Feminine beauty suffers during the menacme from the stress of the demands made on the sexual activity as well as on the functional capacity of the individual. Repeated, rapidly succeeding pregnancies and confinements impair the beauty of the breasts and the abdomen, the figure and the carriage. In consequence of suckling, the breasts, hitherto firm and elastic, usually become more or less pendent and wrinkled, sometimes also flabby and inelastic, sometimes nodular. Diseases of the genital organs and the disorders of the general health dependent thereon, leave disfiguring wrinkles in the face and other traces in the whole structure of the body. Toil, anxiety, and grief also write their horrible marks deeply on the appearance. The mature working-class woman, through sharing in masculine labors, through long-continued muscular exertion, and through neglect of bodily care, frequently assumes in her features, her carriage, her figure, and her whole appearance, a rather masculine type. The beauty and the youthful freshness of girls belonging to the labouring classes seldom endure for long after the menarche, and in cases in which the environment is one of poverty, they last through a very short part only of the epoch of the menacme. The early appearance of wrinkles in the face, the stiff, angular character of the movements, the ungraceful carriage of the body, all these combine to make a woman of five-and-twenty who groans under the burthen of toil appear at the first glance an elderly woman, and a closer investigation shows what damage has been wrought to the attributes of beauty, how the breasts are flabby and flattened, the belly prominent, the buttocks pendulous, the arms muscular. In the well-to-do classes, again, at this period of life, when generous diet combines with insufficient exercise, an abundant deposit of adipose tissue may already have occurred, resulting in a great impairment of beauty, the body and limbs being enlarged, the gait and the carriage correspondingly altered for the worse—changes which seem desirable only to those orientals to whom such obesity, such exaggeration of femininity, is sexually stimulating. If, however, this deposit of fat is not excessive, this it is which endows women during these years of fullest development with an imposing appearance and buxom form. In favourable circumstances, beauty of this type may persist to the fortieth year of life and even beyond, and it is of such a character as to justify the proverb that woman’s first sexual epoch is dedicated to love, her second to voluptuousness. [Illustration: FIG. 50.—The uterus, the left Fallopian tube and the left ovary, in their connection with the broad ligament of the uterus, which has been fully unfolded. Seen from behind. From a virgin, aged nineteen years. (From Toldt: Atlas of Human Anatomy.—Rebman Company, New York.) ]