ARE WOMEN DEVOID OF DESIRE?
PERHAPS a religious periodical like the
ICONOCLAST should avoid a question of such delicacy,
should leave it to the medical magazines, which may
speak as plainly as they
please, even in the presence of the proverbial
“young person”—now deep in the study of
physiology and even essaying the practice of
therapeutics. My quarrel, however, is with these same
medical magazines, which delight in discovering mares'
nests for no other apparent purpose than to make
mankind uncomfortable. They will persist in disregarding
the time-honored axiom that “everybody knows
more than anybody,” a truism which Dr. Spahr
elaborated in his declaration that “the common
observation of common people is more trustworthy than
the statistical investigations of the most unprejudiced
expert”—even though he be a distinguished M.D. I
have before me an essay by George Troup Maxwell,
M.D., of Florida, read before the association of doctors
and printed, with evident approval, by the
Virginia
Medical Semi-Monthly. Like most gentlemen of his
profession, Dr. Maxwell discusses matters of the utmost
delicacy with refreshing freedom, an example which I
must follow to some extent if I would expose his
fallacies; hence the “young person”—unless
indeed she be studying to become a doctor or a writer of
“realistic” fiction—is solemnly adjured to dive no
deeper here. Dr. Maxwell makes several startling assertions
from which I—albeit a doctor of divinity instead of
medicine—must emphatically dissent. I make no apology
for so doing, for it is the time-honored prerogative of
preachers to speak
ex cathedra on all
questions, whether religious, scientific or political. The
pulpit is to all other professions what philosophy is to the
various schools of science—exercises supervisory power,
and by a tap here and a prod there, makes them
consentient with its own infallible scheme of things, so
to speak. It is a very trying occupation, yet some
complain that we parsons must have our summer
vacation on full pay and nurse our precious health at
swell hotels, while common people feed on potatoes—
and plant and grow six-cent cotton for the benefit
of the contribution plate. But from of old there have
been morbose people ever ready to criticize the holy and
put cockleburs in the back hair of the pure in heart. The
salient features of Dr. Maxwell's essay may be
summarized; as follows:
Sexually considered, civilized man is more
beastial than the brutes. He does not respect the person
of his gestant wife, and this disregard of natural law is
the most potent failure in the curtailment of natural
increase. Certain physiological facts indicate that woman
is destitute of desire. Carpenter, the great English
scientist, is quoted in support of this proposition, and a
“female lecturer of distinction” (name not
given) to establish the theory that the chief cause of
marital unhappiness and the ill health of wives is the
sexual inhumanity of husbands—such inhumanity being
quite as common among the better as among the
uncultured.
The foregoing is as delicately as I can state
propositions of such far-reaching importance, and which
neither Dr. Maxwell nor the “female lecturer of
distinction” treat in a manner at all “mealy-mouthed.” Even after exhausting my stock of
euphemisms the recital appears risque enough
to alarm more than one lady reader, and I am tempted to
turn back; but courage, good soul! there's nobody
looking, and if we must live it is important that we learn.
“The proper study of mankind is man;” and we
can obtain no true idea of the animal if we view him only
in holiday attire. As despite all “progress of
science,” incubators and other labor-saving
machinery, people still persist in entering the world in the
primogenial way, the relation of the sexes is of quite
immeasurable importance, and knowledge thereof should
not be monopolized by the narrow circle who read
medical magazines. It
is well that we come occasionally out of the cloud-realm
of sentiment and discuss the relations of man and
woman from the standpoint of practical common sense.
I am aware that the views expressed by Dr. Maxwell are
entertained by some very able medical men; but they
violate the public understanding, and, as usual, the
people are right and the specialists are wrong. We do
not find desire, as here understood, in plants and the
lowest development of animal life, it being particularly an
attribute of the higher biogeny. As the more perfect the
animal organism the more acute the sensations of
pleasure and pain, it follows that in man, most complex
of earthly creatures, is found the most powerful
procreative passion. But while this is the necessary
correlative of his superior nervo-muscular organization,
his better attributes are likewise developed—or
differentiated—by the same law of evolution. Desire,
though accentuated, is refined and rendered subordinate
to his reason, while the brute is the blind slave of
instinct. With the desire of the man and the reason of
the mollusk, the
genus homo would be all that
he is painted by Dr. Maxwell. Should man become for
one day “more beastial than the brute” his
boasted civilization would revert to subter-savagery.
