IN MARRIAGE) od for the perpetuation of the human race. W. J. R.] The idea that the soul and character of the child can be in any degree influenced by the mental status of the mother during the months of its development as an embryo within her body, is apt to be greeted with pure skepticism —for it is difficult of proof, and repugnant to the male intellect, now accustomed to explain life in terms of chemistry. Yet all the wisest mothers whom I know vary only in the degree of their belief in this power of the mother. All are agreed in believing that the spiritual and mental condition and environ- ment of the mother does profoundly affect the character and the mental and spiritual powers of the child. d # An interesting fact which strengthens the woman's point of view, is quoted (though not in this connection) by Marshall,” who says: “It has been found that immunity from disease may be acquired by young animals being suckled by a female which had previously become immune, the antibody to the disease being absorbed in the ingested milk.” This particular fact is ex- plainable in terms of chemistry: but it seems to ***The Physiology of Reproduction,” 1910, p. 566. CHILDREN 139 me more than rash for any one in these days of hormones from ductless glands, to deny the pos- sibility of mental states in the mother generat- ing “chemical messengers” which may impress permanent characters in the physiological re- actions of the developing child. Ellis says (“Sex and Society”), “The mother is the child’s supreme parent, and during the period from conception to birth the hygiene of the future man can only be affected by influences which work through her.” And Alfred Russel Wallace, the great natu- ralist, thought the transmission of mental in- fluence neither impossible nor even very improb- able.” I am convinced that it takes place all the time, molding and influencing the hereditary factors. Hence I suggest that the husband who is de- prived of normal fatherhood may yet make the child of his wife's body partly his own, if his thoughts are with her intensely, supportingly and joyously throughout the whole time of the unborn baby’s growth. If he reads to her, plays beautiful music or takes her to hear it, and gives her the very best of his thoughts and aspira- tions, mystical though the conclusion may seem, ***Nature,” 1893, August 24, pp. 389 and 390. 140 LOVE IN MARRLAGE he does attain an actual measure of fatherhood. The converse, where the wife is really bar- ren and the husband capable of having children with another woman, is a much more difficult problem. Then the attainment of children by the man is impossible without the collaboration of another woman in a manner not recognized by our laws and customs. Even if this is done, it is clear that to introduce the child of another woman into the home is demanding a much greater self-abnegation from the wife than is demanded from the husband in the situation we have just considered. Many people whose ideals are very noble are yet strangely incapable of adapting the material facts of life to the real fulfillment of their ideals. Thus there is a section of our community which insists that there should be no restriction what- ever of the number of children born to married people. They think any birth control immoral. They take their stand upon the statement that we have no right to destroy potential life. But if they would study a little human or animal physiology they would find that not only every celibate, but also every married man incessantly and unavoidably wastes myriads of germs which had the potentiality of fusion with an ovum, and CHILDREN 141 consequently could have produced a child had opportunity been given them. For the supposed sake of one or two of these myriad sperma- tozoa which must naturally and inevitably die, they encourage the production of babies in rapid succession, which are weakened by their proximity, while they might have been sturdy and healthy, had they been conceived further apart from each other. Such people, while awake to the claims of the unborn, nay even of the unconceived, are blind to the claims of the one who should be dearest of all to the husband, and for whose health and happiness he is responsible. A man swayed by such pseudo-religious ignorance will allow his wife to bear and bring forth an infant annually. Save where the woman is exceptional, each child following so rapidly on its predecessor, saps and divides the vital strength which is avail- able for the making of the offspring. This generally lowers the vitality of each succeed- ing child, and surely even if slowly, may mur- der the woman who bears them. Of course the effects of this strain upon the woman vary greatly according to her original health and vitality, the conditions of her sur- roundings and the intensity of the family's 142 LOVE IN MARRIAGE struggle for food. A half-starved mother try- ing to bring up children in the foul air of city slums, loses, as a rule, far more of her family than a comfortable and well-fed woman in the country. Nevertheless, conditions are not every- thing; under the best conditions the chances of death of the later children of a large family, which comes rapidly, are far greater than for the earlier children. - Dr. Ploetz found that while the death rate of first born infants is about 220 per thousand, the death rate of the seventh born is about 330, and of the twelfth born is 597 per thousand. So that when “nature” has its way, and twelve children come to sap a woman's vitality, so lit- tle strength has she that nearly 60 per cent. of these later ones die. What a waste of vitality! What a hideous orgy of agony for the mothers to produce in anguish death-doomed, suffering infants! . Forel (“The Sexual Question”) says: “It seems almost incredible that in some countries medical men who are not ashamed to throw young men into the arms of prostitution, blush when mention is made of anti-conceptional methods. This false modesty, created by cus- tom and prejudice, waxes indignant at innocent CHILDREN 143 things while it encourages the greatest infa- mies.” - It is important to observe that Holland, the country which takes most care that children shall be well and voluntarily conceived, has in- creased its survival-rate and has thereby not diminished but increased its population, and has the lowest infant mortality in Europe. While in America, where the outrageous “Comstock Laws” confuse wise scientific prevention with illegal abortion and label them both as “ob. scene,” thus preventing people from obtaining decent hygienic knowledge, horrible and crim. inal abortion is more frequent than in any other country. It should be realized that all the proper, medi- cal methods of preventing undesired pregnancy consists, not in destroying an already growing embryo, but in preventing the male semen from reaching the unfertilized egg cell. This