Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/482

466 The effect of celibacy upon women has often elicited the remarks of gynæcologists. Dr. Tilt says of marriage: "It is easier to prove the benefits of marriage than to measure accurately the evils of celibacy, which I believe to be a fruitful source of uterine disease. The sexual instinct is a healthy impulse, claiming satisfaction as a natural right." Again: "An enlarged field of observation convinces me that the profession has not in any wise exaggerated the influence of marriage on women, and that its dangers are infinitesimal as compared with those of celibacy." Nearly every treatise upon gynæcology may be quoted to establish the same fact. It is upon the mind of woman that the defeated sexuality acts reflexly in a morbid manner. Dr. Maudsley, who has had abundant opportunities for observation, says: "The sexual passion is one of the strongest in Nature, and as soon as it comes into activity it declares its influence on every pulse of organic life, revolutionizing the entire nature, conscious and unconscious; when, therefore, the means of its gratification entirely fail, and when there is no vicarious outlet for its energy, the whole system feels the effects, and exhibits them in restlessness and irritability, in a morbid self-feeling taking a variety of forms." While it is true that the engrossing cares of professional life, or of a skilled labor, will serve as a partial "vicarious outlet for its energy," in contrast to an idle life, yet this will in no manner act as a substitute for the natural expression of this physiological want. Its constant suppression will tinge the thought and manner of the woman. This is not an unreasonable statement, when we reflect that bodily derangements, not at all serious, will often account for changes in the mind and manner, as well as for the entire mental habit of men otherwise strong. If we contrast her with man in this respect, the chances are infinitely against woman in professional life. The penalty of sex is an episode in man's life. The tribute to his sexuality once paid, he is practically unsexed, and the trained intellectual man moves among women and men with scarcely more than a consciousness of his reproductive faculty. But sex in woman is a living presence. From the age of fifteen to that of forty-five, her life is crowded with startling physiological acts. Ovulation, impregnation, conception, gestation, parturition, lactation, and the menopause, contend with each other for supremacy—each act a mystery; each attended with its peculiar peril; and most of them evoking in its behalf the highest efforts of which her physical organization is capable. It will demand genius indeed to enable woman to rival man in the field of labor, and, at the same time, contend with the inexorable law of reproduction.

Having shown that women are not free agents in the matter of marriage, but do so in obedience to a primal law of their sexual life, we will next consider what are the chances for the married women in