Under such conditions human progress, society itself,
were impossible. It is by no means true, as Dr. Maxwell
asserts, that children are born solely because men are
animals possessing animalistic instincts. True, they could
not well be born were men not animals; but the
“sweet reasonableness” of things enters ever
more and more into the advent of children upon this
earth. Were man made altogether of mud, intent only on
the indulgence of brute desire, there had been no sacred
institution of marriage, and family names proudly handed
down from sire to son through many centuries. The
name of father had not been venerable, nor that of
mother a
synonym of sanctity. To the civilized man marriage does
not mean, as Dr. Maxwell seems to imagine, simply
license for obscene riot, but a solemn covenant that he
and the object of his adoration have forsaken all else to
cleave each unto the other through weal and through
woe, through life unto death. Desire may be the basic
principle of the union, but only as the earth is the basic
principle of the rose's beauty and the jasmine's perfume.
Since earliest biblical days women have sought to bear
children that their husbands might love them better;
indicating that indulgence is not man's sole concern,
even though he be a barbarian; that one reason he seeks
the opposite sex is his desire for fair daughters and brave
sons—a love in which there is no taint of lust. Hugo, to
whom the human heart was as a printed page, has given
us an admirable portrait of “the way of a man with a
maid” in the courtship of Marius and Cosette.
Youth and ardor and opportunity, yet no thought of evil—
all the dross in human nature transformed into the
spirituelle by the pure white light of love. True, all men
are not Mariuses or Romeos. There be Lovelaces and
Cagliostros and Calibans; but prithee, good sir, let us
judge our kind by the nobler instead of the baser
standards. Josephs and St. Anthonys are not plentiful I
grant you; but neither are such brutish husbands as those
you denounce. Love and poetry and chivalry still have an
abiding-place in the heart of man, and the mother and
matriarch of this triune is woman. Prof. Carpenter, Dr.
Maxwell and the “female lecturer of distinction”
to the contrary notwithstanding, it is doubtful if the
sexes differ much in the intensity of desire. True, I have
written somewhere that “God made the male to
seek, the female to be sought”; but it does not
follow therefore that every woman is a Daphne who
would be transformed into a laurel tree to escape an
importunate lover. There may
have been women so bloodless that their love left frost
on the window-panes of their boudoirs; but never did
their sons become world compellers. Despite the pretty
theory of Dr. Maxwell, the same fiery cross is laid upon
the daughters as upon the sons of men, and thousands
falter and fall beneath it and are swept downwards to
their doom. Were it otherwise, were women the
passionless creatures some doctors delight to paint them,
all our encomiums of female virtue were idle mockery. It
is because we realize that in the veins of the vestal virgin
runs the same fierce tide which Egypt's Queen nor
Russia's Empress could control, and which flamed in
battle-splendor in the ten years' war of Troy, that with
uncovered heads we render her the tribute of our
respect. Women admit all this in demanding the
“single standard of morals.” It is doubtless true
that many women are less amorous than their lords—are
to some extent the victims of the latter; but before
assuming that this defect is congenital it were well to
inquire if there be not an efficient post-natal cause. It is
no compliment to woman to urge that she contributes
unwillingly to the world, would fain ignore the God-given
law to “be fruitful and multiply.” Regardless of
the affected horror of anæmic prudes and ancient
wall-flowers, the woman of to-day insists upon being
recognized as a vital force—is even beginning to
comprehend that, refine it as you will, differentiate it as
you may, it is the same vital force which fills the cradle
that sways the scepter. As she aspires to share with
man the regency of this world, she will scarce thank
Carpenter and Maxwell for a premise from which the
conclusion must be inevitably drawn that, as a world-power, she must ever rank with eunuchs—that she is here
solely by man's volition and despite her implied protest.