may be done either by shutting the semen away from the opening of the womb, or by securing the death of all (instead of the natural death of all but one) of the two or three hundred million spermatozoa which enter the woman. Even when a child is allowed to grow in its mother, all these hundreds of millions of spermatozoa 144 LOVE, IN MARRIAGE are inevitably and naturally destroyed every time the man has an emission; and to add one more to these millions sacrificed by nature is surely no crime! To render inert the ejaculated spermatozoa which would otherwise die and de- compose naturally is a simple matter, now fa- miliar to every intelligent physician and lay- man. The knowledge is easily obtainable. To those who protest that we have no right to interfere with the course of nature, one must point out that the whole of civilization, every- thing which separates man from the animals, is an interference with what such people com- monly call “nature.” s Nothing in the cosmos can be against nature for it all forms part of the great processes of the universe. - > Actions differ, however, in their relative po- sitions in the scale of things. Only those ac- tions are worthy which lead the race onwards to a higher and fuller completion and the per- fecting of its powers, which steer the race into the main current of that stream of life and vi- tality which courses through us and impels us forward. ^ It is the sacred duty of all who dare to hand on the awe-inspiring gift of life, to hand it on CHILDREN 145 in a vessel as fit and perfect as they can fashion, so that the body may be the strongest and most beautiful instrument possible in the service of the soul they summon to play its part in the mystery of material being. - CHAPTER X SOCIETY “Leve is fed not by what it takes, but by what it gives, and that excellent dual love of man and wife must be fed also by the love they give to others.”—Epward CARPENTEs. MAN, even the commonplace modern man, is romantic. He craves consciously or uncon- sciously for the freedom, the beauty, and the adventure which his forefathers found in their virgin forests. This craving, transmuted, changed out of recognition by civilized life and modern conditions, is yet a factor not to be ignored in the relationship of the sexes. The “bonds of matrimony” so often referred to with ribald laughter, touch, and perhaps se- cretly gall, even the most romantic and devoted husband. If to the sincere and friendly ques- tion, “What is most difficult in married life for the man?” one should get a sincere answer —that answer would be summed up in the words: “Perpetual propinquity.” Of this, the wife, particularly if she be really 146 SOCIETY: 147 in love, is seldom fully aware. If her husband is her true lover, his tenderness and real devo- tion will give him the wit to conceal it. But though by concealment he may preserve the un- ruffled surface of their happiness, yet the long- ing to be roving is not completely extinguished. In the true lover this unspoken and unconscious longing is perhaps less a desire to set out upon a fresh journey, than a longing to experience again the exquisite joy of the return: to re-live the magic charm of the approach to the spot in which the loved one is living her life, into the sacred separateness of which the lover breaks and, like the Prince by his kiss, to stir her to fresh activity. - * As will be realized by those who have under- stood the preceding chapters, each coming to- gether of man and wife, even if they have been mated for many years, should be a fresh adven- ture; each winning should necessitate a fresh wooing. Yet what a man often finds so hard, is to come to that wooing with full ardor and with that complete sense of romance which alone can ren- der it utterly delightful, if the woman he is to woo has been in a too uninterrupted and pro- saic relation with him in the meantime. 148 LovE IN MARBLAGE Most men, of course, have their businesses apart from their homes, but in the home lives of the great mass of middle-class people, the Victorian tradition still too largely preponder- ates, and the mated pair bore each other to death during the daily routine. | To a very thoughtful couple of my acquaint- ance, the sense of romantic joy in one another was so precious that they endeavored to per- petuate it by living in different houses. Such a measure, however, is not likely to suit many people, particularly where there are chil- dren. Yet even without bodily separation (which must always entail expense) or any measure of freedom not at every one's command, much can be done to retain that sense of spiritual freedom in which alone the full joy of loving union can be experienced. . r - But even intellectual and spiritual freedom is often rendered impossible in present-day mar- riage. • The beautiful desire for ideal unity which is so strong in most hearts, is perhaps the original cause of one of the most deadening features in many marriages. In the endeavor to attain the ideal unity, one partner consciously or uncon- sciously imposes his or her will and opinions SOCIETY, 149 upon the other partner, and then upon the chil- dren as they grow up. The typical self-opinionated male which this course develops, while a subject for laughter in plays and novels, a laughter which hastens his extermination, is yet by no means extinct. In his less exaggerated form such a man may often be an idealist, but he is essentially an idealist of narrow vision. The peace, the unity, for which he craves is superficially attained; but it takes acuter eyes than his to see that it is attained not by harmonious intermingling, but by super-position and destruction. I have known a romantic man of this type, apparently unaware that he was encroaching upon his wife's personality, who yet endeavored not only to choose her books and her friends for her, but “prohibited” her from buying the daily newspaper to which she had been accus- tomed for years before her marriage, saying that one newspaper was enough for them both, and blandly ignoring the fact that he took it with him out of the house before she had an opportunity of reading it. This man posed to himself more successfully than to others, not only as a romantic man, but as a model hus- band; and he reproached his wife for jeopardiz- 150 LOVE IN MARRLAGE ing their perfect unity whenever she accepted an invitation in which he was not included. On the other hand, in homes where the avowed desire is for the modern freedom of intellectual life for both partners, there is very frequently a bickering, a sense of disharmony and unrest that dispels the peace and the air of restful se- curity which is an essential feature of a true home. It is one of the most difficult things in the world for two people of different opinions to re- tain their own opinions without each endeavor- ing to convert or coerce the other, and at the same time to