The sexual life of woman is coextensive with the peculiar vital activity of the female sex, for it endures from the moment when individuality first begins to develop out of the indifferent stage of childhood until the decline into the dead-level of senility.
To illustrate this fact, I have drawn up a curve of the sexual life of woman, making use of the statistical data available in central Europe regarding the age at which menstruation first appears, the age at which maidens marry, the age at which the largest number of women give birth to a child, and the age at which menstruation ceases; and reducing the figures to averages. * denotes the fifteenth year of life, as the average age at the menarche; ** denotes the twenty-second year of life as the average age at marriage; *** denotes the thirty-second year of life, in which woman exhibits her maximum fecundity; **** denotes the forty-sixth year of life as the average age at the menopause. (FIG. 1.)
FIG. 1.—Curve of the sexual life of woman from the tenth to the sixtieth year of life. ]
Not in this respect alone, however, is the sexual life of woman of paramount importance; it is, in addition, the mainspring of the well-being and progress of the family, of the nation, of the entire human race. In the evolution of man from the primitive state in which he existed merely for the performance of vegetative functions up to the highest stage of contemporary culture, in the history of all races and of all times, the sexual life has been a most potent determining factor. With that life, religion, philosophy, ethics, natural science, and hygiene, have been most intimately related; for that life, they have furnished precepts and laws. The history of the sexual life is identical with the history of human culture.
In a primitive condition of society, among people living in a state of nature and among the lower races of mankind, the sexual life of woman possesses no great general interest, the female being merely a chattel; the ownership of this chattel, moreover, being often temporary and transient. The investigations of anthropologists have shown that among primitive people this form of property is neither highly esteemed nor carefully safeguarded. In such societies no restraint is imposed on the sexual impulse, which is gratified without shame and without formality. No hindrance is offered to the mutual intercourse of the two sexes. Chastity in the females is not prized by the males, nor do the latter compete for the favors of the former. Procreation is no more than a gregarious impulse of the masses among whom the common ownership of all booty is a matter of tribal custom. The woman has no disposing power over that which every one desires and which every one has the right to demand. Very gradually, however, a change takes place in this respect, so that in every period of social life since the very earliest, the modesty of young girls, the high valuation put upon the preservation of virginity, the ethical approbation of chastity in the wife, respect for the duties and rights of the mother, the reverence felt for the matron—all these, throughout the sexual life of woman, have had a civilizing, ennobling, and elevating effect. Thus, as family life has become developed, and as love and marriage have been more highly esteemed, woman has become the much-prized embodiment of all that is beautiful and good, of all that is summed up in the idea of the “housewife,” and her sexual life has been more completely, more ideally admired. The danger is not remote, however, that the leveling tendencies of the present day, and an inclination to despise the sexual life of woman, far from resulting in a further elevation of the social status of womanhood, will result rather in its abasement.