The cover image was produced by the transcriber, and is placed in the public domain.

RADIANT MOTHERHOOD

BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

SCIENTIFIC.

The Cretaceous Flora, Part I. Illustrated. Published by the Trustees of the British Museum. 12s. net.

The Cretaceous Flora, Part II. Illustrated. Published by the Trustees of the British Museum. £1 1s. net.

Ancient Plants. Illustrated. Published by Blackie. 4s. 6d. net.

The Study of Plant Life. 2nd Edition. Illustrated. Published by Blackie. 3s. 6d. net.

Married Love. 8th Edition. Published by Putnam. 6s. net.

Wise Parenthood. 6th Edition. Published by Putnam. 3s. 6d. net.

A Letter to Working Mothers. Published by the Author. 6d. net.

TRAVEL.

A Journal from Japan. Published by Blackie. 7s. 6d. net.

LITERARY.

Man, Other Poems and a Preface. Published by Heinemann. 3s. 6d. net.

Conquest, a Three-Act Play. Published by French. 1s. net.

Gold in the Wood and The Race. Two Plays. Published by Fifield. 2s. net.

With Prof J. Sakurai, Plays of old Japan, The Nō. Published by Heinemann. 5s. net.

The author’s vivid and imaginative sympathy has really enabled her, in some degree, to communicate the incommunicable.

Athenæum.

Radiant Motherhood
A Book for Those Who
are Creating the Future

By
Marie Carmichael Stopes
Doctor of Science, London; Doctor of Philosophy, Munich; Fellow of University College, London; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Linnean Society, London

LONDON
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS, LTD.

TORONTO
THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY, LIMITED

First published August 9, 1920

Copyright; translations and all other rights
reserved by the Author. Copyright in U.S.A.

Dedicated to young husbands and all who are creating the future

CONTENTS

PREFACE

This book is written for the same young people who inspired Married Love. Many of my readers have asked me to write such a book as this, and I sincerely hope that it will not disappoint them. Many, many people have contributed facts which have helped me to write it. The book, however, is pre-eminently the work of my baby son and his father, whose beautiful spirits have been, and will be, through all eternity united with me in a burning desire to bring light into dark places.

M. C. S.

Radiant Motherhood

CHAPTER I
The Lover’s Dream

So every spirit, as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heauenly light,
So it the fairer bodie doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairely dight,
With chearefull grace and amiable sight.
For of the soule the bodie forme doth take:
For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make.

Spencer: An Hymne in honour of Beautie.

Every lover desires a child. Those who imagine the contrary, and maintain that love is purely selfish, know only of the lesser types of love. The supreme love of true mates always carries with it the yearning to perpetuate the exquisite quality of its own being, and to record, through the glory of its mutual creation, other lives yet more beautiful and perfect.

Existence being such a difficult compromise between our dreams and the material facts of the world, this desire may sometimes be thwarted by factors outside itself; may even be so suppressed as to be invisible in the conduct and unsuspected in the wishes of the lover. Yet the desire to link their lives with the future is deeply woven into the love of all sound and healthy people who love supremely.

It is commonly said that most women marry for children, and not out of a personal love, and there is more truth in this saying than is good for the race. To-day, alas, many women cannot find the perfect and sensitive mate their hearts desire and they hope in any marriage to get children which will mitigate the consequent loneliness of their lives. Sometimes they may, to some extent, succeed, but far less often than they imagine, for that strange and still but little understood force “heredity” steps in, and the son of the tolerated father may grow infinitely more like his physical father than he is like the dear delight his mother dreamed he might be.

Few girls have not pictured in day dreams the joy of holding in their arms their own beautiful babies. No man of their acquaintance, however, may seem fine enough to be their father. Until she has been crushed by experience, or, unless she listens with absolute belief to the depressing information of her elders, each girl believes that her own intense desire for perfection will be the principal factor in creating the beautiful babies of her dreams. Often it seems as though this power were granted, for women sometimes bear lovely children by fathers in whom one may seek in vain for any bodily grace or charm.

The century long working of economic laws based on physical force, the remnants of which still affect us, has resulted in man generally having the selective power and tending to choose for his wife the most beautiful or charming woman that his means allow; hence hitherto on the whole, the race has been bred from the better and more beautiful women. This has undoubtedly tended to keep the standard of physical form from sinking to the utter degradation which we see in the worst of the slums, and in institutions where live the feeble-minded offspring of inferior mothers who have wantonly borne children of fathers devoid of any realization of what they were doing.

From these avenues of shame and misery, however, I must steer my line of thought, for this book is written pre-eminently for the young, happy and physically well-conditioned pair who mating beautifully on all the planes of their existence, are living in married love.

Whether early in the days of their marriage or postponed for some months or more out of regard for his wife’s body and beauty, the hour will come when the young husband yearning above her, sees in his wife’s eyes the reflection of the future, and when their mutual longing springs up to initiate the chain of lives which shall repeat throughout the ages the bodily, mental and spiritual beauties of each other, which each holds so dear. Perhaps in lovers’ talk and exquisite whispers they have spoken of this great deed on which they are embarking, and each has voiced that intense yearning which filled them to see another “with your eyes, your hair, your smile,” living and radiant. The lovers dream that they will be repeated in others of their own creation, always young, running through the ages which culminate in the golden glories of the millenium.

The dream is so wonderful, the thought that it pictures in the mind so full of vernal beauty, light and vigour that, were facts commensurate with it, its result should spring all ready formed from between the lips of those who breathed its possibilities like Minerva from the head of Jove.

It seems incredible that such splendid dominant designs to fulfil God’s purpose should be hindered, and made to bend and toil through the hard material facts of the molecular structure of the world, and that it is only many months afterwards that the first outward body is given to this dream, and that then it is in a form not strong and dancing in lightness and beauty but weak and helpless with many intensely physical necessities which for months and years will require the utmost fostering care or it will be destroyed by material effects, hostile and too strong for it. Yet such is the limitation of our powers of creation. And underneath the intense passion of love and all its rich dreams of beauty is the slow building, chemically molecule by molecule, biologically cell by cell, against obstacles the surmounting of which seems a superhuman feat.

Lovers who are parents give to each other the supremest material gift in the world, a material embodiment of celestial dreams which itself has the further power of vital creation.

In this and all my work, I speak to the normal, healthy and loving in an endeavour to help them to remain normal, healthy and loving, and thus to perfect their lives. So in this book I do not intend to deal with those whose marriages are mistaken ones, or with those who do not know true love. I write for those who having made a love match are passing together through the ensuing and surprising years, and incidentally doing one of the greatest pieces of work which human beings can do during their progress through this world, and that is creating the next generation.

In nature, the consummation of the physical act of union between lovers generally results in the conception of a new life. We share this physical aspect of mating and the resulting parenthood with most of the woodland creatures. How far many of the lowlier lives are conscious of the future results of their mating unions is a problem in elementary psychology beyond the realm of present knowledge. But that parenthood is the natural result of their union is to-day known, one must suppose, by almost all young couples who wed. I am still uncertain how far the two are conscious of this in the early days of their union, when every circumstance encourages that supreme self-centredness of happy youth. Much must depend on the age, and on the previous experience and education of the two; much also on their relative natures. A profoundly introspective and thoughtful man and woman are more liable than others to be speedily aware of the many interwoven strands of their joint lives, and to live consciously on several planes of existence simultaneously.

The supreme act of physical union as I have shown in my book, Married Love, consists fundamentally of three essential and widely differing reactions, having effects in correspondingly different regions. There is (a) the intimately personal effect on the internal secretions and general vitality of the individual partaking of that sacrament; (b) there is the social effect of the union of the two in a mutual act in which they must so perfectly blend and harmonize; and (c) there is the racial result which may lead to the procreation of a new life.

In the early days of the honeymoon, personal passion and the concentrated delight of each in the mate is probably more than sufficient in all its rich complexity to fill the consciousness of the two who are thus united in a life-long comradeship to form that highest unit, the pair. But as education and the conscious control of our lives grow, the young pair who are so blissfully self-centred as not to remember or not to be aware of the racial effects of their acts are probably decreasing in numbers. Among the best of those who marry to-day, the majority only enter upon parenthood or the possibility of parenthood when they feel justified in so doing. The young man who profoundly loves his wife and who considers the future benefit of their child, protects her from accidental conception or from becoming a mother at times when the strain upon her would be too great, or when he is unable to give her and the coming child the necessary care and support. That myriads of children are born without this consideration on the part of their parents applies to the commonalty of mankind, but not to the best.

Often to-day the betrothed young couple will speak openly and beautifully of the children they hope to have, while others equally full of the creative dream feel it too tender a subject to put into words, and may marry without ever having given expression to the possibility that they will generate through their love yet other lovers.

CHAPTER II
Conceived in Beauty

... Here in close recess
With flowers, garlands and sweet smelling herbs,
Espousèd Eve deck’d first her nuptial bed,
And heav’nly choirs the Hymenæan sung,
What day the genial angel to our sire
Brought her in naked beauty more adorn’d,
More lovely than Pandora, whom the Gods
Endow’d with all their gifts....
... Into their inmost bower
Handed they went; and, eased the putting off
Those troublesome disguises which we wear,
Straight side by side were laid; nor turn’d, I ween,
Adam from his fair spouse; nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial love refused:

These, lull’d by nightingales, embracing slept,
And on their naked limbs the flowery roof
Shower’d roses, which the morn repaired. Sleep on,
Blest pair, and O! yet happiest if ye seek
No happier state, and know to know no more.

Milton: Paradise Lost.

In ancient Sanskrit, there is a work dealing minutely with love and with the different forms its expression takes in different types of people. This has been modified, added to and re-written by many later authors, and under various names works based on this are to be found in Sanskrit and translated into various Indian dialects.

In these volumes much that is curious, and to Western nations, absurd, is to be found, but also several profound observations which appear to be based on truths generally ignored by us. One of the interesting themes of these very early writers is a recognition and a description of the characteristics of the best and most perfect type of woman, the “Padmini.” In addition to describing fully her physical appearance and characteristics, it is observed that she being a child of light and not of darkness, prefers the supreme act of love to take place in the daylight rather than the dark.

In this country, owing to our artificial, over-burdened and over-strained lives, the physical union of lovers is almost always confined to the night time. Crowded as we are in cities and suburban districts, solitude in Nature is almost impossible; for most, seclusion is only known in a closed room after dark. The Sanskrit writer of the sixth century, however, takes love more seriously than we do, and he describes how for the sacred union serious preparation of beauty should be made—a room or natural arbour decked with flowers; and for the supreme expression of love (that is the love between a pair each of the highest and most perfect type), this should take place in the light of day and not the darkness of the night. Even in our present degraded civilization there are some who do realize the sacredness and the value of the bodily embrace in the fresh beauty of nature and sunlight. There must be many beautiful children who were conceived from unions which took place under natural conditions of light and open air radiance. The most spontaneous time for conception is the summer when our air is mild and sweet enough for true love in Nature’s way.

In an empire where woodland or seaside solitude is not obtainable by lovers for this their most sacred function, the distribution of the population is gravely wrong. It will, however, probably for some time to come be difficult for those who desire such a profound return to natural rectitude, to obtain the necessary security of seclusion amid beautiful surroundings. Therefore, alas, it will in all probability long remain only possible to most lovers to ramble together in nature, and then later to follow the usual course of uniting within their room.

We do not know enough about ourselves or the results of our actions, under our present conditions, to realize to what extent the hour of conception modifies the quality of the offspring. We only know that the child of lovers beautiful in mind and body, the child ardently desired by them, whose coming is prepared with every beauty which it is in their power to obtain, is often well worth all the outlay of love and thought. Certainly among those personally known to me who have followed the rather exceptional course I indicate, the children are remarkable for both physical beauty and exquisite vitality, balanced with sweetness and strength of mental and spiritual qualities.

There is an old and in my opinion valuable view (although it has not been “scientifically proved”) that the actual hour of conception, the condition of the parents at the moment when the germs fuse is one of vital consequences to the child-to-be. Scientific proof of this will be, of course, extraordinarily difficult to discover, but indirectly there do appear to be some actual data in favour of the converse, namely that temporary unhealthy states of the parents result in the conception of children so inferior as to be markedly and seriously anti-social. Forel (Sexual Question, 1908) says:—

The recent researches of Bezzola seem to prove that the old belief in the bad quality of children conceived during drunkenness is not without foundation. Relying on the Swiss census of 1900, in which there figure nine thousand idiots ... this author has proved that there are two acute annual maximum periods for the conception of idiots (calculated from nine months before birth) the periods of carnival and vintage, when the people drink most. In the wine-growing districts, the maximum conception of idiots at the time of vintage is enormous, while it is almost nil at other periods.