feel the same tender trust in the judgment of the other that each would have felt had they agreed. It takes a generous and beautiful heart to see beauty and dignity in the attitude of a mate who is looking at the other side of a vital question. But the very fact that it does take a beautiful and generous heart to do this thing proves it well worth the doing. If the easier way is chosen and the two mu- tually conceal their views when they differ, or the stronger partner coerces the weaker into hiding those traits which give personality to an individual, the result is an impoverishing of SOCIETY 151 both, and through that very fact, an impover- ishment, a lowering of the love which both sought to serve. In marriage each one dreams that he will find the Understander—the one from whom he may set out into the world in search of treasures of knowledge and experience, and before whom the spoils may be exhibited without thought of ri- valry, and with the certainty of glad apprisal. Treasures, dear to our own hearts but of no value to others, should here find appreciation, and here the tender super-sensitive germ of an idea may be watered and tended till its ripe beauty is ready to burst upon the world. As marriage is at present, such tenderness and such stimulating appreciation is much more likely to come from the woman to the man and his work than from the man to the woman. . For too long have men been accustomed to look upon woman's views, and in particular on herº intellectual opinions, as being something de- manding at the most a bland humoring beneath the kindest of smiles. Even from the noblest man, the woman of sensitive personality to-day feels an undercur- rent as of surprised congratulation when she has anything to say worth his serious attention 152 LOVE IN MARRIAGE outside that department of life supposed to be- long to her “sphere.” Thus man robs his wedded self of a greatness which the dual unity might reach. But in marriage the mutual freedom and re- spect for opinions, vitally important though they be, are not sufficient for the full develop- ment of character. Life demands ever widening interests. Owing partly to the differentiation of many types of individuals due to the special- ization of civilization, and partly to the trans- mutation of his old vagrant instinct, man in- creasingly desires to touch and to realize the lives of his fellows: In the lives of others our hearts and understandings may find perpetual adventures into the new and strange. Individual human beings, even the noblest and most complex yet evolved, have but a share of the innumerable faculties of the race. Hence even in a supremely happy, marriage, which touches, as does the mystic in his raptures, a realization of the whole universe, there cannot lie the whole of life’s experience. Outside the actual lives of the pair there must always be many types of thought and many potentialities which can only be realized in the lives of other people. SOCIETY 153 In the complete human relation friends of all grades are needed, as well as a mate. Marriage, however, in its present form is too often made to curtail the enjoyment of intimate friend- ships. The reason for this is partly the social etiquette, which, though discarded in the high- est levels of society, still lingers in many cir- cles, of inviting the husband and the wife to- gether upon all social occasions. It is true that they are separated at the dinner table, but they are always within the possibility of ear- shot of each other, which very often deadens their potentialities for being entertaining. The mere fact of being overheard repeating some- thing one may have already said elsewhere, is sufficient to prevent some people from telling their best stories, or from expressing their real views about important matters. - And, a still more serious barrier to joy, so primitive, so little evolved are we even yet, there is in most human beings a strong streak of sex-jealousy. For either mate to be allowed to go out uncriticized into the world, is to de- mand, if not more than the other is willing to give, at least a measure of trust which by its rarity appears now-a-days as something con- spicuously fine. 154 LOVE IN MARRLAGE Jealousy, which is one of the most frequent shadows cast by the light of love, is very apt to sow a distrust in one which makes a normal life for the other partner impossible. It is hard to say in which sex the feeling is more strongly developed. It takes special forms under different circumstances, and if a nature is predisposed towards it, it is one of the most difficult characteristics to eradicate. Custom, and generations of traditions, seem to have imprinted on our race the false idea that marital fidelity is to be strengthened by coercive bonds. We are slowly growing out of this, and now-a-days in most books giving advice to young wives there is a section telling them that a man should be allowed his men friends after marriage. But this is not enough. There should be com- plete and unquestioning trust on both sides. The man and the woman should each be free to go, unchallenged even in thought, on solitary excursions, or on visits, week-ends or walking tours, without the possibility of a breath of jeal- ousy or suspicion springing up in the heart of the other. t It is true that many natures are not yet ready for such trust, and might abuse such freedom. , \ SOCIETY 155 But the baser natures will always find a method of gratifying their desires, and are not likely to err more in trusted freedom than they would inevitably have done through secret intrigues if held in jealous bondage. And it is only in the fresh unsullied air of such freedom that the fullest and most perfect love can develop. In the marriage relation it is supremely true that only by loosening the bonds can one bind two hearts indissolubly to- gether. When they are sometimes physically apart married lovers attain the closest spiritual union. For with sensitive spirits—and they are the only ones who know the highest pinnacles of love—periods of separation and solitude can be revivifying and re-creative. - So great is the human soul that some of its beauty is hidden by nearness: it needs distance between it and the beholder to be perceived in its true perspective. To the realization of the beauty and the enjoy- ment of solitude, woman in general tends to be less open than man. This, perhaps, is due to the innumerable generations during which the claims of her children and of domestic life have robbed her of nature's healing gift. 156 LOVE IN MARRIAGE Although it is merely incidental to the drama, yet to me the most poignant thing in Synge's beautiful play Deirdré is that she could feel inevitable tragedy when the first thought of something apart from herself crosses her lover’s mind. Deirdré and her lover had been together for seven years in an unbroken and idyllic intimacy, and she