The Physical Life of Woman: Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother Part 4

WHEN THE CHANGES ARE PAINFUL.

There are wide individual differences in this respect. Some young women suffer much from local pains, headache and languor at such epochs, without apparently losing anything in general health; others experience no distress whatever.

The causes of painful periods are various. Sometimes they depend on a tendency to rheumatism or to ague. Over-work, or excessive devotion to social duties and pleasures, is often their source. Cold and damp are common incidental causes. Green sickness and general debility are sometimes to blame.

Of course the treatment must depend on which one of these is present. It is a good rule, however, always to wear flannel next the skin; also, to avoid exposure to the weather for several days before the change is expected. A large, hot, linseed-meal poultice, over which a dessert-spoonful of laudanum has been sprinkled, or a large mustard-plaster, spread on the lower abdomen, will afford much relief. A hot brick or bottle of hot water wrapped in flannel, and applied to the small of the back, is often of great service. Rest in bed is always to be recommended. A tea-spoonful of sweet spirits of nitre will sometimes bring early relief.

But if these simple means are not sufficient, it would be better to consult a physician.

A common belief is that such troubles are cured by marriage. Sometimes they are, but we do not approve the remedy. The state of marriage should be entered upon in perfect health and full vigor. Upon it depends the health of future generations, and it were better for them did only those a.s.sume its bonds who are able to endow their children with sound physical frames.

THE AGE OF NUBILITY.

It does not follow, because a girl is capable of marriage, that she is fit for it. Science teaches us many valid objections to too early unions. It goes farther, and fixes a certain age at which it is wisest for woman to marry. This age is between twenty and twenty-five years.

Anatomists have learned that after p.u.b.erty the bones of a woman's body undergo important modifications to fit her for child-bearing. This requires time, and before twenty the process is not completed. Until the woman is perfect herself, until her full stature and completed form are attained, she is not properly qualified to a.s.sist in perpetuating the species.

We might urge that up to this moment neither does her self-knowledge qualify her to choose a life-companion, nor can her education be finished, nor is her experience sufficient for her to enter on the duties of a matron. But we do not appeal to these arguments. There are others still more forcible. If her own health, life, and good looks are of value to her, if she has any wish for healthy, sound minded children, she will refrain from premature nuptials.

A too youthful wife finds marriage not a pleasure but a pain. Her nervous system is prostrated by it; she is more liable to weakness and diseases of the womb; and if of a consumptive family, she runs great risk of finding that fatal malady manifest itself after a year or two of wedded life. It is very common for those who marry young to die young.

From statistics which have been carefully compiled, it is proven that the first labors of very young mothers are much more painful, tedious, and dangerous to life, than others. As wives, they are frequently visited either with absolute sterility, and all their lives must bear the reproach of barren women, or, what to many is hardly less distasteful, they have an excessively numerous family.

What adds to their sufferings in the latter event, is that the children of such marriages are rarely healthy. They are feeble, sickly, undersized, often with some fault of mind or body, which is a cross to them and their parents all their lives. They inherit more readily the defects of their ancestors, and, as a rule, die at earlier years than the progeny of better-timed unions.

These considerations are formidable enough, it would seem, to prevent young girls from marrying, without the need of a law, as exists in some countries. Moreover, they are not imaginary, but real, as many a woman finds out to her cost.

The objections to marriage after the age of twenty-five are less cogent.

They extend only to the woman herself. She should know that the first labors of wives over thirty are nearly _twice_ as fatal as those between twenty and twenty-five. Undoubtedly nature points to the period between the twentieth and twenty-fifth year as the fittest one for marriage in the woman.

_LOVE._

ITS POWER ON HUMANITY.

Love, pure love, true love, what can we say of it? The dream of youth; the cherished reminiscence of age; celebrated in the songs of poets; that which impels the warrior to his most daring deeds; which the inspired prophet chooses to typify the holiest sentiments,--what new thing is it possible to say about this theme?

Think for a moment on the history or the literature of the world. Ask the naturalist to reveal the mysteries of life; let the mythologist explain the origin and meaning of all unrevealed religions; look within at the promptings of your own spirit, and this whole life of ours will appear to you as one grand epithalamium.

The profoundest of English poets has said--

'All thoughts, all pa.s.sions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame.'

That life which is devoid of love is incomplete, sterile, unsatisfactory. It fails of its chiefest end. Nature, in anger, blots it out sooner, and it pa.s.ses like the shadow of a cloud, leaving no trace behind. Admirable as it may be in other respects, to the eye of the statesman, the physician, the lover of his species, it remains but a fragment, a torso.

