Since in the minds of many good and otherwise intelligent women much
confusion exists respecting the actual marriage or “sexual union,” it
is desirable that we make some remarks on that organ of the brain on
which rests conjugal love--namely, Amativeness.
No other single organ of the brain has so commanding an influence on
the whole nature as this much-slandered faculty. The very word itself
is held attaint. Yet it is this power, in woman as well as man, that
gives beauty and symmetry to form and feature, grace and sweetness
to manners and voice, and sympathy and charity to the soul. All the
heroism that has redeemed the past from utter and disgusting barbarism,
has sprung out of the love of man for woman; not the Friendship, but
the Love, whose completest expression--that which most softened and
refined the man, strengthened and sustained the woman--was the perfect
union of soul and body demanded by itself. And spite of its gross
and cruel record, amativeness is to-day, as it always has been, the
principal guarantee for the higher development of humanity. Without it
genius is impossible, capacity for large enjoyments, attractiveness, a
segment of the circle is wanting, making all the rest incomplete and
defective.
Because of the hitherto undue activity of this organ and its apparent
fickleness, many philosophers have given friendship a higher place
than love in the economy of human life. But let us extinguish this
passion in the heart, leaving friendship to its widest experience,
and we should soon sink down to the level of the Chinese, whose
brutal contempt for woman expressed in every fable and proverb,
and illustrated in the national countenance, precludes to them all
advancement.
Man appears to have been superendowed with amativeness since first
he stood erect. Inferior intellect and strong passions characterized
the primitive man. And as the head of the modern man still awaits the
arch, he continues to be intemperate on this side of his nature, and to
dominate woman in such degree as suits his pleasure. Over-indulgence is
followed by a sense of shame, of disgust; and as this habit of excess
was and is universal, man has learned to separate this passion from
what he calls his higher nature, and brand it as degrading, sensual,
shameful. The helpless, the willing subjection of woman in marriage has
served to lower yet more the character of the relation.
The Church has taught that marriage is a sensual estate, including
one major-general and one private. A profound contempt for nature is
inherited with the blood, and is confirmed in us by experience.
Now, science and philosophy prove that sin, evil, wickedness, mean
merely a want of balance among faculties in themselves good. How
weak is a man without sufficient firmness, yet how unamenable is he
who possesses too large a share. How valuable is acquisitiveness with
conscience and the reasoning powers fully developed. Without the
latter, acquisitiveness purloins cash and jewelry.
Excess of amativeness--the faculty most blindly abused hitherto--has
worked most cruel wrong. Goaded by stimulants it has murdered its
willing slave, sought satisfaction in promiscuous relations which
destroy conjugal love, changing it to lust,--levied tax on the other
organs of the brain, dragging them with itself to a shameful death.
The difference between Love and Lust is the difference between heaven
and hell. Love seeks only the happiness of the being loved, and is as
refined in its most private as in its public demeanor. Lust cares only
for selfish, animal gratification, without regard to the slave who
gives enforced consent.
That an act absolutely necessary to the continuance of the race,
animal, human, and vegetable, and the principle of which governs even
the mineral world, should be in itself, and under right conditions,
considered coarse, is but evidence of our own ignorance. We reason _a
priori_ that when the entire being consents, the spiritual as well
as the affectional, the act of union is as pure in its character as
the blossoming of the lily or the rose. The pure, unselfish love of
a noble man, when carried to its ultimate with a happily responsive
wife, should be as free from shame as the opening violet. Emotion is
as divine as thought. _Could_ it be necessary, or even possible, for
a merely sensual act to originate a being like Margaret Fuller, or
Hawthorne, or the author of Shakespeare’s plays? He who replies in the
affirmative is unbalanced and unnatural.
To common observation the more reverent and kindly demeanor of the lad
as he approaches puberty demonstrates the refining, ameliorating nature
of conjugal love.
The radiant countenance of the modest wife, the harmonious faces of the
chaste and loving pair, justify their lives.
Marriage is a partnership for the higher development of each party, and
the continuance of the race.
Under the past _régime_ the highly organized and more individualized
American woman has had her capacity for conjugal emotion almost
annihilated. And this constantly repeats itself in her children as the
abused mother transmits to her son the abnormal passions of his father,
and to her daughter her own feeble, outraged conjugal capacity.
This state of things will continue as long as women grow up ignorant
of the laws of their own being; as long as mothers bring up their
sons and daughters in absolute ignorance of what is right and wrong
in marriage--the mother thinking she is modest and refined when she
blushes before the honest facts of nature.
What father instructs his son before marriage as to his behavior under
that most sacred bond? What mother advises with her daughter, assuring
her that she is to be the judge and regulator in her private life with
her husband? Too often the health of both is impaired, and the mutual
attraction destroyed, because knowledge came too late. Instead of
this, the young wife should be proud to say, “My mother taught me that
this relation should take place very seldom. We shall be less happy
if we are intemperate.” The man who married her because he loved and
admired her, would willingly be guided by her to a true continence. As
it is, she evades the responsibility, and abandons soul and body to
the undisciplined will of one as ignorant of law as herself. Here, as
elsewhere, men, and women too, persuade themselves that subserviency in
woman is lovely as in a man it is contemptible.