We must understand woman before presuming to
measure her passions or estimate her powers; and it is
well
to remember that after some sixty centuries of interested
scrutiny she remains very much a mystery—to eminent
physicians as well as others. Her mind seems to
bewilder the psychologists no less than her body puzzles
the physiologists—both find the factual impossible and
the self-evident absurd. Dr. Maxwell has discovered,
however, that comparatively few women marry men
whom they would select were they free to inspect the
entire human penfold and make a choice of a mate. Now
if he will conjoin that fact to this other, equally self-evident, that with the average woman desire is the
fruitage of which love is the flower, perchance he will
find a valid explanation of what Carpenter calls her
sexual passivity. Man is a born polygamist, but woman
is not naturally polyandrous. This statement—which I
have made hitherto to the consternation of the godly and
at imminent danger of being prosecuted for heresy—is
substantiated by the fact that with man desire usually
precedes love, while the latter is not its necessary
sequence; but with the normal woman love must act as
pilot for passion—so much is she our moral superior.
Every woman is a day-dreamer and a worshiper. During
girlhood she pictures to herself some perfect man—some
impossible demigod—who is to drift within the little circle
of her life and make her the proudest of women, the
happiest of wives. In grace or beauty, in genius or
bravery—or all these attributes—he is to be the paragon,
to tower like Saul above his brethren. Her husband is to
be a man of whom she will be intensely proud, herself
the envy of her sex. If this be not correct let some old
mother in Israel answer. Happy for the daydreamer if her
fairy prince, or somewhat her fond imaginings can accept
as such, lays heart and fortune at her feet; sorrowful
indeed if he come not, worse if he materialize and have
eyes only for others. If she be so fortunate as
to wed the one man in all the world whom she would
have chosen had such choice been vouchsafed her by
kind Heaven, o'ermastering love will sweep her through
all the heavens a sensuous fancy ever feigned; but the
chances are that her idol lives only in the ghostly realm
of dreams, else goes elsewhere to wive, and she marries
not whom she would but whom she must—wedlock,
thanks to her mistaken training, being the end and aim of
her existence. Instead of an idol to adore, she secures
some foolish eidolon whom she can scarce respect, and
through days of disgust and nights of agony strives to
“do her duty,” to conceal from the world her
disappointment. Thus is blood that might have been a
sirocco to stir the soul of an anchorite, transformed into
an icy mist—the Paphian Venus lies crushed, degraded,
cold, amid the reeds of Pan. But this mesalliance, this
mating with Davus the detested instead of with
Œdipus the adored, is not the only cause of
indifference. The health of American wives, their
muliebrity or womanly power, is sapped in various ways.
Millions of them are overworked, all the virility ground
out of them in the brutal treadmill of existence; and it not
infrequently happens that they are the wives of men in
easy circumstances, who are too fat-headed to realize
that those womanly attributes which so charm the
sterner sex cannot long withstand continual drudgery.
One is tempted to believe that such men married to save
the expense of hiring a housekeeper, that they hoped by
sleeping with their laundress to avoid wash bills. Take
the great middle class of America (which is the social and
moral cream of the country) and you will find that, as a
rule, the men have abundant leisure in which to
recuperate from the exhaustion of labor, and are robust
as Jove's Phoenician bull, while their wives slave from
early morn till dewy eve and present the faded,
“washed-out” appearance that be
speaks the work which is never done and the worry
which ends only with death. If you will look closely you
will detect traces of tight corsets and other sartorial
enginery with which Dame Fashion attempts to eliminate
the little life which continual cooking, washing and pot-walloping has left—for woman, though her heart be
broken, her spirit crushed and her viscera a chaos, still
clings to her vanity, will “follow the fashions”
though they lead to a funeral. Such is your Idalian
Aphrodite ten years after marriage, when to her matured
charms the beauty of her girlhood should be as moonlight
unto sunlight and as water unto wine. And this wan,
suffering creature, with a drug-shop on her pantry
shelves and more “female complaints” than
were known to the father of medicine, is expected to
comfort the couch of Cæsar! Nor is this all. As the
struggle for existence grows harder (as it has been doing
in America for some decades) and the necessity for
“keeping up appearances” more imperative,
ever greater precautions are taken to prevent family
increase. So widespread is this evil that you can scarce
pick up a paper without finding some abortion nostrum
advertised. Scan the next paper that comes into your
home and see if the virtues of some tansy, penny-royal or
other fœticidal compound be not therein set forth.