It is, of course, not always possible to arrange the hour of the union which will lead to conception. And further even when the hour of the union is arranged, nature, to some extent, controls and may modify conditions before conception. Sometimes the fertilization of the egg cell by the sperm cell takes place in the hour of the bodily union of the lovers, sometimes this inner process is delayed by hours or days (see overleaf). Conception is possible in most women at almost any time during the years of potential motherhood, yet there do appear to be several factors which lead to the potential fertility of a woman varying very much from time to time. Some women, for instance, appear to be liable to conceive only for a certain number of days in each month, and these are in general the two or three days immediately following the monthly period and the day or two immediately before. With other women, however, unions on any day of the month may lead to conception, but this depends, possibly, not only on the woman herself but on the vitality and probable length of life of the sperm cells of her husband. This also varies very greatly in individuals. The longest time which the individual sperm has been observed to remain vital after entry into the woman is seventeen days (see Bossi, N. Arch. d’Obstetr. Gynocol., April 1891).

Hence it will be realized that a union arranged to take place under ideal and perfect conditions, perhaps on a holiday into wild and inspiring solitudes, may result as desired in the entry of the sperm into the womb of the woman, and yet the actual fusion of the sperm and egg cell, and the consequent conception may not come to pass until some days later.

Strange it is indeed in this world, in which so much scientific and laborious observation has been devoted to all sorts of irrelevant and trivial subjects, that knowledge of the actual processes of our own fertilization and conception and of the extent of the significance to the future generations of the mode and condition of the union of the parents are almost totally unknown to scientists or doctors, and are disregarded by the majority of the public.

A recent memoir in the French Academy of Science[1] dealing with statistical figures (going back in France, at any rate, so far as 1853) proves that there does seem to be a definite seasonal influence on the power of conception. Taking the births for the whole year, it is found they are not equally divided throughout the months, but that a notable maximum of births is found in February and March for most of the countries in the northern hemisphere, the actual maximum of births being from the 15th February to the 15th March, and thus indicating that the maximum of conceptions took place between the 5th May and the 5th June. Richet quotes Bertillon as having established the fact that this maximum of conceptions does not depend on the chance that brides like to be married in the spring, because an identical maximum is found in the illegitimate birthrate. Richet gives many tables of figures, and maintains that the maximum corresponds both in the town and in the country, among the rich and the poor, and among the married and the unmarried, and is, therefore, in his opinion, an actual physiological function:—

C’est que les conditions physiologiques de la maturation de l’ovule et de sa fécondation ne sont pas également favorables dans toutes les periodes de l’année. Par suite d’une ancestrale prédisposition, au moment du printemps, chez la femme, comme chez la plupart des animaux, mais moins nettement que chez eux, la maturation, la chute et la fécondation de l’ovule se font dans des conditions meilleures et plus assurées.

The corresponding maximum for the southern hemisphere arises between August and October. This natural tendency to produce children according to the season is, to some extent, altered by the conscious and deliberate control of parenthood, which all the more highly civilized countries now find that their better citizens are exerting.

This natural time for conception will, however, tend not to be thwarted by those who are consciously regulating their lives, because from almost every point of view, the summer is the best time in which to experience the joys of love. As the verdant spring is the best time for a baby to be born, the thoughtful mother-to-be will try, other things being equal, to arrange that its birth should take place then, both for her own sake and for that of the child. The weeks of recovery after the strain of the birth are more easily and happily spent lying in the warm sunshine of a spring or summer garden than in the chill of the winter months, and even the actual expense of the birth is reduced when it takes place in the warmth of the spring or early summer when fires and the labour they involve will be saved.

The child too has warm air to surround it on its first introduction to the outer world after its long period of warmth and protection within its mother, and when in a month or two it is able to kick about on the grass, it benefits directly from the rays of the sun and also from the sun-warmed earth.

Various notable men and women, and, in particular, the famous Dr. Trall of America, have held that the actual hour of conception is the one of fate, and that the moods, feelings and conditions of the parents in that hour work more vital magic then than they can do in any succeeding days or weeks. Instinctively, one would like to feel that this is so. Indeed it will take much to disprove it, although it is a theme which it is at present impossible to prove, and it must remain always only a personal bias, until thousands of people who view marriage aright will consciously observe and record many things and contribute them to some thinker who will tabulate, correlate and understand them.

Whether the hour of conception affects the child directly or not, the memory of an ardent and wonderful experience in which the pair of lovers consciously surround themselves with beautiful conditions, and deliberately place themselves through their love at the service of God and humanity in the creation of the next generation, must give a vitalizing and joyous memory to both throughout all their lives. This memory being especially connected with the dear child of that union must, therefore, have in this indirect way at any rate a positive racial value.

CHAPTER III
The Gateway of Pain

As when desire, long darkling, dawns, and firs
The mother looks upon the newborn child,
Even so my Lady stood at gaze and smiled
When her soul knew at length the Love it nurs’d.
Born with her life, creature of poignant thirst
And exquisite hunger, at her heart Love lay
Quickening in darkness, till a voice that day
Cried on him, and the bonds of birth were burst.

D. G. Rossetti.

The price of every beauty in this world is in proportion to its quality, even although the payment of the price exacted may be long deferred or may be made in such an intricate and remote form that its connection with the result is overlooked.

As the greatest thing which lovers can give each other is a child, and as none in the world are so great as lovers, the price exacted by Nature for the child of loving and sensitive people is correspondingly heavy.

This statement may apparently conflict with the idea that the joy of bearing a child to the beloved is a woman’s consummation of happiness; yet it does not conflict, because of the deeper truth that the supremest happiness is mysteriously intermingled with self-sacrifice. A young woman whose character is sufficiently beautiful and sensitive to know the highest joys of motherhood—the full delights of human existence and love—will also be sensitive to the varied pains which motherhood will bring. Indeed, in this respect, the poet’s saying that “the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be pricked by the thorn” is essentially true.

The radiance of the highest form of motherhood is that of the transfigured saint, hallowed by suffering comprehended and endured, transmuted into a service beyond and above the lower desires of self.

For long, indeed for the many millions of years during which she has shown a motherhood comparable with that of human beings,[2] Nature has essentially trapped and tricked the mother into her motherhood. All the woodland and jungle creatures, the deer or the tiger, the rabbit or the squirrel, grow up through their brief adolescence into a partial consciousness of delight in themselves and reach the phase of their development in which their own desires urge them to unite with each other. One can scarcely believe that they are conscious of the resulting parenthood which will become a physical fact at a later date, although the training of her cubs by a woodland mother undoubtedly does include handing on, through some speechless communication, of some actual instruction. A similar blind parenthood, but in addition coerced, has for many thousands of years been characteristic of a large portion of the human race. Even to-day motherhood is too often blind: the young girl delighting in herself and the fairness of her own body, conscious of the power she wields in social life as a beautiful and attractive creature whom older people pet and please and young men place upon a pedestal, is urged by this natural self-centred delight into accepting through flattery the enjoyment of herself by some chosen mate; and the later consequences of motherhood are then faced either in amazed astonishment or in open revolt.

Earlier civilizations often dealt with the excessive births resulting from blind or coerced parenthood by destroying the children as infants after birth. This was done directly, and often by her leading citizens, in Greece (one of the highest forms of civilization ever attained) and still infanticide direct or indirect goes on among all the populous races of the world. Where the value placed on the mother’s mental and physical suffering is low, one may still see motherhood, not as a fine, voluntary and glorious act of self-sacrifice from the highest possible motives of love and service directly to the beloved, and indirectly to the race, but as the exploitation of a trapped and helpless sacrifice.

Mothers will say that their babies are their greatest joys; one may ask, therefore, how I can use the word “sacrifice” in connection with motherhood. The use of the word is just, and based on truths too generally concealed by those who know them, and far too generally unknown by those who ought to know them. Ignorance of their extent has made men callous, indifferent or ribald towards the profound sacrifices of motherhood.

Few there be, however, who do not know of the agonizing torments of actual birth. The Bible is read aloud in churches, and in its wording there is some recognition of the existence of this agony, although based upon earlier and simpler civilizations in which the women were probably better cared for and better fitted for motherhood than the majority of women are to-day. Following biblical tradition, the memory of the agony of birth is generally portrayed as being wiped out by the supreme joy in the child which follows. To-day, however, this effacement of the anguish is by no means universal, and the abiding horror of the birth is so great that not a few women refuse to bear another child. Then men, who cannot even imagine the experience of child-bearing, denounce such a mother, rate her and hold her up to derision. How little do they realize that in her they may see Nature’s working of the laws of evolution (see p. [24]).

The torturing agony of birth might so easily have been averted by Nature had the construction of our bodies differed but very slightly from those which we to-day possess in common with most of the higher animals. The human baby when the hour comes for it to sever its connection from its mother, and as an independent individual to venture into the open air of the world, has to make its way through the arched gateway of bone fixed and set by the mother’s own requirements as a frame to her own structure. The encircling archway of bone through which the infant has to pass is but three or four inches in diameter. It would have been possible had our evolution taken a different turn for the infant to have made its exit through the soft wall of the mother’s body instead of through this fixed and hardened circle of her bone. But for some causes too remote for us at present to discover this was not so, and the essential fact faces us to-day that every infant born naturally must be born through this circle of bone. Moreover if the infant is a well-developed and healthy one, as the ordinary baby of a healthy and beautiful young couple should naturally and rightly be, that infant’s head is larger in diameter than the circle of bone through which it has to pass. Its tissues have, therefore, to be squeezed and pressed to mould their shape in order to allow its exit through the orifice, and this must be a slow process, and one which almost always entails great pressure and consequent agony to the mother. Dr. Mary Scharlieb says in The Welfare of the Expectant Mother:—

It is, however, scarcely possible that either the public or the profession realizes that one woman dies in child birth for every 250 children born alive. In addition to this we have to remember that the same accidents and diseases which kill the mothers and the babies inevitably cause a still heavier percentage of crippling and invaliding (p. 43).

Twenty-five per cent. and more of the babies conceived and borne die before they reach normal birth. Often they find the journey through the bony archway into the outer world so difficult and arduous a task that they perish in the process of birth, although probably had they been born by Cesarean section, they would have survived and grown into healthy children.

We do not consider what the infant itself in birth may be enduring. The infant is “unconscious,” that is to say it carries no memory of these earlier months in its conscious memory as it grows up, but the excessive moulding, particularly of its head, which often has to take place and sometimes takes weeks to right itself, must, one thinks, greatly disturb the little brain, and in my opinion may have a lifelong effect.

I have never heard this aspect of our present problem duly considered. The fact that the increasing brain capacity of civilized man tends ever to give the new born infant a larger head, and tends proportionately to increase the size of the head out of relation to the size of the circle of its mother’s bone, has been commented on, and appears to some far seeing thinkers as the possible cause of the ultimate extinction of the human race. Because if we go on developing in the way we are at present doing, ever depending more and more on our brains, and the head of the new born infant tends to increase with the natural development of the brain, the day will come when the birth of a child is absolutely blocked by the relative diameter of its head and of its mother’s pelvic bones. If the higher races maintain a dominant place in the world, the day may come when with nearly all women such an incompatible relation will arise. Of what avail then would be the ratings and peevish fury of callous men? What scheme the race may have devised before that date to relieve this cruel deadlock we cannot here discuss. The perfecting of the method of birth by Cesarean section offers much promise. It may become a racial necessity. This possibility, on which to-day we are beginning to impinge, indicates one great cause of the torturing agony of the actual hours of birth which the young mother and father-to-be may have to face before they can see the child of their love.

Fortunate women are even still so constructed that the circle of bone has a relatively large orifice which allows the infant comparatively easily to pass through it, and the difficulty and danger of birth for them is minimized. With them the birth pangs may be so trivial in comparison with the result, that they are truly “almost negligible” as most men would like to believe of most women.

Such women, when outward circumstances allow it, are those whom every impulse should encourage to be the mothers of the large families, which are, under proper conditions, still desirable for a portion of our people.

Such a woman as the one who wrote me the following letter is indeed the standard which all women and would-be mothers would gladly reach were it possible in any degree to control the formation of a growing girl’s body so that as a woman she might retain such a primitive adaptation to motherhood:—

On the exact right day the babe arrived ... in a quarter of an hour he was there, without nurse, doctor or any one and with no pain to myself. This little party has grown into a splendid specimen, very large (he was 8½ lbs. at birth) and firm and muscular. He is the whole day long laughing and kicking or sleeping.

Such women, however, so far as records go, are few. Much might be done by science to discover what are the causes of the reverse condition, and if possible to attempt to eliminate them.