feels that all is fin- ished, and that her doom, the knell of their joy, had struck, when for the first time she perceived in him a half-formed thought of an occupation apart from her. This ancient weakness of our sex must be conquered, and is being conquered by the mod- era. WOLT1811. * * While modern marriage is tending to give ever more and more freedom to each of the part- ners, there is at the same time a unity of work and interest growing up which brings them to- gether on a higher plane than the purely do- mestic one which was so confining to the women and so dull to the men. Every year one sees a widening of the independence and the range of the pursuits of women: but still, far too often, marriage puts an end to woman's intellectual life. Marriage can never reach its full stature until women possess as much intellectual free- SOCIETY 157 dom and freedom of opportunity within it as do their partners. - That at present the majority of women neither desire freedom for creative work, nor would know how to use it, is only a sign that we are still living in the shadow of the coercive and dwarfing influences of the past. In an interesting article on woman's intellec- tual work, W. J. Thomas (“Sex and Society”) says: “The American woman, with the enjoy- ment of greater liberty has made an approach toward the standards of professional scholar- ship, and some individuals stand at the very top in their university studies and examina- tions. The trouble with these cases is that they are either swept away and engulfed by the mod- ern system of marriage, or find themselves ex- cluded in some intangible way from association with men in the fullest sense, and no career is open to their talents.” “ He sees clearly that this is but a passing phase in the development of our society, and he advocates a wider scope for the play of married women's powers. “The practice of an occupa- tional activity of her own choosing, and a gen- erous attitude towards this on the part of the 158 LovE IN MARRIAGE man, would contribute to relieve the strain and make marriage more frequently successful.” When woman naturally develops the powers latent within her, man will find at his side not only a mate, free and strong, but a desirable friend and an intellectual comrade. The desire for freedom, both for physical and mental exploration and for experiences outside the sacred enclosure of the home, may at first sight appear to be conflicting and entirely in- compatible with the ideal of closer and more perfect unity between the married pair. But this conflict is only apparent, though it is true that most writers have failed to realize this. Consequently, in some sections of the writing and teaching of the “advanced” schools, there are claims only for increased freedom—a free- dom to wander at will—a freedom in which the wanderer does not return to his fixed center. On the other hand there are those who real- ize principally the beauty of married unity, and, concentrating on the demand for the unity and extremest chastity on the part of the married pair, are very apt to ignore the enriching flow of a wide life’s experiences. They try to dam up the fertilizing tide of life, and thus, though they are unconscious of what they are doing, SOCIETY 159 they tend to reduce the richness and beauty of marriage. - It is for the young people of the new genera- tion to realize that the two currents of longing which spring up within them—the longing for a full life-experience, and the longing for a close union with a life-long mate—are not in- compatible but are actually both essential parts of the more perfect and fuller beauty of the fu- ture that already seeks to find its expression in their lives. Ellen Key (“Love and Marriage”) seems to fear the widening of the married woman’s life, and she writes as though the aspiration to do professional and intellectual work of a high or- der must dwarf and sterilize the mother in the married woman. * She writes of a more northerly people, the Scandinavians, and it may be true of her coun- try-women, I do not know. But it is not essen- tially and universally true. I am writing of the English-speaking races of to-day, and though we also have among us that dwarfed and sterilized type of woman, she forms in our community a dwindling minority. The major- ity of our best women enter marriage and motherhood, or else long for a marriage more 160 LOVE IN MARRIAGE beautiful than the warped mockery of it that is offered them. As Mrs. Gilman says (“Women and Eco- nomics”): “In the primal physical functions of maternity the human female cannot show that her supposed specialization to these uses has improved her fulfil- ment of them, rather the opposite. The more freely the human mother mingles in the natural industries of a human creature, as in the case of the savage woman, the peasant woman, the working woman everywhere who is not overworked, the more rightly she fulfills these functions. The more absolutely the woman is segregated to sex-functions only, eut off from all economic use and made wholly dependent on the sex- relation as means of a livelihood, the more patho- logical does her motherhood become. The over-de- velopment of sex caused by her economic dependence on the male reacts unfavorably on her essential duties. She is too female for the perfect motherhood l’’ The majority of our young women, I am con- vinced, have in them the potentiality of a full and perfected love. So, too, have the majority of our young men. For the best type of young man to-day is tired of polygamy, he has seen enough in his father's and his friends’ lives of the weariness of the sinister, secret polygamy, SOCIETY 161 that hides itself and rots the race under the pro- tecting cloak of the supposed monogamy of our social system. But as things are at present in England and in America, the young man who marries, how- ever much he may be in love, is generally too ignorant (as has been indicated in the preced- ing chapters) to give his wife real physical de- light. Then, sooner or later, comes the sequence of disappointments which culminate in the long- ing for a fresh adventure. As one young husband said to me: “A de- cent man can’t go on having unions with his wife when she obviously does not enjoy them,” and so he is forced to “go elsewhere.” “And they call us polygamists! We are not polyg- amists. But marriage is a rotten failure,” was his verdict. No. They are not polygamists, the finest young men of the present and of the future. Most men to-day are not in their heart of hearts polygamists, in spite of all the outward signs to the contrary; in spite of the fact that so few of them have remained faithful to one woman. But they are ignorant of the sex-laws and tra- ditions, that sex-knowledge which was the herit- age of much less civilized tribes, and so they 162 LOVE IN MARRIAGE have trampled and crushed out the very thing for the