Love is one thing to a woman, another to a man. To him, said Madame de Stael, it is an episode; to her, it is the whole history of life. A thousand distractions divert man. Fame, riches, power, pleasure, all struggle in his bosom to displace the sentiment of love. They are its rivals, not rarely its masters. But woman knows no such distractions.

One pa.s.sion only sits enthroned in her bosom; one only idol is enshrined in her heart, knowing no rival, no successor. This pa.s.sion is love! This idol is its object.

This is not fancy, not rhetoric; it is the language of cold and exact science, p.r.o.nounced from the chair of history, from the bureau of the statistician, from the dissecting table of the anatomist. We shall gather up their well-weighed words, and present them, not as fancy sketches, but as facts.

This deep, all-absorbing, single, wondrous love of woman, is something that man cannot understand. This sea of unfathomed depth is to him a mystery. The shallow mind sees of it nothing but the rippling waves, the unstable foam-crests dashing hither and thither, the playful ripples of the surface, and, blind to the still and measureless waters beneath, calls woman capricious, uncertain,--_varium et mutabile_. But the thinker and seer, undeceived by such externals, knows that beneath this seeming change is stability unequaled in the stronger s.e.x, a power of will to which man is a stranger, a devotion and purpose which strike him with undefined awe.

Therefore, in the myths and legends which the early races framed to express their notions of divine things,--the Fates, who spin and snip the thread of life; the Norns, who

Lay down laws, And select life For the children of time-- The destinies of men,--

are always females. The seeresses and interpreters of oracles--those who, like the witch of Endor, could summon from the grave the shades of the departed--were women.

Therefore, also, modern infidelity, going back, as it ever does, to the ignorance of the past, and holding it up as something new, makes woman the only deity. Comte and his disciples, having reasoned away all G.o.ds, angels, and spirits, and unable to still the craving for something to adore, agree to meet once a week to worship--woman. The French revolutionists, having shut up the churches and abolished G.o.d by a decree of the Convention, set up in His stead--a woman.

We could never exhaust this phase of world-history. Everywhere we see the unexpected hand of Love moulding, fashioning all things. The fortunes of the individual, the fate of nations, the destinies of races, are guided by this invisible thread. Let us push our inquiries as to the nature of this all-powerful agent.

WHAT IS LOVE?

It has a divided nature. As we have an immortal soul, but a body of clay; as the plant roots itself in decaying earth, but spreads its flowers in glorious sunlight,--so love has a physiological and a moral nature. It is rooted in that unconscious law of life which bids us perpetuate our kind; which guards over the conservation of life; which enforces, with ceaseless admonition, that first precept which G.o.d gave to man before the gates of Eden had been closed upon him: 'Be thou fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.' Nothing but a spurious delicacy, or an ignorance of facts, can prevent our full recognition that love looks to marriage, and marriage to offspring, as a natural sequence.

Do we ask proofs of this? We have them in abundance. Those unfortunate beings who are chosen by Oriental custom to guard the seraglios undergo a mutilation which disqualifies them from becoming parents. Soon all traces of pa.s.sion, all regard for the other s.e.x, all sentiments of love, totally disappear. The records of medicine contain not a few cases where disease had rendered it necessary to remove the ovaries from women. At once a change took place in voice, appearance, and mind. They spoke like men, a slender beard commenced on their faces, a masculine manner was conspicuous in all their motions, and every thought of s.e.xual love pa.s.sed away for ever. These are the results in every case. What do they signify? Undoubtedly that the pa.s.sion of love is dependent upon the capacity of having offspring, and that such was the intention of Nature in implanting in our bosom this all-powerful sentiment.

But this is not all. Nature, as beneficent to those who obey her precepts as she is merciless to those who disregard them, has added to this sentiment of love a physical pleasure in its gratification,--an honourable and proper pleasure, which none but the hypocrite or the ascetic will affect to condemn, none but the coa.r.s.e or the lewd will regard as the object of love. There is, indeed, a pa.s.sion which is the love of the body. We call it by its proper name of _l.u.s.t_. There is another emotion, for which the rich tongue of the ancient Greeks had a word, to which we have nothing to correspond. Call it, if you will, Platonic love, and define it to be an exalted friendship. But understand that neither the one nor the other is _love_, in the true sense of the word, and that _both_ are inferior to it.