In view of the agony which myriads of women throughout the ages of civilization have endured, it seems strange indeed that no effort should apparently have been made by the learned to understand the causes which control the individual formation of the growing structure, with a view possibly to securing some such development. In recent years, however, a little has been done in the recognition of the causes of the converse, that is to say the excessive narrowing of the pelvis to the degree where child birth is not only torment but a life and death agony. And it is now well known that this condition is associated with malnutrition and rickets in infancy and early girlhood.

The little baby girl who has rickety bones (which result from being improperly fed as an infant) is, in extreme cases certain, and in many cases very likely, to have such contracted pelvic bones that when her turn comes for motherhood, the birth of a living child may be impossible by the ordinary processes of Nature. Here again, as so often is inevitable, in the course of any consideration of the profound truths of mated existence, we impinge upon the treatment of the unsound and the diseased. This under development of the mother’s pelvic bones is a different problem from that evolutionary one touched on in the paragraphs above.

Alas, that it should be true that the great majority of city dwellers come into the category of the spoilt and the tainted in some respect or another. But with the vision of true health and beauty as a standard before our eyes, many might escape the incipient weaknesses by consciously pursuing a standard of health, beauty and normality. It is this standard, this ideal picture, which may yet be reproduced in the lives of millions, which I desire to present in this book, so that in telling young married people some of the great facts which are ahead of them I will present only those difficulties which are inevitable, and leave to others the handling of disease. As things are to-day among British stock,[3] it is the very exceptional women who find birth an entirely easy process of which the pain is trivial, and this is chiefly due to the bony structure fixed and limited in size, which stands as a gateway of pain between the infant and the outer world, between the young wife and her motherhood.

Before the hour of birth is reached, however, the young mother-to-be, if she is neither instructed nor helped by the wisdom of her elders, may have already endured much that it will distress and dismay her lover and husband to observe, and much more which she, being a woman, will endure without allowing him to perceive, although she may be so frightened that it may be hard indeed for her not to cry out in her bewildered pain. How much of this distress and pain is essentially “natural,” how much is the artificial result of our mode of living and our ignorance of Nature’s laws? What are the things which a healthy, finely-built young woman mated to a healthy young man must endure, those experiences which she cannot escape and those which she may with proper help avoid altogether or in part? It is the object of several chapters in this book to answer these questions more truthfully and I hope more helpfully than they have yet been answered. The things I deal with specially, because they will face nearly every healthy girl, are in most books ignored.

My chapters may appear superfluous to those who view the long list of books purporting to give advice to the young wife and expectant mother on how to treat herself and the coming child. I have read the majority of those books, and I write this one because of their failure to touch on the profoundest essentials in a way which will truly help the healthy and sensitive type of young people. The healthy, normal and happy in my mind’s vision are the standard of the race: those who to-day to some extent foreshadow the strength and beauty of bodily and mental equipment which will become a commonplace when all have risen to their standard, and it is for them that I feel it imperative to add this one more book to the long list of books advising the young mother. With the young mother I also consider and try to help the young father who has been so strangely neglected and ignored and who also needs help.

The majority of the writers on cognate subjects, like the majority of the minds of those who are concerned at all with the problems of the young mother, really though perhaps unconsciously present studies in disease, pictures of aberrations from the normal, accounts or innuendos dealing with illness and handicaps, with abnormal conditions which should never arise, and the knowledge of which should not be brought before the sensitive mind as if they were a usual and general thing. The acquiescence in a low standard of health, the discussion of diseased conditions as though they were normal, or even as though they were unavoidable, are intensive in their result and harmful to all who come under their influence. The race sickens ever more and more profoundly because of such influences.

We have to-day in our community a new conception in the Government Department of the Ministry of Health, but alas, that Ministry is engrossed in the contemplation of disease. In the present state of our civilization this is perhaps unavoidable, because there are not enough people in the country of standing and experience in scientific research who have concerned themselves with the problems of the healthy and beautiful, and with the needs and requirements in the way of instruction and outward conditions and environment of those who by nature are healthy and normal, and who desire to remain healthy and normal. Even these need instruction to compensate for that which Nature cannot give to those who toil apart from her bosom in the cities, where they cannot hear her voice for the roaring of the traffic. This is the piteous plight of the majority of our citizens to-day, for so many live in towns.

Alas, that there are physical facts which all must face of a type which makes one feel that Nature is cruel in her treatment of us. When two young, beautiful and ardently happy beings are embarking upon the greatest work for the community which they can do, with a desire to create further beautiful and happy lives, it seems indeed an ironic and wanton mistake that there should be distressing physical experiences for both of them to endure. But “As gold is tried by the fire, so the heart is tried by pain,” and if they are given a conscious knowledge of what they must face and what they may avoid, there will then be a firm foundation and a triumphant consummation to the visions and ideals of splendour and perfection which they can secure unimpaired through the trials which they conquer.

CHAPTER IV
The Young Mother-to-be:
Her Amazements

But lo! what wedded souls now hand in hand
Together tread at last the immortal strand
With eyes where burning memory lights love home?
Lo! how the little outcast hour has turned
And leaped to them and in their faces yearned—
“I am your child: O parents, ye have come.”

Rossetti: The House of Life.

The intermingling of the physical, the mental and the spiritual is so subtle, intricate and inexplicable that, in describing the states of the bride who is about to be a mother, it is difficult to know with which first to deal.

In an Appendix, p. [229], I put in compact form one or two of the obvious physical phenomena with which it may be necessary for the bride and bridegroom to acquaint themselves. Although generally known to their elders, my many correspondents have shown me that even such simple and direct facts are often unknown to young people, who are frequently so shy that they do not like to consult a medical practitioner or an older friend. Assuming then that the simple physical facts are known, there still remain innumerable subtleties which may cause heart searching, perhaps to both bride and bridegroom.

It is almost as though the bearing of a child were a function so primitive in its origin that it tends, to some extent, to dissociate the ordinary coherence of the mother’s life, and to result in a weakening of the sub-conscious control over her emotions to which she had all her life grown accustomed. Thus she enters upon a complex state in which primitive instincts and feelings may be at variance with the conscious thoughts and aspirations of highly civilized and sensitive humanity.

This complexity of her instincts and her conscious feelings may lead the young wife to find an apparently inexplicable conflict in her attitude towards her husband. Consciously she desires ardently, with all that is best in her nature, to bear the child of their love. She adores her husband and is full of tender emotions towards him as the coming father, and experiences a form of gratitude that he should be the means of fulfilling her dreams; but possibly, at the same time, she may be amazed to find in herself an intense and active antagonism to his personal presence, an antagonism which she has to fight against revealing. She may realize that it is utterly at variance with her real feelings, and she may know that it would be the acme of cruelty to allow him to become aware of it, particularly when he is full of deep concern and love for her, and is doing all that a loving consideration can do for her happiness and welfare.

Such a complex diversity of mental states existing perhaps co-incidently at the same hour in the mind of a girl may, if acute, lead to an outwardly recognizable form of hysteria and even to an unbalanced mind. Of such, however, I am not speaking, but am now describing the outwardly controllable, but nevertheless inwardly felt effervescing conflict of instinctive emotions, which is far more frequent than is generally recognized, and which the best balanced and most loving women are amazed to experience in themselves.

From women whom I know to be exceptionally happy wives and mothers, I have evidence on this theme. With, of course, personal variations, they tell me that they have never confided this bewildering experience to their husbands, their doctors or their relatives, but, in essence, they say what is said in the following words by one of my correspondents:—

In the first few months of coming motherhood she had a feeling of antagonism so strong “that it amounted to actual dislike of my husband’s presence, and a desire to be right away from him. This distressed me very much at first as I thought I must be losing my love for my husband, and could not understand such a sudden reversal of feeling as I loved him very deeply.... At the end of the first three months, I found that my feeling of love returned in full strength, and with it a feeling of intense devotion and tenderness towards my husband as the father of my coming child.”

Some such experience, generally and fortunately limited to comparatively short though different periods, is not infrequently felt and is often a source of secret distress and anguish to the young wife whose sense of loyalty to the man she loves and married bars her from the relief of talking of these feelings. As is now beginning to be realized, emotions deeply experienced which are deliberately suppressed, may have far reaching effects even on the health. It is, therefore, well that she should know what is, I am sure, the truth, that this physical repugnance, which sometimes even amounts to a detestation of sharing the same house with the husband, and a desire to escape even from the superficial contact of eating in the same room with him, is a temporary phase, possibly phylogenetic[4] in its origin.

This passing phase, whether it lasts a few days or months, is neither necessary nor absolutely universal, but so far as I can ascertain it appears to be a common occurrence in the lives of the more sensitive and tenderly loving of wives. Where the coming child has not been desired by both parents, and where the mother resents her coming maternity, there is, of course, a totally different problem for which there is a very obvious reason. I am speaking now only of the mother-to-be who deeply desires her child, who is physically healthy and well formed, living under comfortable, protected and happy conditions, and who ardently loves and is loved by her husband; it is she who may and most frequently does feel this passing phase of intense physical antagonism. That she loves, and consciously loves, gives her an outward control so that this under-current of inherent antagonism is not allowed to show, and is gallantly concealed from the whole world. She would feel it an intense disloyalty to speak of it to any living soul, but it is there and it is so often a source of distress and strain upon the nervous system that it should be openly faced instead of being as it now is a repressed feeling. This repression tends to result in one of the greatest difficulties of the healthy woman who is carrying a child, namely sleeplessness. The complex balance of her nervous control is strained by her surprise at herself, and perhaps by her self-reproaches, and thus she has an unnecessary burden in addition to the one of the coming child. This phase, therefore, is not a fact to be ignored or treated too lightly, and while it lasts it should be respected so far as is compatible with the circumstances of the two and with due regard for the mother. It is not a thing either to fear or to be ashamed of. It is perhaps best openly faced as a fact of rather curious interest as an ancient survival in oneself of racial history. If possible it should form the object of innocently playful laughter between the girl and her husband; this would do much to prevent its suppression taking a serious root.

Aware of the existence of this phase and its probable meaning and treating it in this simple sensible way, neither the young mother nor the father-to-be need fear this brief physical antagonism. Where its danger lies, however, is in the possibility that unrecognized, it will, with those who live a shade less perfectly, result in the beginning of a habit of irritation, and perhaps in the setting up of some form of verbal bickering on the part of those who cannot lead as secluded and separate lives as would be possible in a spacious country or in a large establishment. When once the pair have broken the sweet custom of speaking only in love to each other, then, even after the temporary phase of antagonism has passed, they may find themselves with a habit of verbal bickering which is intensely corrosive, ultimately perhaps more than any other thing tending to destroy the outward beauty of a mutual life.

There is another and reverse aspect of the mental phases through which a young mother-to-be may pass, in which she has an intense and added passion for her husband, and, as this leads to a subject of great importance, and a subject which has never been adequately handled, I will defer its consideration to Chapter [XII].

CHAPTER V
The Young Mother-to-be:
Her Delights

The sweet, soft freshness that blooms on baby’s limbs—does anybody know where it was hidden so long? Yes, when the mother was a young girl it lay pervading her heart in tender and silent mystery of love—the sweet, soft freshness that has bloomed on baby’s limbs.

Tagore: Gitanjali.

In a happy and desired motherhood, every hour of the day and night may bring its intense delight, both in the dreams of contemplation, wherein the experience of love sinks deep into the heart, and of the linking up of the present with the future. All natural functions rightly performed give a deep satisfaction and content, but this, the greatest function of all, now so specialized and intimately interwoven with every highest racial impulse and every dearest personal desire of the loving pair, yields a wealth and profundity of experience surpassing all else.

In my opinion, undoubtedly the ideal way of spending the earlier months of coming parenthood is in the form of an extended honeymoon, in which the couple travelling slowly should follow the guide of seasonal beauty or should visit place after place of historic interest or natural charm so that the mother’s mind should be fed and stimulated by historic memories, by the exquisite freshness of nature, and the grandeur of man’s artistic achievements. This, of course, would not be possible in its fullest extent to many, until, in the future, society recognizes the supreme importance to the race of the expectant mother. Some such course, however, might be possible to a larger number than it is at present were they to realize not only their personal good but the racial benefit of this procedure. In our country, owing to our artificial and unclean attitude, the mother-to-be, particularly during the later months, stays at home so far as possible, and does not go from place to place. When going about entails battling with crowds on public conveyances, this is wise. But the easy effort of walking or of riding in the old fashioned horse carriage from place to place on an extended journey, is ideal, and sometimes appears to have beneficial reactions on the character and quality of the child that is coming. But, even if such a mode of life is impossible, yet the mother by reading and conversation can, if she has a mind of trained imagination, vary and enrich the mental environment of her child while it is developing.