growth of which their hearts are ach- ing. Hence secretly (for in a marriage that is at least superficially happy the man seldom does this openly) the man begins to crave for an- other type of society and he “goes elsewhere.” Not, it is true, to find, or even in the hope of finding, what he would get from a perfect mar- riage; but often to satisfy in some measure that yearning for fresh experience, for romance, and for that sense of fusion with another is the ro- mantic experience which, even if it is only a delusion of the senses, is yet one of the most precious things life has to offer. It is hard, indeed, in many cases it seems im- possible, for a good woman to understand what it is that draws her husband from her. Re- stricted by habit and convention in the exercise of all her faculties, she is unaware of the ever , narrowing range of her interest and her pow- ers of conversation. The home life tends to be- come that of a fenced pond, instead of a great ocean with innumerable currents. From the re- stricted and fenced, man's instinct is ever to escape. Man's opportunities for exploration in the cities are few, and the loose woman is one SOCIETY 163 of the most obvious doors of escape into new experiences. Women feel a so righteous and instinctive horror of prostitution, and, regarding it, they experience an indignation so intense that they do not seek to understand the man's attitude. The prostitute, however, sometimes supplies an element which is not purely physical, and which is often lacking in the wife's relation with her husband, an element of charm and mutual gayety in pleasure. If good women realized this, while they would : judge and endeavor to eliminate prostitution no less strenuously, they might be in a better' position to begin their efforts to free men from the hold that the social evil has upon them. It is perhaps impossible to find the begin- ning of a vicious circle, but the first step out of it must be the realization that one is within it, and the realization of some, at any rate, of , -its component parts. Man, through prudery, through the custom of ignoring the woman's side of marriage and con- sidering his own whim as the marriage law, has largely lost the art of stirring a chaste partner to physical love. He therefore deprives her of a glamour, the loss of which he deplores, 164 , LOVE IN MARRLAGE for he feels a lack not only of romance and beauty, but of something higher which is mys- tically given as the result of the complete union. He blames his wife’s “coldness” instead of his own want of art. Then he seeks elsewhere for the things she could have given him had he known how to win them. And she, knowing that the shrine has been desecrated, is filled with righteous indignation, though generally as blind as he is to the true cause of what has occurred. Manifold and far-reaching, influencing the whole structure of society not only in this coun- try, but in every country and at every time, have been the influences which have grown up from the root-fallacy in the marriage relation. Then there is another cause for the dulling of a wife's bright charm. It is indeed a serious matter, as Jean Finot says, that, “under pres- ent conditions, the mistress keeps certain liber- ties which are denied to married women.” The past and its history have been studied by many, and we may leave it. What concerns the present generation of young married peo- ple, is to-day and the future. The future is full of hope. Already one sees beginning to grow up a new relationship between the units com- posing society. . SOCIETY: 165 In the noblest society love will hold sway. The love of mates will always be the supremest life experience, but it will no longer be an ex- perience exclusive and warped. - The love of friends and children, of com- rades and fellow-workers, will but serve to de- velop every power of the two who are mates. By mingling the greatness of their individual stature they can achieve together something that, had both or either been dwarfed and puny individuals, would have remained for ever un- attainable. The whole trend of the evolution of human society has been toward an increased coherence. of all its parts, until at the present time it is already almost possible to say that the commu- nity has an actual life on a plane above that of all the individuals composing it: that the community in fact is a superentity. It is through the community of human beings, and not in our individual lives, that we reach an ultimate permanence upon this globe. When our relation to the community is fully ‘realized, it will be seen that the health, the hap- piness, and the consequent powers of every in- dividual, concern not only his own life, but ºfso 166 LOVE IN MARRLAGE affect the whole community of which he is a member. ſ The happiness of a perfect marriage, which enhances the joy of the private life, renders one not only capable of adding to the stream of the life-blood of the community in children, but by marriage one is also rendered a fitter and ; more perfect instrument for one's own particu- ! lar work, in the tempering and finishing of which society plays a part, and the results of which should be shared by society as a whole. Thus it is the concern of the whole commu- nity that marriage should be as perfect, and hence as joyous, as possible; so that the pow- ers which should be set free and created for the purpose of the whole community should not be frittered away in the useless longing and disappointment engendered by ignorance, nar- row restrictions, and low ideals. In the world the happily mated pair should be like a great and beautiful light; a light not hid under a bushel, but one whose beams shine through the lives of all around them. CHAPTER XI TEIE GLORIOUS UNFOLDING} “Let knowledge grow from more to more, but more of reverence in us dwell.”—TENNyson. We are surrounded in this world by processes and transmutations so amazing that were they not taking place around us hourly they would be scouted as impossible imaginings. A mind must be dull and essentially lacking in imagination which can learn without interest or amazement for the first time that the air we breathe, apparently so uniform in its invisible unity, is in reality composed of two principal, and several other, gases. The two gases, how- ever, are but mixed as wine may be with water, and each gas by itself is a colorless air, visually like that mixture of the two which we call the atmosphere. Much greater is the miracle of the composi- tion of water. It is made of only two gases, one of them a component of the air we breathe, and 167 168 LOVE IN MARBLAGE the other similarly invisible and odorless, but far lighter. These two invisible gases when linked in a proportion proper to their natures, fuse and are no longer ethereal and invisible, but precipitate in a new substance, water. The waves of the sea with their thundering