Were these crime promoters not extensively sold the
murderous scoundrels who manufacture them could not
annually expend vast sums of money without
“public educators” for their exploitation. These
advertisements frequently suggest the crime; that is their
intent; hence publishers who insert them are the co-partners of abortionists and share both the iniquity and
the cash. But even this costly advertising does not
indicate the extent of the evil, for by far the greater part
of those married women who desire to avoid maternity
are their own practitioners—paying the penalty with
premature
age, impotency and pain. As a rule the mother of
a large family is a healthy woman with vigor unimpaired,
while others of her age having few children or none are
the semi-invalids who denounce their husbands to the
doctor. The practice of avoiding marital responsibility is
frequently condemned by the medical press, even by the
pulpit; but while M.D.'s and D.D.'s make a specialty of
both gynecology and gyneolatry, neither seem to understand
the spirit in which these sins against hygienics are
committed. Doubtless a few fashionable butterflies avoid
motherhood for selfish reasons; but these are
unimportant exceptions to the rule. If a woman does not
love her husband she may not care to bear him children;
but maternal instinct usually dominates this desire. If she
does love him, and his financial resources be limited, she
hesitates to increase his responsibilities. The social
standing of a family in this artificial age is measured
chiefly by the faithfulness with which it follows fashion's
decrees; and as every child, by enhancing expense makes
service of this modern Moloch more difficult, the unborn
innocents are slain. She considers the educational and
other advantages that will accrue to the children already
born, and unselfishly—if sinfully—sacrifices herself. It is
an evil that will scarce be eliminated by the dehortations
of homilists who see no deeper than the surface. Dr.
Maxwell and his lady lecturer are certainly mistaken in
the assumption that American husbands do not consider
the welfare of their wives when in a delicate condition,
and it is a mistake that must be classed either as criminal
negligence or calumny. I opine that the lady lecturer
aforesaid is a sour old maid—that if she ever becomes a
wife and mother she will learn somewhat of the caprices
of her sex subsequent to conception that will materially
modify her complaint. Reasoning by analogy from the
inferior order of animals to man hag
led more than one enthusiastic physiologist into serious
error. The medical profession is continually alarming the
country. It has been but a little while since men were
assured that they were poisoning their babies by kissing
them, and now they are flatly told that their wives regard
the nuptial couch with aversion. Havana cigars give a
fellow the “tobacco heart,” plug exhausts the
saliva necessary to digestion, and bourbon whiskey burns
his stomach full of blowholes. Beer makes him bilious,
tea and coffee knock out his nerves, while plum-pudding
gives him dyspepsia, grape pie appendicitis and hot
biscuits undermine his general health. Emotional
preaching afflicts him with “jerks,” golf has a
tendency to paresis, the round dance infects him with
philogyny and bicycling deforms his face. We might just
as well be dead and with Lucifer as believe these
doctors, for life wouldn't be half worth the living if we
heeded their laws. My brethren of the loaded capsule
and sociable stethoscope are evidently off their
equipoise. Babies flourish much better on the kiss
micrococcus than on the slipper bacillus, few women will
live with impotent husbands, and nearly every
centenarian is a collocation of bad habits that, by all the
laws of Hippocrates, should have buried him at the
halfway house. It may seem unchivalrous to say so, but
it is a stubborn fact nevertheless, and merits the
consideration of Dr. Maxwell, that more men are misled
by lustful women than maids betrayed by designing men.
In fact, no man—at least no civilized man—makes
improper advances to a woman unless he receives some
encouragement, being deterred both by chivalrous
sentiment and respect for the persuasive shotgun.
Despite the picture drawn by the lady lecturer and others
of the horrors of married life, I opine that the woman
who captures a sure-enough man who isn't negotiating
simply for a cook and chambermaid, and who can be
depended
upon to play Romeo to her Juliet for sixty years or so,
should be in no unseemly haste to break into that heaven
where Hymen is given the marble heart, and the matron
who breaks into the game with seven obedient husbands
to her credit has no advantage over the old maid who
never swallowed a pillow while watching a man clad only
in a single garment and a cerulean halo of profanity,
making frantic swipes under the bureau for a missing
collar-button.