Then, too, the mother-to-be can count among her delights all the intimate personal enjoyment of the little physical things which contribute to the great anticipations of the future. She can, if she has the skill herself, sew the little clothes, stitching into them sunny thoughts and beautiful hopes, making them links between the present delightful solitude à deux and another beautiful time which the little one who is coming cannot comprehend till, many years hence, he or she will experience its charm in turn.

Little things intensely loved undoubtedly bring a greater reward in human happiness than great and numerous possessions, the joy of which can be but partly grasped. Within a tiny home, a mother whose heart vibrates with love can find a thousand sources wherewith to enrich the coming life.

But of all her delights, the greatest must always be the thought of the wonderful gift, which, at some ever nearing date, she will be able to give to the man whom she adores. Some men are negligent of the charms and enravishments of children, but I think in every man who fully loves and is fully loved by his wife, the thought of the child of them both must always be a stimulant to everything most ardently beautiful and profound in their natures.

Pictures of the child in after life filling brightly and beautifully some big position in the world may flit past the mother’s mind during this time, but, if the mother is wise, she will not too intimately visualize the outward form of her child as a maturing girl or boy. By so doing she may indirectly wrong it. (See Chapter [XIV]).

Her delight should be to picture a tiny laughing messenger from God, thinly veiled so that its sex is hidden; the figure of a child a few years old, still full of divine innocence and radiant possibilities. Happy hours of bodily rest may be spent picturing it in a thousand beautiful actions dancing in the sunlight, a contagious centre of joy in the whole world around them. On such an idea of delight she may lavish every day invigorating thoughts and wonderful dreams; none will be wasted, of that she may be assured. If, at the same time, she is securing the coming child’s bodily well-being through the proper material channels, then she can feel that these dreams of higher than material beauty are being built into reality. The secret sacred wonder of the process of which she is the active centre casts its spell of magic and delight around the willing mother. “A Garden enclosed is my Beloved,” and she feels within her own existence the mystic sense of divine beauty, which one feels in another form in a walled garden in the summer twilight.

CHAPTER VI
The Young Mother-to-be:
Her Distresses

The amount of suffering that has been and is borne by women is utterly beyond imagination.

Herbert Spencer: Principles of Ethics, II.

The bodily changes which at first almost imperceptibly steal upon the mother, if she be a girl who has enjoyed her own physical beauty, and has taken that care of herself which so delightful a thing as a young woman’s body merits, will be at first a series of amazements and perhaps of delights as her body rounds itself and becomes more perfect. At this time the husband should fill his memory with her exquisiteness, for though she will, in the end, return perhaps to her normal strength and a re-awakened and different beauty, she will never again in her life reach such a point of bodily perfection as she does during the first three months or so of her coming motherhood, culminating at about the close of the third month.

As the years pass, hallowed and sanctified by love which is understood, even when grey with age, her face may gain an ever increasing beauty and power, but the perfection of her body is reached in the early days when she is first about to become a mother.

To one who cares for the outward form of her body, changes will occur inevitably as the months pass, which may give rise to deep distresses, principally because they feel at the time so permanent and it is difficult to believe that the disfigurements will ever pass. For a time she must inevitably become less and less beautiful; she may indeed become, even to herself, repugnant. Perhaps to her as to so many thousands of women the sight of themselves then is a torment, and the conquest of this feeling is a great and increasingly difficult mental exercise. As this time approaches and is upon her, the young mother-to-be must concentrate all her conscious thought on the beauty of the future. She must forget the present and its cruel distortions and live in the months and years that are to come when she will have with her another life and lovely form to which she has given origin.

Nothing is at present gained for our civilization by the obstinate blindness on the part of some, and the wilful deception on the part of others, which together encourage the concealment from the bride of what she has to face.

On the one hand stand these prudes, but on the other the too eager and explicit, even lewd and profane and soiled minds who delight in lugubrious warnings.

The result has been that many a woman enters upon her motherhood gaily and eagerly, totally unprepared for what is to follow, totally unaware that, by the first act of motherhood, she gives up something essential to herself and something which is irreplacable in all the after years. So great a gift should be made not only voluntarily, but consciously, and with full knowledge of what it entails.

Cruel indeed is the callous hardness of the older mind that can see without desiring to help the proud and sensitive young spirit embarking upon a course which cannot but entail subtle difficulties at the best and extreme physical anguish at the worst, yet help of the kind the modern sensitive girl needs is almost unobtainable. Rare indeed is the mother of the last generation who has the power and the knowledge to meet the unvoiced demands of this.

Acquainted as I am with all sorts and conditions of men and women, I am nevertheless frequently amazed and filled with burning indignation at the well-nigh inhuman cruelty, stupidity and hypocrisy of the older generation towards young potential parents. It is not an uncommon thing to hear a man who is unfaithful to his wife because she has lost her physical beauty, at the same time haranguing the public on the compulsory duties of parenthood on the part of all young married women, and coupling his denunciations with sneers at the young girl who fears to embark on motherhood, reviling her as selfish. Yet the cause of her shrinking may be that from all the weltering confusion of contradictory and scrappy information which may have been allowed to reach her, the one which has fixed itself in her mind most vividly, is that which promised her loss of her bodily charm and that of all she possesses which is most valuable to her as a bond which binds her husband’s affection to her. The woman who is perfectly sure of the continuance of her husband’s spiritual and romantic love does not fear the risks of motherhood. All who truly and deeply love, desire parenthood. But can a woman who was married by a shallow man only for her beauty dare to risk the thing which holds him to her?

There is indeed a diabolical malignity in the older man who is himself unfaithful because of the very things in his wife which he denounces the younger girl for fearing.

This must not be misunderstood by my readers as indicating that I think a woman should shrink in any way or that her husband should grudge the sacrifice of all the fragrance and beauty which they possess towards making the child of their love the citizen of the future. But with fervent intensity, I feel that to keep the young woman ignorant of facts, and, at the same time, on the one hand to upbraid and bully her and on the other to terrorize her with evil minded tales and tragic sights, is conduct which would be laughable in its absurdity did it not touch the spring of tears.

As the months of expectant motherhood succeed one another the girl will find her power to walk and run, to keep up with her husband in his pleasure, his out-door exertions, or even to do the usual standing involved in the course of her house work, increasingly curtailed. This is perhaps the inevitable consequence of the burden of actual weight which results from the later growth of the child within her as it increases and approaches the size of a living baby.

Sometimes the fortunate mother finds that she is still capable of the same amount of exertion to which she is generally accustomed, but, under modern conditions, this is but seldom. The stories of Kaffir women on the trek who bear their children and follow on with the rest, and savages whose activity is in no way curtailed, are neither applicable to modern conditions, nor are they fair standards to set, because such women do not live as the modern woman is forced to, nor is their bodily organization really comparable with that of our highly sensitive brain-evolved race.

Nevertheless, with the exception of heavy exertion, the girl who is carrying her child should be able to indulge in a much greater amount of healthful exercise, without undue fatigue, than she is generally able to enjoy. (See also Chapter [X]).

Most women have heard rumours of others who have been able to follow out almost all their usual occupations, and have felt little or no handicap from child bearing. Such an exceptional woman is my correspondent who wrote:—

I lived exactly as usual; I played golf up to the middle of the seventh month and bicycled up to my very last. On the afternoon of the day my second child was born (weighing 8¾ lb.) I was shopping with a woman acquaintance, who had no idea there was anything on the way.

Such women, although not very many, do exist among us. Their existence is perhaps the source of the hope which always animates every girl first embarking on her parenthood that she, by the sheer force of the longing for health which is within her, will prove also to be such an exception. Sometimes this desire may be apparently fulfilled, but generally, unless it is coupled with much greater knowledge than most girls possess, as the months pass one by one, her proud spirit will bend, she will give up and give up and give up. Humbled, weakened, humiliated before herself, through the fact that she is not strong enough to fight what she now is inclined acquiescently to call “Nature,” she too goes down the stream with all the myriads of other happy hearted girls, whose gallant endeavours have equally failed. Then she creeps, wearily resting by the way, where she had hoped to tread with a firm and lightsome step.

There grows in her mind, and this is stronger the more she loves her husband, the added distress that she feels that she is failing him. He married a mate, an equal, who lighter of step could yet cover the ground as well as he, and who could share his amusements, his work to some extent perhaps, and his pleasures. She feels that she must, so far as she possibly can, maintain this position. This hope impels her particularly if they have been married but a short time, and hence their days of delightful untramelled companionship have been so few.

In this unselfish distress, which is primarily for him, she is tempted to conceal her effort and tends to overstrain herself in an endeavour to act as completely as she can the part, as reported, of the early Greek or Roman matron or of the proud and savage mother who could bear her children as lightly as a woodland creature. Finding sooner or later that she cannot do so, she suddenly gives in. Her strength, undermined by the series of distresses, the subtle shocks and blows to which she is secretly subjected, she yields and takes on that air of semi-invalidism, demanding constant care and consideration from her husband and those about her, which in a way represents the hauling down of her gallant flag. Her dreams of an easy motherhood are vanquished.

She will at times be dimly conscious that she is no longer able to feel so acutely. This, in a way perhaps, is Nature’s provision against the too intense experiencing of emotion, which would otherwise come with sensitive motherhood. The sensation can be described, as one woman put it, as though each one of her powers of feeling were wrapped round in cotton wool, deadened and clogged so that they no longer gave contact. This may be well, but it adds in a dim way to the various distresses, a sense of unreality and apartness, which, if it coincides with that temporary antipathy to her husband, which was noted on page [33], may make the mother-to-be, for the time at any rate, indeed a wanderer in the valley of the shadow.

CHAPTER VII
The Young Father-to-be:
His Amazements

Till from some wonder of new woods and streams
He woke, and wondered more; for there she lay.

D. G. Rossetti.

The young father-to-be, though a real and very important person, has been curiously neglected by all and sundry who concern themselves with the affairs of the “expectant mother,” “child welfare,” and the other social and semi-eugenic matters about which well-meaning people have so voluminously written and so sedulously talked.

Sometimes jesting reference is made to the rather strange fact that, in some savage races, it is the father and not the mother who lies in bed for weeks after the birth of the child, but of the material and very real psychological experiences and physical difficulties which the young father is encountering and living through during the months before the advent of his first-born, few have any knowledge. Fewer still have offered the father-to-be any sympathy or help. Nevertheless with the increasingly perceptive and specialized individuals comprising our civilization, there arises an increasing number of young men capable of feeling and suffering in some degree corresponding to the great realities of which, for each, his home is the centre. And, moreover, it must not be forgotten that among our thoughtful classes are now growing up the young men whose mothers were among the pioneers of women’s emancipation, whose mothers, therefore, were voluntary mothers who have trained their sons consciously and unconsciously, directly and indirectly, to be more in harmony with the true and natural attitude of a sensitive human being to its mate than are the average gross and over-bearing males, sons of enslaved and involuntary mothers. The sensitiveness of the modern young man towards his duties as a father, towards his wife as the mother of his child is, in my experience, very remarkable in its extent and its beauty. I have direct and indirect evidence from thousands that among the young Army men in various messes on the continent in recent years, an unexpected racial seriousness of attitude was shown when the necessary key that unlocked the secret chamber was available. Although it is a most deplorable truth, that there has been an increase in the racial diseases and an outward levity towards women, this is less an inherent baseness on the part of the young men than the result of the existence of the false conditions in which they have been placed, due to the criminal mishandling the whole racial problem has received from those older and in a position of authority.

In the nature of things, at first the young man can scarcely avoid taking fatherhood much more lightly than the girl takes motherhood. In normal, sweet, and healthy men, a desire for children of their own is very strong. Yet, however sympathetic their dispositions, however observant they may be of others, the unmarried young men cannot, under present conditions, have a full comprehension of what the attainment of motherhood involves in sacrifice for the mother. Hence the ideally mated young couple embarking upon parenthood set about it gaily, but before many months have passed, the young father-to-be must also be filled with amazements. For, control her impulse to be alone as she may (see Chapter [III]), curb her induced fretfulness as she may, the general psychological attraction between the man and the woman must be affected by the physiological state of the mother. The young man should find himself, if not actually repelled as the months progress, at least much more able to give his wife an impersonal tenderness in place of an active desire for physical union than he would have imagined possible. However sweet their love, if they are average human beings and not exceptional, he will perhaps, from time to time, be amazed and pained by unexpected peevishness and fretfulness, perhaps by what appear to be quite irrational and unjustifiable complaints from his wife. He should be made acquainted with the facts on page [33], and should apply them to himself and his wife. Knowing of the liability of such a temporary development, he can guard against any permanent injuries to love arising from the experience, such as often do result when it is unexpected and misunderstood.

