Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/472

468 the latter case the mother's attention is divided. But this is a fallacy. Everybody knows that the one child of the wealthy and highly educated couple is generally a spoiled child and has as a rule, poor health; while the six or eight children of the poor and moderately educated woman are exceedingly strong and lusty. But even supposing that the highly educated woman were able and willing to bear and rear her children like any other woman, she has one drawback from having a fairly large family, and that is the lateness at which she marries, the average being between twenty-six and twenty-seven years. Now, as a woman of that age should marry a man between ten and fifteen years older than herself, for a woman of twenty-seven is as old as a man of forty for the purpose of marriage, both she and her husband are too old to begin the raising of an ordinary sized family. Men and women of that age are old maids and old bachelors. They have been living their own lives during their best years; they have become set in their ways, they must have their own pleasures; in a word, they have become selfish. And, after having had one or at the most two children, the woman objects to having any more, and this is the beginning of the end of marital happiness. The records of our divorce courts show in hundreds of instances, that there was no trouble in the home while the woman was performing her functions of motherhood, but that trouble began as soon as she began to shirk them. Hundreds of thousands of men at the present day are married, but have no wives; and while this sad state of affairs occurs occasionally among the moderately educated, it exists very frequently among the highly educated.

Is the health of the women at the present day worse than it was in the time of our grandmothers? Are the duties of wifehood and motherhood really harder to perform now than they were one hundred years ago? Without hesitation the answer to both questions is 'Yes.' Not only are the sexual and maternal instincts of the average woman becoming less and less from year to year; the best proof of which is later and later marriages and fewer and fewer children; but, in the writer's opinion, the majority of women of the middle and upper classes are sick and suffering before marriage and are physically disabled from performing physiological functions in a natural manner. At a recent meeting of a well-known society of specialists for obstetrics and diseases of women, one of the fellows with the largest practise in the largest city on this continent stated that it was physically impossible for the majority of his patients to have a natural labor, because their power to feel pain was so great, while their muscular power was so little. On these two questions the whole profession is agreed, but I am bound to say that there is a difference of opinion as to the reason. Several of the most distinguished fellows of the above society claim that the generally prevalent breakdown of women is due to their