Does the father, watching, with moistened eyes, his child at its mother's breast; does the husband, bending with solicitude over the sick-bed of his wife; does the wife, clinging to her husband through evil report and good report, through broken fortunes and failing health, indicate no loftier emotion than _l.u.s.t_, no warmer sentiment than _friendship_? What ignorance, what perversity is so gross as not to perceive something here n.o.bler than either? Do you say that such scenes are, alas, rare? We deny it. We see them daily in the streets; we meet them daily in our rounds. Admitted, by our calling, to the sacred precincts of many houses in the trying hours of sickness and death, we speak advisedly, and know that this is the prevailing meaning of love in domestic life.

A warm, rich affection blesses the one who gives and the one who receives. Character developes under it as the plant beneath the sunlight. Happiness is an unknown word without it. Love and marriage are the only normal conditions of life. Without them, both man and woman for ever miss the best part of themselves. They suffer more, they sin more, they perish sooner. These are not hasty a.s.sertions. As a social law, let it be well understood that science p.r.o.nounces that

LOVE IS A NECESSITY.

The single life is forced upon many of both s.e.xes, in our present social condition. Many choose it from motives of economy, from timidity, or as a religious step, pleasing to G.o.d. The latter is a notion which probably arose from a belief that, somehow, celibacy, strictly observed, means chast.i.ty. It simply means continence. The chastest persons have been, and are, not the virgins and celibates, but the married. When this truth is known better, we shall have fewer sects and more religion.

We know women who refrain from marrying to keep out of trouble. The old saying is, that every sigh drives a nail in one's coffin. They are not going to worry themselves to death bearing children and nursing them! It is too great a risk, too much suffering. How often have we been told this! Yet how false the reasoning is! Very carefully prepared statistics show that between the ages of twenty and forty-five years, more unmarried women die than married, and few instances of remarkable longevity in an old maid are known. The celebrated Dr. Hufeland, therefore, in his treatise on the _Art_ _of Prolonging Life_, lays it down as a rule, that to attain a great age, one must be married.

As for happiness, those who think they can best attain it outside the gentle yoke of matrimony are quite as wide of the mark. Their selfish and solitary pleasures do not gratify them. With all the resources of clubs, billiard-rooms, saloons, narcotics, and stimulants, single men make but a mock show of satisfaction. At heart every one of them envies his married friends. How much more monotonous and more readily exhausted are the resources of woman's single life! No matter what 'sphere' she is in, no matter in what 'circle' she moves, no matter what 'mission' she invents, it will soon pall on her. Would you see the result? We invoke once more those dry volumes, full of lines and figures, on vital statistics. Stupid as they look, they are full of the strangest stories; and what is more, the stories are all true. Some of them are sad stories, and this is one of the saddest: Of those unfortunates who, out of despair and disgust of the world, jump from bridges, or take a.r.s.enic, or hang themselves, or in other ways rush unbidden and unprepared before the great Judge of all, _nearly two-thirds_ are unmarried, and in some years nearly _three-fourths_. And of those other sad cases--dead, yet living--who people the madhouses and asylums, what of them? Driven crazy by their brutal husbands, do you suggest? Not at all! In France, Bavaria, Prussia, Hanover, four out of every five are unmarried; and throughout the civilised world there are everywhere three or four single to one married woman in the establishments for the insane, in proportion to the whole number of the two cla.s.ses above twenty-one years of age.

Other women decline to marry because they have, forsooth, a 'life work'

to accomplish. Some great project fills their mind. Perchance they emulate Madame de Stael, and would electrify the country by their novel views in politics; or they have a literary vein they fain would exploit; or they feel called upon to teach the freedmen, or to keep their position as leaders of fashion. A husband would trammel them. If they did marry, they would take the very foolish advice of a contemporary, and go through life with an indignant protest at its littleness. Let such women know that they underrate the married state, its powers and its opportunities. There are no loftier missions than can there be carried out, no n.o.bler games than can there be played. When we think of these objections, coming, as they have to us, from high-spirited, earnest girls, the queens of their s.e.x, our memory runs back to the famous women of history, the brightest jewels in the coronet of time, and we find as many, ay, more, married women than single who pursued to their ends mighty achievements.

If you speak of Judith and Joan of Arc, who delivered their fatherlands from the enemy by a daring no man can equal, we shall recall the peaceful victories of her, wife of the barbarian Chlodwig, who taught the rude Franks the mild religion of Nazareth, and of her who extended from Byzantium the holy symbol of the cross over the wilds of Russia.

The really great women of this age, are they mostly married or single?

They are mostly married, and they are good wives and tender mothers.

What we have just written, we read to an amiable woman.

'But,' she exclaimed, 'what have you to say to her whom high duties or a hard fate condemns to a single life, and to the name of the old maid?'