Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/483

Rh professional life. In a physiological study such as this, we will not concern ourselves with the social obstacles a married woman must encounter. We have a right to consider every woman who has a husband as either a mother, or liable to become one. Any attempt on the part of a wife to avoid children in order to free herself of that obstacle to professional life would be attended with consequences to her mental and physical health which would seriously impair her usefulness. The end and aim of woman's sexual life is perfected by maternity. It broadens and elevates her intellectually and physically. The influence over society reached by wives-mothers is a natural outcome of the stimulus of maternity. The maternal instinct, which lies dormant in the nature of every woman, awakens her mental being into increased activity the moment it is called into life. I think that it is for this reason that frail women, with no knowledge of life, when widowed, often succeed in keeping their families together and providing for them. With the woman who is constantly liable to the demands of a profession, or skilled labor, the maternal affection, anxiety, or care, may intrude at moments when her occupation will demand her highest mental efforts. The manual labor of rearing children the professional woman may delegate to others, but the ceaseless love, care, and forethought, so beautiful in a mother's love, the true woman must assume herself. Physically, children are necessary to the married woman. The sterile wife is constantly exposed to diseases that the fecund wife is comparatively exempt from. The sterile wife is not a normal woman, and sooner or later this physical abnormality finds expression in intellectual peculiarities. Not upon the mind alone, but upon the body as well, does motherhood have a maturing influence. Gestation is nearly the completion of the sexual function. The process involves increase in the size of the heart, and in the volume and strength of nearly all the muscles of the body. It is evident from this that gestation is not only a functional completion, but it is necessary to structural maturity, and to me it seems a natural corollary that it has an equal effect in increasing mental vigor. Having shown that marriage is in obedience to a physiological law, and that maternity is necessary to insure mental and bodily health in the mass of women, it is proper for us to ascertain if the last of these conditions—gestation—is not of itself, physically and mentally, an obstacle to professional life in women. The physical incapacity is too evident to need any comment.

Mentally, the changes undergone are most singular and multiform, and operate upon the cultivated and ignorant alike. Dr. Montgomery, speaking of the nervous irritability of pregnancy, says: "It displays itself under a great variety of forms and circumstances,