Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex DifficultiesStopes, Marie Carmichael
Science
Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties
Stopes, Marie Carmichael
Man-woman relationships; Marriage; Sex (Psychology); Sex differences; Sex in marriage
It must be remembered that the parallel of the more primitive
creatures cannot be pressed too far, because in a thousand ways we
highly civilised human beings have developed in fresh directions
away from our ancestral habits. This question, of whether or not it
is right and wise to have sex unions during pregnancy, is one on
which scientific research should be undertaken. Far too few men and
women are clean-minded and frank enough to record their feelings in
this connection, and far too few medical men delicately sympathetic
enough to elicit the facts even from those women who are personally
conscious of them. The little evidence which I have acquired
through direct personal confidences about this subject points in
absolutely conflicting directions, and 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. 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.
On this most suggestive and important idea, I would gladly obtain
evidence from parents and the medical profession, for only from a
large number of cases can reliable conclusions be drawn. But just
as in popular opinion it is good for the child and the woman to
gratify any harmless fancy for food which she may develop, so, in
my opinion, it seems probable that any desire for moderate and
careful sex union between the prospective mother and the father of
the coming child should be gratified in the interests of all three.
But this opinion is expressed merely provisionally, and largely
in response to a number of inquirers who have asked me about this
point. Immoderate and excessive sex union must undoubtedly be looked
upon as an unfavourable symptom, and a practising doctor should be
consulted about it.
A woman who is bearing a child by the man she deeply loves, has an
intense longing that he should share, so far as is possible, in
influencing that child while it is coming, and that he should be
as near and as close to it and to her as is possible. The basis of
this longing we may well imagine may be not only a tender sentiment
of the brain, but may depend on that fine sensual interchange of
ultra-microscopic particles which must take place between skin and
skin during physical contact, the idea of which is so beautifully
foreshadowed in Carpenter's "Love's Coming of Age."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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