I remember once being told by a nurse who had been at a large maternity home that of those who came there for the birth of their child she had only seen one couple between whom there was no bickering, not even infinitesimal criticisms and gusts of temper to ruffle the surface of their intense and romantic devotion. “Generally the women at this time,” she said, “lead their husbands an awful dance, and are always snapping at them, but they do not really mean it, of course.”

Men, on the whole, I think (although it is difficult and dangerous to generalize) are less tolerant of “superficial snappiness” than women, and the ruffling of the surface which comes with a few angry words enters probably deeper into the life of a sensitive man than it does in the life of a girl of corresponding type, although, on the other hand, a man may very quickly acclimatize himself to ignoring such comparative trivialities. Yet at first, at any rate, they not only amaze but distress, and when they appear irrational and swiftly pass, they may, although a trifle in themselves, be the cause of much misunderstanding and may be the foundation of more serious later disharmonies.

To the man who has any biological knowledge, all the wonderful processes of the growth of the unseen embryo, leading up to birth, are full of amazed wonder. If a man knows, as all should in these days (see my book, Married Love, for information about the fundamental processes of mating) how minute is the single sperm cell from which his growing child takes its rise, the immensity of the results of the activity of that tiny cell appear indeed stupendous. His flower-like bride is changed, her whole body is permeated, altered and impressed by the activities of this particle of himself united with its counterpart within her.

Only for the utterly callous can the experience of the months of waiting be anything but full of continual reminders of the amazing complexity of life. Long ago Tennyson felt:—

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Even more filled with humble and profound amazement must be the future father, who feels that his wife is now the very centre of the greatest mystery and wonder of the universe. Looking at her, brooding in her dreams, his mind must be continually filled with the consciousness of the eager active growth that is in progress, and the intense desire to take part in the mystical processes.

CHAPTER VIII
The Young Father-to-be:
His Delights

A Garden enclosed is my spouse, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

Song of Solomon.

It is said that men naturally have a more casual interest in fatherhood than women have in motherhood. It is sometimes even definitely said that men do not have a passion for fatherhood or care profoundly for young children. This is not my experience. A much larger number of men than are credited with it feel an intense desire for fatherhood, and take a great delight in young children. Though they should share the joy equally, yet the father often has a larger proportion of the pleasure of the little child, while to the mother comes a larger proportion of the burden and the difficulties. To the child itself, too, the father is often more precious than the mother. An accidental testimony to this effect was given by the little daughter of one of those “devoted wives and mothers” who thought woman’s place was only the home, and a mother’s duty only to care for her children. The child and I were chatting and the little one misunderstood something I said, and thought that I asked which of its parents it loved most. The child quickly answered, “Oh, I like father best, of course—mother is there every day and she washes us.” The privilege of being a child’s favourite is no small one, and, as this child shows us, a father may win it with unfair facility.

The conscious dream of parenthood, a parenthood which shall give the children the best possible chance in life undoubtedly lies behind the majority of marriages. Hence when the young man who has married with the desire, perhaps not for immediate, but for ultimate fatherhood, first learns the definite fact that he has already inaugurated the beginnings of his child’s development he must experience an intense and unique wave of feeling, which, as in the early days of marriage, with all its freshness, and with the actual physical difficulties yet unfaced, must be one primarily of buoyant delight.

There is also in the earlier months, for the man of artistic perceptions, an unique experience in the appreciation of his wife’s enhanced beauty. It is perhaps known that the most critical artistic view of woman claims the highest point of perfection in her form about the third month of her first period of motherhood. To a pair of lovers who have delighted in their bodily beauty, as all natural and healthy and well formed young people should do, this period, when the loveliness of the woman is at its very height, and when the man can feel that he has contributed to its perfection, must be a time of very special entrancement. That it is something from within his most sacred being that has added this glow and radiance in perfecting the rounded form of the body that he adored in its virginal grace, must give a man with artistic and poetic potentialities an all too brief but never to be forgotten experience. The young father-to-be should not lose a day of these swiftly passing weeks, for this phase, like all human developments, but even more intensely so than most, is passing and transient, only to be immortalized in the permanence of a perceptive memory.

When, as is inevitable, it has passed, and is followed within another month or two by a phase so acutely, perhaps agonizingly its reverse, the crucifixion of the mother’s sensitive feelings which is entailed should be hallowed and elevated in both their minds by that deeper, less personal, and more profoundly racial delight, the picturing with each other of the radiance, the strength, the power, the purpose and passion of the life which they are creating. So tragically soon after the days when he has feasted his eyes and filled his memory with her beauty, she will, she must withdraw her body from him and for months to come he will be shut out entirely from all sight of her. The reward will be an inner experience of the mind.

A day will come when, for the first time, the father-to-be may lay his hand upon his wife below her waist and feel the sturdy little kicks of his future son or daughter, and can know that, though hidden from him, still there is beside him a vital and independent being whom he has wakened to life. The presence of this little creature whom he has not seen colours and permeates every hour of their joint existence, and links the family in an extraordinary unity, the full significance of which I will consider in Chapter [XII].

When the later months pass, the father-to-be will have lost one of his most exquisite memories if he has not already talked and laughed with his future child, and if he and his wife and child together have not united in that most mystical union possible to human flesh.

CHAPTER IX
The Young Father-to-be:
His Distresses

When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the one in the play of the many.

Tagore: Gitanjali.

With all the passion for children, with the protective chivalrous feeling towards his wife which a well born and well knit man instinctively feels, through all the joy of fatherhood that is coming and the delight in its accomplishment, there must run a thread of intense distress at his own helplessness to help. With every consideration that the most resourceful man can think of towards his wife, with every helpful, tender, encouraging, supporting thing that he can do, how little is his share during all these months in the burden of the coming parenthood. If, through sympathy, he feels each pang his wife may feel; if, through sympathy, he curtails his activity to rest with her, nevertheless it is a voluntary abnegation, and if it became intolerable at any moment he could escape; he could run over the hills; he could go for a day’s fierce solitude and activity wherever his feet desired to lead him; but he knows that his wife cannot, that she is chained, that not for a moment of the day or night for nine months can she lay down the burden for a brief rest—that there is no exit for her from this imprisonment of so many of her potentialities but through the gateway of agonizing pain.

The instinct behind marriage is often a feeling of chivalrous devotion towards a tender and confiding girl, and the desire to give her every protection. The man finds, however, that his act has placed the one whom he desired to protect in such a position that she must bear the greatest burden possible for a human being to bear, and must bear it alone. This must be a deep distress to an imaginative man of integrity, although the distress be mingled with other and joyous feelings. To pretend that it is not so, to say that the joy of coming parenthood should and does wipe out all such under-currents of thought is merely to be callous or silly. To repress an intense feeling, to pretend that it is not there, may give an apparent surface bravery or brightness. But such repression is ultimately destructive to the consciousness and whole physique of the one who, thus gallantly to himself, endeavours to deny the truth, and is often apt to lead to deeper disorders. The modern school of psycho-analysts who endeavour to set right the effects of mental strain often discover that throughout life, perhaps dating from childhood, a personality has been handicapped and weakened by some deep suppression of an intensely experienced emotion.

In my opinion, the pretence that a sensitive man does not feel, and does not endeavour to conceal his feeling about his relation to his wife, particularly at the time of their first coming parenthood is to dishonour man’s capacity and his imagination. Why imply that a rational man does not experience what surely all but a brute must feel. It impoverishes our life of emotional expression, and it tends to injure the man himself, to increase the strain by the pretence that the strain is not there. I know, for instance, one man who fainted at the time his wife gave birth to their child, and who, under no consideration, would allow her to have a second child, although he had intensely desired and looked forward to the fatherhood of a large family before he knew the actual physical experiences which it entailed. Such a man, in my opinion, was a good father wasted by an excess of emotion made all the more intensely destructive to himself by the endeavour to maintain the totally artificial and indeed the crude attitude which is supposed to be “correct” for a man, namely a sort of dissociation of himself from his wife’s experiences and a hardened lack of recognition of all that is involved. It is surely better to recognize that there is that intense and poignant sense of helplessness, that the sensitive and developed young man should and does feel it, but that it should be recognized as the compensating price which he pays for fatherhood.

If we are ever to raise our race to the point when every child is so precious that no child can be hungry, neglected or unwanted, the conscious price which the father pays for his children will be one of the assets in valuing the children of the nation. It is, therefore, better to acknowledge and encourage such sensitiveness in the father by allowing the open and honourable expression of such feeling, and thus to avoid that almost neurotic and destructive effect of the suppression of such intense feeling as warped the father mentioned above. Because, if the wife avails herself of the advice I give in this book, and if the time for parenthood is chosen rightly and wisely in relation to her general health, and it is ascertained before she embarks upon potential motherhood that her bodily and bony structure is fit for motherhood, then though the experiences of both will be difficult and profound in their testing of the quality of each other, motherhood should not result in any excessive strain, and should indeed be a time of wonderful life activity.

With all needless ill-health, and wanton ugliness and wasteful distress which at present are artificially involved in it, once swept away, potential motherhood should not be an unendurable burden. Though the father’s feelings should be intense and poignant on behalf of his wife and though she may go through searching experiences, yet the gladness should so preponderatingly weigh in the balance in excess of the troubles and difficulties that no normally healthy and well endowed young couple should ever suffer so much that they dare not face a second maternity, as happens alas only too often to-day.

On quite a lower plane, but nevertheless on the one so essential that it greatly affects all the rest of life, is the too frequent distress of the young father-to-be about the more material provision of all that is necessary for his wife. In counting the cost of the coming parenthood, too often quite heavy expenses are unforeseen, and, with a fixed income, the young man may have the intense distress of being unable to provide all that his wife not only wishes but really ought to have. Recent years, for instance, were times of extraordinary difficulty for all women who bore children, and who had a naturally healthy and proper desire to eat fruit. With oranges at a shilling each, as they were in the winter of 1918-19, how could an ordinary young couple afford a glassful of orange juice a day, which I recommend as profoundly valuable (see p. [80]). It was obviously impossible. Such a time, of course, one hopes will never be repeated. It was a period of undue strain, when none, considering the future of the race, should have borne a child unless private reasons made it specially advisable.

But apart from such excessive and unprecedented difficulties, there are, and probably always will be, difficulties for the young man who desires to provide everything that can benefit his wife. Not long ago in the newspapers, a budget of the cost of the baby in an ordinary lower middle class home was given, and there was an item: “Dentist’s bill for the mother, twenty pounds.” A wise comment was made on this that, alas, it is by no means an unusual, indeed it is a usual experience that the coming child adversely affects the mother’s teeth, and both for the health of the baby and the mother they should be attended to. Possibly, even her very life may depend on her teeth being thoroughly free from decay after the birth. A heavy dentist’s bill is too often an unexpected anxiety to the young husband, so that the teeth are neglected. Neglected teeth either weaken, or may actually result in the death of the mother from their decay, causing internal poisoning, to which she is peculiarly liable after bearing a child.

Then too, there are unexpected and heavy expenses which are unforeseen through a variety of circumstances, such, for instance, as the uncertainty of the date of the birth. Those who go to nursing homes, as many are now doing owing to housing and service difficulties, experience this trial more acutely than others. They expect and plan, perhaps, for the birth within a given week, and the baby may delay two or three or even more weeks beyond the calculated time. Young couples, scarcely able to afford the heavy expenses of a good nursing home, who yet had saved sufficient to allow the wife three weeks there, may have their plans quite dislocated by a delay of three weeks in the infant’s appearance, resulting in the mother unexpectedly having to remain double the length of time for which they had saved the money for the nursing home. The young father is then faced by the sordid difficulty of finding the necessary money, and unless he is gifted in such a way as to make extra earning a possibility, is under a condition of strain. Just when all his free energy and time should be devoted to companionship with his wife and infant, he has to spend extra hours working at high pressure in order to meet unexpected expenses. The young father-to-be who wishes to maintain the right and beautiful atmosphere around his coming child should inform himself of all certain and likely contingencies of expense, and should make due provision for these before the great act of calling into being one for whom he is primarily responsible.

To a healthy man, also, there may be a period of chastening experience in sharing daily life with one who is out of health. Though the prospective mother ought not to be in any way invalided, yet, alas, as things are, too often she is, and only an unselfish man will fail to resent the personal sacrifice which he endures as a result.

There is a certain self-centred type of man who may, with the most model intentions and in order to lead a self-respecting life, marry, and who may find the resulting pregnancy of his wife very disconcerting to himself and very thwarting to his own requirements. With a certain bitter selfishness, this attitude was unconsciously expressed by one of my correspondents in the following words: “Something must be done to prevent any more children; imagine what a wretched time I have with my wife sick every day for nine months.” Perhaps the reader can scarcely restrain a smile at so callously self-centred an attitude on the part of a husband, but, nevertheless, that man does have a real and difficult physical problem before him. One way, of course, in which to help such a man would be to place such help and knowledge before his wife that her motherhood should be more normal, and not so terrible an experience for her.