power, the sparkling tides of the river buoy- ing the ships, are but the transmuted resultant of the union of two invisible gases. And this, in its simplest terms, is a parable of the in- finitely complex and amazing transmutations of love. Ellis expresses the strange mystery of one of the physical sides of love when he says: “What has always baffled men in the contemplation of sexual love is the seeming inadequacy of its cause, the immense discrepancy between the necessarily cir- cumscribed regions of mucous membrane which is the final goal of such love and the sea of world-embrac- ing emotions to which it seems the door, so that, as Remy de Gourmont has said, “the mucous membranes, by an ineffable mystery, enclose in their obscure folds all the riches of the infinite.” It is a mystery before which the thinker and the artist are alike overcome.” To me, however, the recent discoveries of physiology seem to afford a key which may un- THE GLORIOUS UNFOLDING 169 lock a chamber of the mystery and admit us to one of the halls of the palace of truth. The hormones the internal secretions of the so-called ductless glands in each individual body pour from one organ and affect another, and thus influence the whole character of the individual’s life processes. The visible secretions and the most subtle essences which pass during union between man and woman, affect the lives of each and are essentially vital to each other. As I see them, the man and the woman are each or- gans, parts, of the other. And in the strictest scientific, as well as in a mystical, sense they together are a single unit, an individual en- tity. There is a physiological as well as a spiritual truth in the words, “they twain shall be one flesh.” In love it is not only that the yearning of the bonds of affinity to be satisfied is met by the linking with another, but that out of this union there grows a new and unprecedented creation. In this I am not speaking of the bodily child which springs from the love of its parents, but of the superphysical entity created by the per- fect union in love of man and woman. To- gether, united by the love bonds which hold them, they are a new and wondrous thing sur- 170 LOVE IN MARRLAGE passing, and different from, the arithmetical sum of them both when separate. So seldom has the perfection of this new creation been experienced, that we are still far short even of imagining its full potentialities, but that it must have mighty powers we dimly realize. Youths and maidens stirred by the attraction of love, feel hauntingly and inarticulately that there is before them an immense and beautiful experience: feel as though in union with the be- loved there will be added powers of every sort which have no measure in terms of the ordi- nary unmated life. These prophetic dreams, if they are not true of each individual life, are yet true of the race as a whole. For in the dreams of youth to-day is a foreshadowing of the reality of the future. , So accustomed have we recently become to accept one aspect of organic evolution, that we tend to see in youth only a recapitulation of our race's history. The well-worn phrase “On- togeny repeats Phylogeny” has helped to con- centrate our attention on the fact that the young in their development, in ourselves as in the ani- mals, go through many phases which resemble THE GLORIOUS UNFOLDING 171 the stages through which the whole race must have passed in the course of its evolution. While this is true, there is another character- istic of youth: It is propheticſ The dreams of youth, which each young heart expects to see fulfilled in its own life, seem so often to fade unfulfilled. . . . But that is be- cause the wonderful powers of youth are not supplied with the necessary ..tool—knowledge. And so potentialities, which could have worked miracles are allowed to atrophy and die. But as humanity orients itself more truly, more and more will the knowledge and experi- ence of the whole race be placed at the disposal of all youth on its entry into life. Then that glorious upspringing of the racial ideal, which finds its expression in each un- spoiled generation of youth, will at last meet with a store of knowledge sufficient for its needs, and will find ready as a tool to its hand the accumulated and sifted wisdom of the race. Then youth will be spared the blunders and the pain and the unconscious self-destruction that to-day leaves scarcely any one untouched. In my own life, comparatively short and therefore lacking in experience though it be, I have known, both personally and vicariously, 172 LOVE IN MARRIAGE so much anguish that might have been pre- vented by timely knowledge. This impels me not to wait till my experience and researches are complete, and my life and vital interests are fading, but to hand on at once those glean- ings of wisdom I have already accumulated which may help the race to understand itself. Hence I conclude this little book, for, though incomplete, it contains some of the vital things youth should be told. In all life activities, house-building, hunting or any other, where intellectual and oral tra- dition comes in, as it does with the human race, ‘‘instinct” tends to die, out. Thus the human mother is far less able to manage her baby with- out instruction, than is a cat her kittens; al- though the human mother at her best, has, in comparison with the cat, an infinitude of duties toward, and influences over, her child. A similar truth holds in relation to marriage. The century-long following of various “civil- ized” customs has not only deprived our young people of most of the instinctive knowledge they might have possessed, but has given rise to in- numerable false and polluting customs. - Though many write on the art of managing children, few have anything to say about the art * THE GLORIOUS UNFOLDING 173 of marriage, save those who have some dogma, often theological or subversive of natural law, to proclaim. Any fundamental truth regarding marriage is rendered immeasurably difficult to ascertain be- cause of the immense ranges of variety in hu- man beings, even of the same race, many of which result from the artificial conditions and the unnatural stimuli so prevalent in what we call civilization. To attempt anything like a serious study of marriage in all its varieties would be a monumental work. Those who have even partially undertaken it have tended to be- come entangled in a maze of abnormalities, so that the needs of the normal, healthy, romantic person have been overlooked. Each pair, therefore, has tended to repeat the blunders from which it might have been saved, and to stumble blindly in a maze of difficulties which are not the essential heritage of human- ity, but are due to the unreasoning folly of our present customs. I have written this book for those who enter marriage normally and healthily, and with op- timism and hope. If they learn