Self-sterility

“ We may perhaps all see in her want of self-control a grievous moral delinquency, but in her fortnightly periods of desire she fits perfectly into the law which, it appears to me, governs the normal sex-tides of the female of our species. ”

“ But through it all, in the building and nurturing of the ideal, there runs—ever and always—the thread of thought that self-sacrifice, self-abnegation, self-effacement, are the grandest attributes of maternity. That in order to be a perfect, an ideal wife and mother, the woman must be sunk, the individual immolated, the ego subjugated. ”

“ To half the modern world this alleged “self-control” is merely a euphemistic cover for the ease with which they can forget the weak, barely audible call of their bodies; and to an ever-increasing number of modern women there is precious little enjoyment associated with any stage in the sexual cycle, whether it be actual fertilization, gestation, parturition or lactation. ”

“ In this book I am not speaking so much of the universal sex relation as to those who find themselves to-day in the highly civilised, artificial communities of English-speaking people: and in our present society there is little doubt that the early birth of a child demands much self-sacrifice and self-restraint from the man, one of the reflex vibrations of which is his undefinable sense of loss and separation from his bride. ”

“ The pinched look, the cramped mentality reflects itself in the body and in the face. And then there is the other type, those who have rejected this attitude towards life, denying that there is anything to be ashamed of in the natural impulse of their sex, or cause for regret if they give rein to that whose repression does so much harm, who frankly fling away the idea of self-control, because repression has seemed such a disastrous method of self-control. ”

“ If you will recall our earlier discussion, you will remember that to embrace the feminine role a woman must be willing in the deepest biological and psychological sense to suspend the natural law of self-preservation. She must be willing to sacrifice her time, her being, her other goals—her very life—to give birth to her children and to see them safely to maturity. ”

“ I thought of him as a victim of his own weakness, as the prey of a predaceous and unscrupulous woman 216 who had intrigued and would continue to intrigue against his happiness, a woman away from her own world, a self-complacent and sensual privateer who for a passing whim, for a momentary appeasement of her exile, stood ready to sacrifice the last of his self-respect. ”

“ If girls are so constituted mentally that they long for the independent life, self-support, self-expression, they will have it and without any advice from the worldly-wise; it is as driving an impulse as the reproductive instinct in those who are more liberally sexed. ”

“ As you saw in the normal woman, there are checks and balances within the female personality which prevent her from making a psychological martyr of herself to the point where she would be a detriment to her children, but at this time I should like to make a different point.
I have said that the maternal instinct is more powerful than the instinct for self-preservation. I ask you to imagine for a moment how easily this characteristic of women could frighten a young girl if the experience of pregnancy or the role of the mother is presented to her in an improper way. ”

“ But if the grand essential to a good mother be self-denying, self-effacing love, this is a bad era for its development. Selfishness and self-seeking is the spirit of the time, and its chilling poison has infected womanhood, and touched even the sacred principle of maternity. In some women it assumes the form of a duty. They feel their own mental culture to be of supreme importance; they wish to attend lectures, and take lessons, and give themselves to some special study. Or the enslaved condition of their own sex troubles them ”

“ From one distinguished medical specialist I have acquired the interesting suggestion that in one or two cases among his own patients, where the prospective mother had desired unions and the husband had denied them thinking it in her interest, the doctor had observed that the children seemed to grow up restless, uncontrollable, and with an unduly marked tendency to self-abuse. ”

“ Something had cleft the surface of self, and there welled up the mysterious primal influences, the sacrificial instinct of her sex, a passion of spiritual motherhood that made her long to fling herself between the unborn child and its fate. ”

“ The fiery, swooning passion of mere bodily impulse does not last. But even physical passion, the sex-urge, means more than that. Our new teachers ignore what all experience has proved and science taught—that every physical impulse—whether to eat or drink, [58] work or play—demands restraint for its fruition. The value of self-control is no less of the body than the soul.
It is the fever-bred passion, born of stimulated sex-consciousness, that must snatch at every chance for expression and demands constant change. ”

“ In a society as low in mentality as this, it would be easy to conceive that the woman’s unselfishness—her lack of the self-gratifying impulse—in protecting, nursing, and rearing a burden superimposed on her with no pleasurable antecedents, would be even more amazing than it would be to the male living in a state sufficiently advanced to understand the reproductive function. ”

“ Such men’s wills reside entirely in the thought of their own survival and security, and are determined exclusively by the self-preservative instinct.
If, now, we ask what is Woman’s will, by what instinct is it determined?—we are in a position to say at once: Woman’s will, owing to the very correlation of her bodily parts and the important place the organs and business [Pg 46] of Life’s multiplication hold in her constitution, is at least likely to have a strong bias or predisposition in favour of being determined by her reproductive instinct. ”

“ Sometimes we find women, who are perfectly awake and consciously aware of the cause of their "brazen sterility," as a virile writer has caustically termed it; but more often the conscious mental attitude is lacking and they merely obey blindly the dominant race-mind. ”

“ There it is, she is born with the disease of her own self-consciousness, as was her mother before her. She is bound to experiment and try one idea after another, in the long run always to her own misery. She is bound to have fixed one, and then another idea of herself, herself as woman. ”

“ Later on the special sexual needs of the boy or the girl can be explained, the necessity of cleanliness and the danger of self-abuse. The need of self-control and the possibility of deflecting physical desire to other channels and the great gain resulting; all these things the youth of either sex are capable of understanding and appreciating, and the knowledge given early will prevent many physical and moral wrecks. ”