CHAPTER X
Physical Difficulties of the Expectant Mother

We cannot reason with our cells, for they know so much more than we do that they cannot understand us; but though we cannot reason with them, we can find out what they have been most accustomed to, and what therefore they are most likely to expect; and we can see that they get this, as far as it is in our power to give it them, and may then generally leave the rest to them.

Samuel Butler.

To far too many women the time when they are carrying a child is a period of strain and semi-invalidism, a time filled not only with surprises and difficulties, but too often coloured with actual distress and ill-health. This should not be. The time of prospective motherhood should be one of buoyancy, health, physical activity and mental vitality. The low standard of health which the modern woman tolerates is deplorable.

But to whom can the young mother-to-be turn for advice and assistance? Such healthy, happy, prospective motherhood does not come by instinct in our city life. Those around her, older than she, who have had children of their own may perhaps be able to give her a hint here and a little piece of advice there, which to some extent may alleviate her difficulty or pierce with a faint shadow of light the gloom of perplexity in the ever deepening unknown into which she is entering for the first time; but nearly all such women have themselves gone blindly and individually through this period of immense significance and mystery without having had any rational help from one devoted to the maintenance of health.

Almost every book written to advise the coming mother is written by a doctor of disease, with very few exceptions by doctors who tolerate what is, in my opinion, a disgracefully low standard of general health in women. A distinguished gynecologist who, in cross-examination before a commission persisted in maintaining that the “daily morning sickness” which is so prevalent in women who are carrying a child is “physiologically right and natural” (indeed, he implied almost that it was necessary) represents an attitude of mind very general and capable of far-reaching hypnotic injury to the community as a whole.

By far the best and sanest book available for healthy women is one to which I have already referred, namely Tokology, by Dr. Alice Stockham, but this book has its inaccuracies and its drawbacks, and even its pages are too much occupied with the wretched and handicapping troubles which women do experience in large numbers, but which should not be.

Nevertheless, to allow a young girl or woman to enter upon these months of trial without making clear to her what she has to face, is cruel indeed. For a sensitive woman the experience, even at its best, and when most free from incapacities, is yet incredibly and penetratingly more terrible than she anticipated. The more sensitive and more conscious she is, the deeper and profounder may be her joy in her coming motherhood, but, at the same time, the more intense the physical experiences through which she must pass.

The modern sensitive young woman does not take things blindly and patiently and with resignation, with a pious belief in her own inferiority, which may have helped to dull and moderate the sensations of her grandmothers. The more evolved she is, the more she may be willing to bow to natural law, but the less is she content to suffer wanton cruelties imposed upon her by ignorance, stupidity or coercion.

Many are the midwives, maternity nurses and medical practitioners with whom I have discussed such matters, and from whom, often incognito, I have asked advice. I may say that none gave all the necessary advice, not one gave one-tenth of what is in this book, only one or two gave any necessary simple advice in the sympathetic and understanding fashion desirable, and only one or two appeared to have any clear generalizations or scientific understanding of the facts about which I asked. The resignation, the shrugging of the shoulders in the face of things which would otherwise make one weep, or the cheerful braving out or pretending that things are not as bad as they are, which is the general attitude of mind of the maternity nurse is little more helpful than that of the practitioner. Concerning many of the practical facts of the later months of pregnancy and actual birth, and the succeeding weeks of recovery, the properly trained midwife seems on the whole wiser than the average general practitioner, wiser even than the specialist who may come at a crisis, but who does not watch his patient through the succeeding weeks.

Many young women who have recently been mothers have told me of the mental and physical horror which they then experienced, and of the added horror that they should feel horror. They have asked me to generalize, if it is possible, from their cases in such a way as to help others who enter upon maternity’s difficulties for the first time, so that they may at least be spared that terrible sense of isolation and of exceptional failure when they experience one by one the things which are inevitable, or the things which are, by our artificial lives, so frequently imposed.

The bearing of a child very often may be complicated by actual disease, and then requires, of course, expert medical attention. With those who are in any sense actually ill, and who should be in the hands of a doctor, I am not here dealing, for, in this respect, as throughout my other books, I desire only to write of health for the healthy so that they may have sufficient knowledge to maintain their health and raise the vitality of the race.

I may say here that, even for the healthiest, it is very advisable, not only for her first, but for every succeeding pregnancy, that a woman should be examined and measured by some wise and healthy-minded medical practitioner or midwife at least once during the first three months and twice again during the last three months, but that, for the first baby, it would be better to go at least every month for examination. In that way, the various insidious disturbances of the excretory system, and other fundamental things which may go a little wrong, even in an otherwise healthy woman, can be detected immediately and dealt with. Many however, find a great difficulty in bringing themselves to do this.

Undoubtedly it is much better for the prospective mother to go to a specialist, old enough to be wise and experienced and mellow, and yet young and virile and active enough to be acquainted with modern knowledge, and healthy and clean enough to look for and to desire health and normality in those who come for advice.

This should pre-eminently be the special field for women doctors, but there is not nearly a sufficient body of them with the necessary qualifications to meet the requirements of the community, and I should like to see a new profession created for women who, to the experience and the training of first-class midwives, have added a sufficient training in general medicine to be specialized to advise the healthy prospective mother, and to be able to detect at once anything which should necessitate handing her on to the doctor of disease. Such practitioners should rank in status somewhere between the cultivated midwife of gentle birth (such as a Queen Charlotte’s Hospital nurse) and the medical woman. Thus the prospective mother would be spared that hard and bitter contact with one who has become myopic in the observation of disease, and would be able to go to someone specially trained to encourage health. Meanwhile, as this is but a bright picture of what may come in the future (and that will come if women make a sufficient demand for it) it may spare many women distress if I set out the physical difficulties and peculiarities which are most liable to occur with a healthy woman.

From the welter of accounts of the effects of pregnancy, I have disentangled into three groups those which normal women may have to face. The difficulties are:—

(1) Those nature-imposed; these are essential; they cannot be avoided by the healthiest woman. They can be perhaps, to some extent, mitigated. They are things which the coming mother must be helped through and over; she cannot be saved from them.

(2) Those entirely artificial; these are quite needless and are the results of either ignorance or our gross disregard of known facts, and can be entirely eradicated.

(3) Those which are to-day very usual, but which knowledge and a better mode of life may entirely conquer.

Now to consider first the third group: those which are general, but which a knowledge could or should conquer.

One of the first signs that she is to become a mother, and one of the most usual experiences of a young woman when this time begins, is the daily recurrence of that penetrating nausea and sickness usually after she has risen in the morning, called “Morning Sickness.” This is so usual that medical practitioners rely on it to some extent as a sign of pregnancy. It is described in almost every book for the prospective mother, and, as I have mentioned (p. [72]), it is sometimes even maintained by distinguished gynecologists as a physiological function, i.e., a normal function.

Now this is a very nauseating and wretched experience to the majority of women, and it is one which, I maintain, is entirely imposed by ignorance, wrong living and the general hypnotic effect of others’ perverted views on the woman’s system. In those women whose internal organs are improperly placed or somewhat malformed, it occurs as a physiological result of pressure or other disturbance. In true health there is no physiological reason whatever for the morning sickness, and a woman who lives as she should live during the time of her coming motherhood need not experience it. This should, in the next generation, be entirely conquered, because it is to a very large extent caused by allowing, even forcing to wear corsets, girls when they are still unformed and developing. Those women who have never worn corsets in the whole of their lives, and who dress as they should dress, and do as they should do during the months when they are becoming mothers, seldom experience morning sickness. Though there are some who, when they know the child is coming, discard their corsets too late, and these may still experience this unpleasant feature. The extraordinary adaptability and vitality in a woman’s system, however, is a remarkable thing, and even those who begin later in life than they should to train for motherhood may yet accomplish much.

Granted a healthy, well-formed body, a previous life of normal activity, sensible attention to the following points will insure complete freedom from morning sickness in all but the exceptional and pre-disposed:—

(a) Discard every scrap of heavy or constricting clothing, wearing only the lightest garments hung from the shoulders entirely.

As I said in Married Love the standard of dressing for the prospective mother, whose garments should be of the lightest wool and silk if possible, and should be so lightly hung that a butterfly can walk the length of her body without tearing its wings.

(b) Discard all rich, heavy and over-cooked foods, such as pastries and hot cakes, dried peas and beans, rich game or highly seasoned dishes, and live as much as possible on uncooked foods and simple milk puddings, stewed fruit, lightly cooked meat and fish, with the largest obtainable quantity of very fresh ripe fruit.

(c) Start the day not with tea, but with the juice of two or three oranges squeezed into a tumbler.

If she does these things a normal woman may go through the whole nine months without experiencing one single moment of nausea, as many a woman has done.

A retardation of the action of the bowels or constipation is very frequent, and is a cause of many other ill-effects. A right diet such as I advise, adding for this purpose honey and brown bread, does much to prevent it; if it exists in spite of this, take suitable bending exercises (see also page [72]), even a warm hydrostatic douche (using a douche-can with a little common salt in the water), but do not take regular drugs or “aperients.”

Another of the very frequent experiences of the mother who is carrying a child, particularly towards the later months, is the enlargement of the veins of the legs and ankles and the formation of varicose veins. These may become very serious if neglected, and even if the woman is being doctored, unless, at the same time, she regularly follows the proper healthy method of dieting and living. In addition to the dieting and clothing described above, which will make her almost certain to be immune from varicose veins, she should take warm comfortable sitz baths every evening, and she should lie down for at least half an hour or an hour in the middle of the day or early evening with her feet raised a few inches above the level of her head.

One of the most serious difficulties, felt even by those who avoid all other drawbacks, is sleeplessness, particularly in the last month or two when the activities of the child may be very disturbing. In this, much depends on the position in which the child is lying, and sometimes the position of the child can be improved by massage and manipulation by a trained midwife or doctor. Something also can be done by the mother herself through her mental attitude and hand touch on the child, and also by taking hot sitz baths nightly before going to bed. Still more, however, is accomplished by right diet, clothes, exercise and happiness (see also Chapter [XII]).

The habit of taking aspirin regularly or in large quantities, which too many women indulge in if sleepless during this time, is extremely bad both for the child and for the mother. Drugs of any sort should not be appealed to. If it is possible during these later months, sleep will be much more refreshing, and the advantage will be very great both to the coming child and the mother, if her bed can be arranged on a verandah or out of doors, but it must not be forgotten that towards the end of the period the expectant mother ought not to be out of ear-shot of someone.

Now to consider the second group of disabilities; those entirely the result of artificial outlook and condition. Among these must be classed the inability to walk any distance or to take part in active work of any sort. This is partly imposed by the hesitation of a woman to be seen at this time, and particularly to face the vulgar and leering attitude of the general public, and it is partly also due to the general heaviness or strain on the muscles or to the presence of varicose veins. If these have, by the methods just described, been almost or entirely avoided, she will find that her natural activity is much less reduced than it would otherwise be. To walk a mile or two, or even three miles the day before or even the day of the birth is not at all beyond what can be expected from an ordinary healthy woman who lives as she should.

The necessity perpetually to be fussing, to be taking tonics or drugs or medicines, to be thinking only of herself and never of any general or greater theme, is also eliminated when the general health is improved, and any mental or bodily activity which the mother can indulge in without a sense of strain is advantageous to the child as well as to herself.

The highly nervous condition and overstrained state of so many modern women during this time is due entirely to the artificial social lives, involving late hours, which they try to lead. The mother-to-be should give up almost all social engagements which keep her out of bed after 9 o’clock. Sleep, fresh air, exercise under the healthiest natural conditions she can command, coupled with the right diet, will secure her health and strength throughout the time.

The difficulties, however, about which help is most needed are the first group, those nature-imposed and inevitable difficulties which the woman has to face, and which, without instruction in the things she might do to mitigate them, often lead her to suffer intensely, though needlessly, and tend to have life-long effects on her health and appearance. Simple and sometimes obvious precautions are required, and yet these are almost unknown to the generality of advisers to whom the prospective mother can turn.