its lessons they may be saved from some of the pitfalls in which thousands 174 LOVE IN MARRLAGE have wrecked their happiness, but they must not think that they will thereby easily attain the perfection of marriage. There are a myriad subtleties in the adjustment of any two indi- viduals. Each pair must, using the tenderest and most delicate touches, sound and test each other, learning their way about the intricacies of each other’s hearts. Sometimes, with all the knowledge and the best will in the world, two who have married find that they cannot fuse their lives; of this tragedy I have not here anything to say; but ordinary unhappiness would be less frequent than it is were the tenderness of knowledge ap- plied to the problem of mutual adjustment from the first day of marriage. All the deepest and highest forces within us impel us to evolve an ever nobler and tenderer form of life long monogamy as our social ideal. While the thoughtful and tender-hearted must seek, with ever greater understanding, to ease and comfort those who miss this joyful natural development, reformers in their zeal for side- issues must not forget the main growth of the stock. The beautiful sense for love in the hearts of the young should be encouraged, and they THE GLORIOUS UNFOLDING 175 should have access to the knowledge of how to cultivate it, instead of being diverted by the clamor for “freedom” to destroy it. Disillusioned middle age is apt to look upon the material side of the marriage relation, to see its solid surface in the cold, dull light of every- day experience; while youth irradiated by the glow of its dreams is unaware how its aerial and celestial phantasies are broken and shat- tered when unsuspectingly brought up against the hard facts of physical reality. The transmutation of material facts by celes- tial phantasies is to some extent within the power of humanity, even the imperfect human- ity of to-day. When knowledge and love go together to the making of each marriage, the joy of that new unit, the Pair, will reach from the physical foun- dation of its united body to the heavens where its head is crowned with stars. NOTES 179 it must be remembered that my theory is new, and every well-authenticated case for or against it will be valuable. All communications will be treated with the strictest confidence. - M. C. STOPEs. JAN 20 1919 The following pages contain º announcements of some of THE CRITIC AND GUIDE Publications f BIRTH control The Limitation of 0ffspringby the Prevention of Conception BY WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, M.D. With as Introductions by A. JACOBI, M.D., LL.D. 2x-President of The Americas Medical Associatios , All the arguments for and against the voluntary limitation of offspring or birth control concentrated in one book of 250 pages. 3. The Limitation of Offspring is now the burning question of the day. It has been made so by Dr. William J. Robinson, who was a pioneer in this country to demand that people be permitted to obtain the knowledge how to limit the number of their children, how to prevent con- ception when necessary. For many years he fought practically alone; his propaganda has made hundreds of thousands of converts—now the ground is prepared and the people are ready to listen. Written in plain popular language. A book which everybody interested in his own welfare and the welfare of the race should read. f PRICE ONE DOLLAR . . tº Ti Tì TT T. THE CRITIC AND GUIDE CO. 12 MT. MORRIS PARK W., NEW YORK SEXUAL PROBLEMS OF TODAY By WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, M.D. *-> | Dr. Robinson's work deals with many phases of the sex question, both in their individual and social as. 'pects. . In this book the scientific knowledge of a physician, eminent as a specialist in everything per- taining to the physiological and medical side of these topics, is combined with the vigorous social views of a thinker who has radical ideas and is not afraid to give them outspoken expression. A few of the subjects which the author discusses in trenchant fashion are: g The Relations Between the Sexes and Man's Inhumani to Woman. – The Influence of Abstinence on Man's §. Health and Sexual Power. — The Double Standard of Morality and the Effect of Continence on Each Sex-The Limitation of Offspring: the Most Important Immediate Step for the Better- ment of the Human Race, from an Economic and Eugenic Standpoint. — What To Do With the Prostitute and How To Abolish Venereal Disease.—The Question of Abortion Considered In Its Ethical and Social Aspects. – Torturing the Wife When the Husband Is At Fault.— Influence of the Prostate on Man's Mental Condition.—The Most Efficient Venereal Prophylactics, etc., etc. “SExUAL PROBLEMs of To-DAY" will give most of its readers information they never possessed before and ideas they never had before — or if they had, never heard them publicly expressed before. Cloth-bound, 320 Pages, $2 Postpaid iſºmºiº- j THE CRITIC AND GUIDE CO. 12 Mt. MORRIS PARK w. NEW YORK WOMAN:HERSEX AND LOVE LIFE FOR MEN AND WOMEN By WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, M.D. Illustrated This is one of the most important, most useful books that we have ever brought out. It is not de- voted to abstruse discussions or doubtful theories: it is full of practical information of vital importance to every woman and through her to every man, to every wife and through her to every husband. The . practical points contained in its pages would render millions of homes happier abodes than they are now; they would º the disruption of many a family; they show how to hold the love of a man, how to preserve sexual attraction, how to re- main 3. beyond the usually allotted age. This book destroys many injurious errors and superstitions and teaches truths that have never been presented in any other book before. In short, this book not only imparts interesting facts; it gives practical points which will make thousands of women, and thousands of men happier, healthier, and more satisfied with life. Certain single chapters or even paragraphs are alone worth the price of the book. - You may safely order the book without delay. But if you wish, a complete synopsis of contents will be sent you. * Cloth bound. Price $3.00 THE CRITIC AND GUIDE CO. 12 MT. MORRIS PARK w. NEW YORK I consider myself extremely fortunate in having been instru- mental in making this remarkable book accessible to the English reading public. It is a great book well worth a careful perusal. From Dr. William J. Robinson's Introduction. The Sexual Crisis A CRITIQUE OF OUR SEX LIFE A Psychologic and Sociologic Study By G RETE M El SEL-H ESS * > * AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION By EDEN AND CEDAR PAUL EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION By WILLIAM J. ROB I NSON, M.D. One of the greatest of all books on the sex question that have appeared in the Twentieth Century. It is a book that no educated man or woman, lay or professional, interested in sexual ethics, in our marriage system, in free motherhood, in trial marriages, in the question of sexual abstinence, etc., etc., can afford to leave unread. Nobody who discusses, writes or lectures on any phases of the sex question, has a right to overlook this remarkable volume. Written with a wonderfully keen analysis of the conditions which are bringing about a sexual crisis, the book abounds in gems of thought and in pearls of style on every page. It must be read to be appreciated. A Complete Synopsis of Contents Will Be Sent on Request . 