“ Soon, it may be in five or ten years or more, the complexion of ill health is in these notes, or else life has been adjusted to independence and self-support. Many of these bachelor women are magnificent in mind and body, but they lack wifehood and yet more—motherhood. ”

“ An only daughter and losing her mother in childhood, she had been raised to the mistress-ship of a household at an age in which most girls are still putting their dolls to bed; and thus had early acquired that sense of responsibility, accompanied with the habits of self-reliance, which seldom fails to give a certain nobility to character; though almost as often, in the case of women, it steals away the tender gentleness which constitutes the charm of their sex. ”

“ Where we see the too common spectacle of sickly girlhood, and of families of sisters growing sallow, feeble, depressed, and indolent, we may be very sure that, whatever else may be amiss, they are leading a self-corroding life, and need, above everything, imperative duties and interests which would call them out of themselves. ”

“ Though such cases abound in both sexes, yet far the larger num of them are girls; multitudes of these writhe through their school-days, the impaled victims of a morbid self-consciousness, and diffidence, that make every movement and expression, artificial and distorted, a stifling constraint, half-paralyzing thought, utterance, and action, intensifying self-distrust, and mortification, and thus perpetuating a misery self-inflicted and intolerable. ”

“ Now, so far, the great result of the long years of repression has been the sterility of women's lives. Sterility is a deadly sin. To-day so many of our activities are sterile. The women of our richer classes have been impotent by reason of their soft living; the women of our workers have had their vitality sweated out of them by their filthy labours; they could bear only dead things. Life ought to be a struggle of desire towards adventures of expression, whose nobility will fertilise the mind and lead to the conception of new and glorious births. Women have been forced to use life wastefully. ”

“ Where true womanliness is to end I do not know; but I am pretty sure of this—that it must begin in self-possession. It is not womanly for a woman to deny herself either in comforts or nourishment, or in her instincts of continence and chastity in order that someone else—whether it be her children or her husband—may over-indulge. ”

“ We were there chiefly concerned with the aspects of self-preservation and self-expression rather than with the aspects of love or reproduction, but it is evident that the infantile and childish stages of both aspects must be associated with one another, so that a fixation at an early stage of development with regard to one aspect will be likely to bring with it a corresponding fixation as regards the other. Thus, for instance, an undue reluctance to abandon the conception of the mother as the protector and provider of childhood may easily entail a similar failure of growth on the erotic side. ”

“ The periods in the life of a creative artist often assume the character of a crisis—a kind of climax of vital energy. Sterile years precede productive periods, to be followed by more barren years. The circle of activity is not broken, it is but interrupted; the years of apparent sterility really leading up to, and preparing for, the creative periods. I may point out here a thought in passing in connection with the child-bearing functions of women. ”

“ Consult your own breast, and recollect how these little attentions, when shown you by others, flatter that degree of self-love and vanity from which no man living is free. Reflect how they incline and attract you to that person, and how you are propitiated afterward to all which that person says or does. The same causes will have the same effects in your favor. Women, in a great degree, establish or destroy every man’s reputation of good-breeding ”

“ And just as he has claimed that to possess woman is the natural prerogative of the male, so you will hear him maintain that lack of self-possession in regard to woman is natural also—and a certain degree of licence the male prerogative. The two things go together—claim to possess others and you lose possession of yourself: Give to all with whom you come in contact their full right of self-possession and self-development, and you, from that social discipline and service, will in your own body and mind become self-possessed. ”

“ The complaint made of many women is that they are wanting in self-control, creatures of impulse, erratic, irresponsible, at the mercy of chance influences that assume control of their lives for the moment, subject to "nerves," carried away by emotional enthusiasm beyond all bounds, and using a blind tenacity of will to land themselves with the cause they have embraced in a dead-lock of absurdity. ”

“ I have already expressed the opinion that prudence and social selfishness, operating through sexual self-restraint on the part of the best citizens of the State, are the cause of their infertility. It is impossible for the State to correct this evil, except by lessening the burden the fit man has to bear ”

“ Ay, but not one of the world; with that consciousness I sustain myself in the petty and sterile career of life. Shut out henceforth and for ever, from all the tenderer feelings that belong to my sex; without mother, husband, child, or friend; unloved and unloving, I support myself by the belief that I have done the little suffered to my sex in expediting the great change which is advancing on the world ”

“ This self-control must consist, not simply in the concealment of all the outward signs of any disagreeable emotion,—whether of grief, anger, or pain,—but in the assumption of a cheerful smile and agreeable manner under even the most distressing of circumstances. The duty of self-restraint is taught to the little girls of the family from the tenderest years; it is their great moral lesson, and is expatiated upon at all times by their elders. ”

“ 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 ”

“ If at this period actual intercourse takes place, it is, as a rule, free from pain, as also is the introduction of the speculum. Without any seduction from without, the chaste girl now frequently finds a way to relieve the excessive tension without the aid of a man. It is self-abuse that leads gradually to the production of pain in defloration. The menstrual phenomena correspond to birth; self-gratification or relief during sleep to intercourse. ”

“ But the moment she leaves me, I begin to long for her—long for her as for my own arms and legs. It is queer that sometimes I have a feeling that she is nothing in herself, but only a part of myself—an organ that can take away with it my will, my very desire to live. ”