The first and most obvious inmost change that affects her is that felt in the muscles below the waist, particularly those which run vertically, and which support, by their elasticity and strength, the whole front of the body. As the months pass and the child and its attendant tissues grow, there is a slowly increasing strain on these muscles. As the enlargement proceeds the skin will also stretch, and the under-skin and tissues beneath it are finally stretched almost to breaking-point, stretched sometimes so that they do break apart and leave ultimate permanent little scars under the skin of the mother. Few apparently know, but all should know, that this can be almost entirely avoided (by fortunate women entirely avoided), if the skin and tissues immediately below it are kept supple by daily rubbing with olive oil from the fifth month. Perhaps from the fourth month once a week, and certainly from the fifth month daily, the mother should rub the lower part of her body and her breasts with a little olive oil. This will not only have a soothing effect upon the skin, but will assist its elasticity in such a way that she may return to her virgin condition without leaving those tell-tale scars which so often mark a woman, and which many, even highly trained maternity nurses and doctors, seem to think are inevitable. Such scars are not inevitable, and this very simple precaution, coupled with exercise, will frequently be sufficient safeguard for the woman who desires to avoid them altogether.

The same internal growth which enlarges the muscles and strains the skin will also sometimes press apart the two main vertical muscles in such a way that there is a tendency for inner tissues to project, and for the last month or two this may be very uncomfortable without in any way being dangerous. It is then advisable to wear a small stiff pad over this and fasten it in place with a narrow, soft elastic band. The use of a localized plaster very often strains the skin and leaves scars or makes it sore. It is wise to have the small hard central bandage wherever there is a tendency to localized projection as will be self-evident to anyone who experiences it.

The natural darkening of the colour of the skin when it is strained and stretched as it must be is very displeasing to the eye and, particularly to a young girl whose beautiful body has been her delight, may be a cause of great distress and self-repugnance. It is well that she should be helped over this most anxious time of self-detestation by the reliable assurance that it is only a temporary phase, and that if she keeps in good health, and rubs herself with pure oil for two or three months after birth as well as before, the skin will be entirely freed from any stained or discoloured appearance, and will return to its normal condition.

As the months pass, the actual physical weight of the body will increase, gradually becoming a greater burden, so that long distance walking and any acute activity such as running or tennis-playing must become impossible. Nevertheless if the diet and mode of living suggested above is followed out this will be very much less embarrassing than is usually experienced.

Many forms of support or maternity corsets are advertised or medically recommended to assist supporting the weight at such times, but, unless the woman has any actual slipping of the position of the organs or any deformity, she is very much better not to take such proffered assistance for they will form a broken reed, and, as one knows, “the broken reed pierces the hand.” It is much better for her to strengthen her own muscles by slow and careful exercise, bending forward until she touches the ground or as nearly touches the ground as possible; also lying on her back on the ground and rising without touching the floor with her hands and arms; also slowly raising the feet forward above the head while lying on the back, and then allowing them to drop slowly to the ground, this last exercise being very strengthening to the central muscles of the body wall (detailed accounts of other useful exercises will be found in Dr. Alice Stockham’s Tokology). So long as there is no strain upon her, she should exercise throughout the whole of the time. She would then not need any artificial support, and would be much better without it.

I have never seen it elsewhere clearly stated, but I have discovered that one very important reason against corsets is that, however well shaped and loose they may be, they tend to touch and exert some slight pressure on the soft tissues at the back of the waist; they must do so, merely to remain upon the body without dropping off, and this amount of pressure is sufficient to induce morning sickness (see p. [88]) for the following among other reasons. As the womb grows in the centre of the body it pushes aside and to the back the many yards of soft tubular alimentary canal which normally lie coiled in the front of the body, and, if there is no constriction or pressure, these tend to find room for themselves round the waist line and to the back, so that there appears what seems almost like a coil or roll of fat round the waist. This disposition is very advantageous, however, and should not be interfered with in the way any corset must interfere, and it greatly reduces the ungainly frontal size and helps to keep the body better balanced (see p. [91]).

At first the breasts will become firmer and larger and will support themselves more readily than at any time, but later on their shape somewhat changes and they tend to fall. They should then have carefully slung and properly arranged supports looped over the shoulder. Neglect of this often results in the final and lifelong loss of the beauty of the bosom, and it is indeed a cruel thing that the average doctor or nurse appears not to be capable of giving any useful advice on this point, so that hundreds of thousands of women have not only lost their beauty, but have been told that it is an inevitable and natural result of having borne a child. That it is well-nigh inevitable under modern unaided conditions, may be true. With proper support, proper massage and treatment afterwards, the ugly breasts need not have been, and need not be.

A thing which often distresses girls, but which however unsightly it is while present is a temporary and passing phenomenon, is the sudden appearance of freckles, even large patches of brown colouring matter, on the skin during the time the baby is forming. So far as I am aware nothing can be done to prevent it, and if as sometimes happens these brown patches even appear on the face, it is a misfortune which must be endured as stoically as possible, encouraged with the knowledge that it will entirely pass.

Another curious thing I know one woman experienced, and about which I am awaiting further evidence, was the apparent transplantation by the child in the mother of the strong black body hairs of the father. The result was that during the later months of carrying and for a few months after birth, the mother’s lower limbs and forearms had a thick growth of masculine-like hair, which nearly all fell off within six months after the birth.

The tendency that the coming child has to extract nutriment from the mother’s tissues often results in the loss or temporary spoiling of two of her beauties, the beauty of her nails and the beauty of her hair. These are apt to suffer unless she is warned in time and protects them. The injury to them probably depends on the withdrawal of the proper quantity of fat from the tissues. It is, therefore, advisable for the mother-to-be to rub her nails and hair with some suitable natural oil. Refined paraffin, almond oil or castor oil for the hair are by far the best, and for the nails some animal grease such as lanoline, or perhaps simple vaseline. Expensive concoctions, very much advertised and claiming wonderful properties, generally owe anything which they may contain to these ingredients, but more frequently contain little or nothing of any value, and are often harmful.

The more fundamental, and, alas, almost inevitable result of bearing a child is that it extracts not only the fat from the system, but the hardening matter from the teeth. This indeed is, so far as I am aware, a theft from the mother by the next generation which no knowledge of its liability can prevent, and which can only be met by a careful supervision of the mother’s teeth both before and after birth. Women differ in the amount they lose, but it is, alas, one of the almost inevitable things that there shall be a certain weakening of the teeth. Sometimes this will right itself and teeth which shook in their sockets immediately after the birth may apparently harden again and refix themselves firmly, but if the weakening takes the form of actual decay, they must be attended to.

In this respect the diet recommended by Dr. Stockham in Tokology, which advocates the elimination of all calcareous food is perhaps inadvisable if strictly followed out, because the growing child insists on mineral matter, and it simply takes it from the mother’s structure if it does not get it in other ways. I have, therefore, thought it advisable not entirely to eliminate the wheat and other bone making materials from the usual diet as Dr. Stockham recommends, but to maintain a certain proportion of wheat, especially whole wheat, in the food. Her advice to replace rich dishes by simple rice, stewed fruits, etc., is certainly wise, and still more important is it to follow her warm recommendation to eat large quantities of fresh fruit.

One of the perfectly natural, but to the young mother rather unexpected, results of the changes of the later months is the alteration which gradually comes in the position of the centre of gravity of her whole body. She is of course scarcely conscious of this, and yet it is a point of some importance, because it results in a certain liability to slip and to fall, particularly coming downstairs. The danger of such a fall is less to the child, which is safely surrounded by a buffer of fluid and by the mother’s protective muscles, but more to the mother herself, who, in falling, may strain or injure herself. The growth which results in this change in the centre of gravity comes too rapidly for the system quite perfectly to adjust itself to it. It will be remembered how long it takes a baby to learn to balance itself upright upon its feet; the adult mother-to-be has had a whole lifetime knowing just how to balance, and every muscle has become adjusted to the centre of gravity in its accustomed place. The change in the distribution of weight changes the position of the centre of gravity to some extent, sufficiently at any rate to throw the co-ordination of many years somewhat out of gear, and it is, therefore, wise for the expectant mother to take particular care not to slip or stumble unexpectedly. The sudden and active movement of the child which may kick or turn with no warning may cause her quite to lose her balance, particularly if she is on a steep staircase. It is well, therefore, to make a special point of keeping guard against this possibility by always having a firm grip on the handrail when going up or down stairs during the later months of carrying a child.

However well and full of a sense of power and creative vitality she may be, a woman should take long hours of rest: to bed at nine each evening and not up till eight o’clock in the morning and taking at least one hour lying down during the day. During the nine months of bearing the unborn child, she should remember she is providing it with vitality every second of the twenty-four hours of each day, and she should neither have forced upon her, nor should she desire to do, work which ever tires her, though she should live an active, full, healthy, happy existence and should be capable of nearly all her normal work and enjoyments. If she is wise she will work in direct contact with sun-lit earth. Gardening ensures the truest sense of physical well-being.

CHAPTER XI
Physical Difficulties of the Expectant Father

I was a child beneath her touch,—a man
When breast to breast we clung, even I and she,—
A spirit when her spirit looked through me,—
A god when all our life-breath met to fan
Our life-blood, till love’s emulous ardours ran,
Fire within fire, desire in deity.

D. G. Rossetti.

The higher the evolution of the creatures, the more is the parental responsibility shared by both parents. Among human beings the institution of monogamy, which is universally accepted as a higher form of human relation than polygamy, involves in the dual partnership a certain sharing of the actual physical difficulties of parenthood by the father which is not entailed in the fatherhood of a polygamous establishment. In fact, a pure monogamy strictly maintained, does really affect the physical aspects of expectant fatherhood more than it does the physical aspects of expectant motherhood.

The modern pair, being intensely and deeply united, the effects of the experiences and physical states of one have actual reverberations and physical effects on the other. In this respect the change in the girl’s attitude of mind towards the man, which is sometimes a result of the physical effect of motherhood (see Chapter [III]), may have a very far reaching influence upon the man’s health and happiness if he does not comprehend the cause of this experience, and, through comprehension, know how to endure or overcome it. Undoubtedly a home which is disturbed by uncomprehended antagonisms or suppressed irritations has a physical effect on the general mental balance, and consequently on the whole health of the pair involved.

The way in which these difficulties can be overcome is by a mutual comprehension, so far as is possible, of the needs of each other, and sometimes perhaps by the attitude of “bowing before the storm” until it has passed, recognizing that it is a phenomenon beyond human control.

Beyond this may be subtler and more intricate reverberations from his wife’s state. The actual physical fact has to be faced by the father-to-be that perhaps rapidly following on the period when all his natural desires for a completed sex union with his wife were met and consummated by equal desires in her, there comes a time when such impulses on his part are not only not responded to by his wife, but are perhaps antagonized and may be entirely thwarted by either her mental or her physical condition.

In Chapter [XII], I will show how, to some extent, and at probably rather long intervals, his impulses may be not only satisfied but may be harmoniously responded to and may be profoundly valuable. Nevertheless, in almost every period of coming fatherhood, there will be at least some months when bodily union is actively repugnant and consequently actively harmful, to the wife. At such a time the instinctive feeling of the mother against any act should be sufficient to bar it, because, even if the act itself should not be harmful, to force her will at such a time or to lure her into coercing herself against her own will is in itself harmful. A young husband, therefore, will be faced by periods in which it will be impossible for him to have any of the unions to which he may have become accustomed and which his natural virility may at first continue to demand.

This difficulty is of very varying intensity for different types of men. Some feel it so acutely that, although they may do so with deep shame, they yield to the impulses and are unfaithful to their wives in a bodily sense just at the time when of all others they may be mentally and spiritually most deeply united to her. Such shameful conflict of will with deed must have blackened many a father’s memory, and, with due understanding of all the circumstances, it should be eliminated from our race: it should not take place. Nature has created a way out for the man who deeply loves and is in sympathetic rapport with his wife. While the wife on whom he centres all his desires and love is in a bodily condition which deprives her from such an experience as a complete union with him, this fact has a mental and consequently a physical reaction on the better type of man, and he finds, sometimes even to his surprise, that the instinctive impulses to which he has been accustomed die down. At first perhaps becoming only sufficiently dormant to be conquered by a deliberate exertion of the will, but as the weeks pass and the inhibition from his wife increases, its reaction stills his desire also, and his need for unions may temporarily cease.

This is partly to be explained as a nervous reaction due to his anxiety and his concentration of nervous force on his wife, which tend to inhibit the setting free of the vital energy which would otherwise demand an outlet.

The vitality, the physical state, the needs, however, of different men vary very greatly, and there are those who really do require some physical assistance in addition to will power and even a religious determination to help them through this time of difficulty. For such I recommend daily thorough washing in cold water of the organs of generation, and when an over-mastering desire may come, the soaking of the whole body in as hot a full length bath as can be borne.

It may perhaps sound fantastic because one has not yet scientific proof (neither had Leonardo da Vinci when he casually made the first announcement that our earth is a planet of the Sun), but I think, in addition to the physical presence of the secretions potentially demanding exit, that a very important factor in the desire for sex union is an electrical accumulation within the system, and undoubtedly the soaking in hot water tends to disperse this tension, and to allay the urgency for a desire for a sex union.