350 PAGES. PRICE $3.00 w T H E C R IT IC AND GUI DE CO. 12 MT. Morris PARK, wººt ºf is ºr sº NEW YORK CITY AN EPOCH-MAKING BOOK Never Told Tales GRAPHIC STORIES OF THE DISASTROUS RESULTS OF SEXUAL IGNORANCE By WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, M.D. Editor of the American Journal of Urology and of The Critic and Guide Every doctor, every young man and woman, every newly-married touple, every parent who has grown-up children, should read this 6ook. Every one of the tales teaches a distinct lesson, a lesson of vital (mportance to the human race. ...We knew that we were getting out a useful, a NECESSARY book, and we expected it would meet with a favorable reception, but we never expected the reception would be so extravagantly and so unanimously enthusiastic. There seems to have been a long-felt but dormant want for just such a book. One reader, who has fortune running into the millions, writes: - “I would have given a good part of my fortune if the knowledge I obtained from one of your stories to-day had been imparted to me ten years ago.” - * Another one writes: “I agree with you that your plain, unvarnished tales from real life should have been told long ago. But better late than never. Your name will be among the benefactors of the human race for having brought out so forcibly those important, life-saving truths. I know that I personally have already been benefited by them.” Fine Cloth Binding One Dollar per Copy tº - THE CRITIC AND GUIDE CO. 12 MT. MORRIS PARK W. NEW YORK A New Book by Dr. Robinson Sex Knowledge for Men. By WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, M. D. ILLUSTRATED. An honest, unbiased, truthful, strictly scientific and up-to-date book, dealing with the anatomy and physi- ology of the male sex organs, with the venereal diseases and their prevention, and the manifestations of the sex instinct in boys and men. Absolutely free from any cant, hypocrisy, falsehood, exaggeration, compromise, or any attempt to concAate the stupid and ignorant. An elementary book written in plain, understandable language, which should be in the possession of every adolescent boy and every parent. Price, cloth bound, $2.o.o. for W. Sex Knowledge 'º';" What Every Woman and Girl Should Know A Companion Volume to SEX KNOWLEDGE FOR MEN Price, cloth bound, $1.oo. ADDRESSs - THE CRITIC AND GUIDE CO. 12 MT. MORRIS PARK W. NEW YORK CITY EUGENICS, MARRIAGE BIRTH CONTROL [Practical Eugenics) By WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, M.D. One of the best practical books for the general reader. It does not deal with chromosomes, unit characters, determiners—simplex, duplex. or nulliplex–heterozygotes, homozygotes, etc. Nor does it have a word to say about Mendel's sweet peas. Interesting and important as these things are, they have but little relation to human heredity and to the questions: How can we im- prove the human stock, and who should and should not marry? These practical questions this book tries to answer. Hence the subtitle: Practical Eugenics. - 208 pages, cloth bound. Price $1.00 UN CONTROLLED BREEDING OR FECUNDITY ps. CIVILIZATION A contribution to the study of over- tion as the cause of War and the chief obstacle to the Emancipation of Women By ADELYNE MORE With an Introduction by Arnold Bennett and Preface and Notes by William J. Robinson, M.D. Cloth Bound, $1.00. •"e Paper, 60c. THE CRITIC AND GUIDE CO. 12 MT, MORRIS PARK W. NEW YORK Pºplain and Bith ſolid A SY M P O S I U M EDITED BY EDEN and CEDAR PAUL One of the greatest books on Birth-Control in the English or any other language. By writers of international reputation. CONTENTS Introduction, by William J. Robinson; Malthus, a Biographical and Critical Study, by Achille Loria; Birth–Control and the Wage Earners, by Charles W. Drysdale; Race Suicide in the United States, º: Quessel; Eugenics, Birth–Control, and Social- ism, by Eden Paul; Economics of the Birth Strike, by Ludwig Quessel; Decline in the Birth-Rate, Nationality, and Civilisation, by Edward Bernstein; Philosophy of the Birth Strike, by Ludwig Quessel; Over-Population as a Cause of War, by B. fusion; The Decline in the Birth-Rate, º R. Manschke; ñysgenic Tendencies of Birth–Control and of the Feminist Movement, by S. H. Halford; Women and Birth-Control, by F. W. Stella Browne; Editorial Sum- mary and Conclusion. Price $3.00 SMALLORLARGEFAMILES BIRTH-CONTROL FROM THE MORAL, RACIAL AND EUGENIC STANDPOINT BY * Dr. C. V. DRYSDALE DR. HAVE LOCK ELLIS DR. WILLIAM J. ROBINSON PROFESSOR A. GROTJAHN Price J1.00 E- ADDRESS THE CRITIC AND GUIDE CO. 12 MT, MORRIS PARK W. NEW YORK CITY A UNIQUE JOURNAL THE CRITIC AND GUIDE Dr. Robinson's Famous Little Monthly g It is the most original journal in the country. It is the only one of its kind, and is iº from cover to cover. There is no routine, dead matter in it. ... It is one of the very few journals that is opened with anticipation just as soon as it is received and of which every line is read with real interest. Not only are the specialF. of the medical profession itself dealt within a vigorous and progressive spirit, but the larger, social aspects of medicine and physiology are di in a fearless and radical manner. Many problems untouched by other publications, such as the sex question in all its varied phases, the economic causes of disease and ºther problems in medical sociology, are treated boldly and freely from the standpoint of modern science. In discussing questions which are considered taboo by the hyper-conservative, the editor says * he wants to say very plainly without regard for Mrs. , Grundy. --> THE CRITIC AND GUIDE was a pioneer in the ganda for birth control, venereal prophylaxis, sex education of the young, and free discussion of sexual problems in general. It contains more interesting and outspoken matter on these subjects than any other While of great value to the practitioner for therapeutic sug tions of a practical, up-to-date and definite §. : and ºf: are what make THE CRITIC AND GUIDE tinique ; É:gºd eagerly alike by the medical profession and 111 t y. PUBLISHED MONTHLY ONE DOLLAR A YEAR THE CRITIC AND GUIDE COMPANY" 12 MT. MoRRIS PARK w. : :: New York crty s 3 9015 02207 8.490 Taubman Medical Library DO NOT REMOVE OR MUTILATE CARD | - |