These two simple physical assistances, combined with a definite will to maintain himself purely for his wife, and the definite concentration of his nervous energy to her support with the desire to contribute everything possible, mental and bodily, to the well-being of his child, should suffice to keep the body of a normal man in that condition which his best instincts will approve. Others more acutely handicapped by incorrigible physical requirements, may have a hard time; if it is insupportable, the explanation of that may be the existence of some slight physical abnormality for which they should and can get medical treatment.

After the restraint of the time of betrothal, followed by the usage of the honeymoon, the strain of almost total deprivation again, due to the wife’s pregnancy, is greater on the husband than it need be; and this is another argument in favour of deferring conception for at least some months or a year after the wedding. (Cf. Married Love, Chapter IX).

Even when, as is indicated later, there may come times when the impulse of the potential family is to unite, the physical condition of the mother may offer a hindrance to the customary form of union, but this with tact and intelligence may be surmounted.

CHAPTER XII
The Union of Three

“The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.”

In the early days of our modern civilization, that is to say within the last couple of hundred years, the treatment of women in Western Europe sank to a terribly low ebb. Although the last few years have done much to restore woman to some of her ancient rights and privileges, there are still among us a distressing proportion of ignorant, coarse and consequently ruthless men who are not debarred from becoming husbands. Such men have been in the past in the habit of “using their wives” regardless of the desires or even the actual health requirements of the unfortunate women who are tied to them, and such men have made a practice of continuing to indulge in sex union even through the later stages of pregnancy. I have heard from midwives, to my amazed horror, that some such depraved men (not bestial, for no beast behaves in such a way) have even used their wives while they are still in bed after child birth. With such I have in this volume no concern beyond the mention that they are loathsome.

Their existence, however, has had an effect on a better type and has given rise to reaction on the part of men infinitely their superiors. Women who have seen their sister women thus outraged have had the support of men of sensitive conscience and consideration when they have claimed that the mother who is carrying and nursing her child is sacred, and must not be approached by her husband at all during the whole of the child’s coming and nursing period. It has, therefore, come about that a large number of our best and most high-minded women (supported by correspondingly high-minded men, anxious to do the best that is within their power for their wives and children) hold the view that no sex union after the third month, or perhaps that no sex union at all is allowable during pregnancy.

Now this is one more matter which has not begun to receive the consideration which it deserves. When I wrote Married Love I felt that I was not entitled to decide on this subject, and I tried to hold the balance between the various opinions, and drew attention to the fact that the prospective mother of the lower creatures is always set apart. This was apparently misinterpreted by some of my readers as being a personal expression of opinion, and women wrote or spoke to me about the subject saying they were sure I was right because their husbands held the same opinion as I did, BUT the women themselves were ashamed, almost humiliated, to confess that during the carrying of their child they most ardently desired unions.

To these, as individuals, I pointed out that I was very far from expressing a definite opinion in my book on this point, and that my actual opinion indeed inclined towards thinking that restricted unions should be advantageous. In a later edition (the 7th) of my book, I enlarged on what I had to say on this subject, concluding: “There is little doubt that in this particular, even more than in so many others, the health, needs, and mental condition of women who are bearing children vary profoundly.”

Through evidences from very various types of women in the last year or two, I have now accumulated facts in sufficient numbers to begin to see something approaching a possible generalization on this subject.

One of the most striking things I noticed concerning the evidences I received was that the women who confessed to a desire for sex union while they were carrying a child were, almost without exception, the best type. A hasty generalization would have predicted that those very women with their pure attitude, their high degree of culture, their intellectual attainments, and their gracious self-restraint in outer life were just exactly those women who would maintain a fierce chastity during the nine months. These quite remarkable corresponding experiences of similarly superior women forced the matter vividly upon my attention, and I am now prepared to make a tentative generalization, coupled with the generalization to be found in Chapter [XV].

The attitude of one of the women who confessed her intimate feelings to me is typical of those of this type, and is illuminating. She is a woman of unusually gifted brain, well endowed physically and a normally healthy mother in every respect; she is noted for a peculiar beauty and sweetness of disposition, and an unusually high degree of sensitive appreciation of beauty and goodness. In conversation she said to me: “You know I feel so ashamed and degraded by myself, but just at the time when I felt I ought to be sacred from these things, I more ardently desired my husband than I had done throughout all my married life of fifteen years.” She then told me that her husband who had been truly devoted to her all his life was particularly considerate and thoughtful for her during her time of expectant motherhood, and that when she tentatively hinted at her wish for union with him he refused tenderly on the grounds that the higher standard for men was to share, however difficult it was, in the nine months of complete abstinence. He said that, for the sake of the child and herself, he must refuse. Her desire, however, again recurred, much to her own shame and mortification, because she felt that what her husband said really represented the highest accepted standard of pre-natal conduct. Quite a number of rather similar and also exceptionally endowed women have confessed to me in almost the same terms the same feeling.

Before I indicate my conclusions, let us briefly consider some of the surrounding circumstances of this problem. As I said in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, the nobler and better men have been carried away by a certain type of woman into thinking that it is man’s share of the difficulties and self-sacrifice of parenthood that he should entirely sacrifice what is spoken of as “his desires.” In my opinion, this attitude involves two profound fallacies. The first fallacy is that the act of sex union is to meet only “his desires”; it is not. Completed union is something infinitely greater: it is a consummation jointly achieved by both the man and his wife. This attitude I make clear in my book, Married Love and in my new Gospel addressed to the Bishops at Lambeth. And I must postulate in this, my present book, the far reaching effects on the bodily, spiritual and mental health of a man and woman concerned in this complex sex union. The truth is that the husband who mutually and considerately unites with his wife when she can accept him is not merely gratifying his own desire, he is enriching her whole system as well as his own through this mutual alchemy.

Before following up the logic of this paragraph, let us turn to the woman and her needs. The drain on her system of providing for another life out of her own tissues, and the substances which pass through her own body, must be very severe unless she is amply provided with all the subtle chemical compounds which are demanded of her. Now there is much evidence that in unmarried women, and in young wives who are debarred from sex union altogether, something approaching a subtle form of starvation occurs; conversely that women absorb from the seminal fluid of the man some substance, “hormone,” “vitamine” or stimulant which affects their internal economy in such a way as to benefit and nourish their whole systems. That semen is a stimulant to a woman was long ago recognized as probable, and is now the opinion of several leading doctors. Reference to this will be found in Havelock Ellis, vol. 5, 1912. See also the paper by Toff in the Centralblatt Gynakologie, April, 1903. Incidentally the converse is true, and the man who conducts himself properly during the sex union, and remains for long in contact with his wife after the ejaculation is completed, also benefits through actual absorption from his wife. For this I have the testimony of a number of men.

If, therefore, the woman who is becoming a mother, and who is supporting a second life, feels the need of union with her husband it is, I maintain, an indication that her nature is calling out for something not only legitimate but positively beneficial and required, and that it should be not only a man’s privilege, but his delight, to unite with his wife at such a time and under such circumstances.

The maintenance of the right balance of the internal secretions of the various glands which re-act on sex activity is important to women at all times, and particularly during the time when a woman is becoming a mother. One of the results of the growth of the child is the increased activity of the thyroid gland in the neck, which considerably increases in size.

A general account of the relation of such glands to a woman’s mental and physical balance is found in Blair Bell’s book (The Sex Complex, 1916), but he does not deal with the special aspect of a woman’s requirements which forms the subject of this chapter.

There is, even with the type of woman who does feel the need of, and ardently desires some sex unions with her husband during the long months, almost always a space of time, perhaps as much as two or three months consecutively, when she will have no such desires at all and there are also times of special liability to lose the child through premature birth, when unions should be avoided. Unexpected abortions most usually take place at the dates around the time which would have been a monthly period.

When I consider the evidence which I have before me, which is almost exclusively from the very best type of women, and when I observe that the most generally perfected, and finest women of my acquaintance, and they in particular, desire occasional moderate intercourse during pregnancy, I feel that one has a guide to what is best for the race. In these women and the conduct which their needs inspire, we have an indication of the truest and highest standard of all. The deviations of conduct may at last return from both the grossness of abuse and the reaction from it, and settle in the right and middle path. After the excessively virtuous, and perhaps undersexed type of woman, in contrast to the totally base attitude of the earlier and coarser type of man, has made the thoughtful speed from baseness to an ascetic absence of unions, we should be led back by these well developed and well balanced and noble minded women to the right and middle way. In this the spontaneous impulse of the responsible mother will be the guide for her husband and will benefit all three concerned.

For, let us realize what a profound mystical symbol is enacted when the union is not that of a single man and woman, but of that holy trinity the father, the mother and the unborn child. Only during these brief sacred months can the three be united in such exquisite intimacy, and during all these months when the child is forming, it is only in the few infrequent embraces of subdued passion that the husband and father-to-be can come truly close to his child, that he can, through additions to her system from his own, assist the mother in her otherwise solitary task of endowing it with everything its growth demands.

Every woman who is bearing a child by a man whom she loves deeply, longs intensely that its father should influence it as much as it is possible for him to do: in this way and in this way alone can he give it of the actual substance of his body.

This view of mine, in the present crude state of scientific knowledge must, of course, be stated as an hypothesis, but it will be proved later on when science is sufficiently subtle to detect the actual microscopic exchange of particles which takes place during proper and prolonged physical contact in the sex union.

Light on my thesis is also shown by the converse: For instance, an interesting suggestion was made by a distinguished medical specialist as a result of his observation of two or three of his own patients, where the prospective mother had desired unions and the husband had denied them thinking it in her interest: the doctor observed that the children seemed to grow up restless and uncontrollable, with a marked tendency to self-abuse. To these two or three instances I have added some which have come under my own observation and, although as yet the evidence is insufficient to support a dogmatic attitude, I incline to think that not only the deprivation of the mother of proper union during pregnancy, but also the after effects of some years of the use of coitus interruptus tends to have a similar effect upon later children. That is to say that mothers whose natural desire for union has been denied, and mothers who are congenitally frigid rather tend to produce children with unbalanced sex-feeling liable to yield to self-abuse. Immoderate and excessive desire for sex union during pregnancy so far as I am aware is rare, and where it occurs it should of course be treated as an abnormality.

The mother of the higher type, such as I have indicated in the paragraphs above who does desire unions, will probably only require them infrequently during these months.

It should be obvious, but as the general public often lacks a visualizing imagination, I ought to add, that for the proper consummation of the act of union, particularly during the later months of coming parenthood, the ordinary position with the man above the woman is not suitable and may be harmful. The pair should either lie side by side, or should lie so that they are almost at right angles to each other, so that there is no pressure upon the woman. Or the man should lie on his side behind the woman, which makes penetration easy and safe and free from pressure. I might point out here a fact which is of general importance in all true consummations of the sex union, and that is that all the preliminaries and even the final act of ejaculation itself do not constitute the whole of the truest union. A truth on which I lay great stress, although I have not yet dealt with it fully in any publications, is the fact that an extremely important phase of each union is the close and prolonged contact after the culmination takes place. The benefit to both of the pair of remaining in the closest possible physical contact for as long a time as is possible after the crisis is almost incalculable.

A whole chapter could be written upon this theme, and indeed it should be written. In the union during pregnancy, a woman is by nature debarred from the complete and intense muscular orgasm and for her, indeed, the union must essentially consist almost solely of the close contact of skin with skin and of the absorption of molecular particles as well as the resolution of nervous tension as the result of so close and prolonged a contact.

Among the children known to me personally, several of the most beautiful were the children of mothers and fathers who had unions during the months of their development. The following quotation from a young husband may be of interest in this connection:—

The day before the birth of our baby, we went for a six-mile walk over country ground, and I slept with my wife the very night before he was born.... We had unions, but not in the ordinary position; she would be on her side with her back to me, and after union would quietly go off to sleep in my arms, and in the morning would wake with a joyful and passionate kiss. Now our baby is one of the finest of babies from all points of view.

As I have seen photographs of the child, I can endorse the parent’s opinions.

Tolstoy’s condemnation of any sex contact while the wife was pregnant or nursing may have influenced some serious men, but, as in many other respects, Tolstoy’s teaching is so widely contradictory, and depends so much upon his own age and state at the time, one cannot but regret the unbalanced influence his literary power has given him.

While this chapter may be taken as an indication that sex union is, in my opinion, not only allowable but advisable for certain types during the time they are carrying a child, nevertheless I do not wish it to be misinterpreted in such a way that a single act of union which is repugnant to the prospective mother should be urged upon her “for her good.”