WOMEN PROFESSIONS AND SKILLED LABOR. 467 



professional life. In a physiological study such as this, we will not 

 concern ourselves with the social obstacles a married woman must 

 encounter. We have a right to consider every woman who has a 

 husband as either a mother, or liable to become one. Any attempt 

 on the part of a wife to avoid children in order to free herself of that 

 obstacle to professional life would be attended with consequences to 

 her mental and physical health which would seriously impair her use- 

 fulness. 1 The end and aim of woman's sexual life is perfected by 

 maternity. It broadens and elevates her intellectually and physically. 

 The influence over society reached by wives-mothers is a natural out- 

 come of the stimulus of maternity. The maternal instinct, which 

 lies dormant in the nature of every woman, awakens her mental being 

 into increased activity the moment it is called into life. I think that 

 it is for this reason that frail women, with no knowledge of life, when 

 widowed, often succeed in keeping their families together and pro- 

 viding for them. With the woman who is constantly liable to the 

 demands of a profession, or skilled labor, the maternal affection, anx- 

 iety, or care, may intrude at moments when her occupation will de- 

 mand her highest mental efforts. The manual labor of rearing chil- 

 dren the professional woman may delegate to others, but the ceaseless 

 love, care, and forethought, so beautiful in a mother's love, the true 

 woman must assume herself. Physically, children are necessary to 

 the married woman. The sterile wife is constantly exposed to dis- 

 eases that the fecund wife is comparatively exempt from. The sterile 

 wife is not a normal woman, and sooner or later this physical abnor- 

 mality finds expression in intellectual peculiarities. Not upon the 

 mind alone, but upon the body as well, does motherhood have a ma- 

 turing influence. Gestation is nearly the completion of the sexual 

 function. The process involves increase in the size of the heart, and 

 in the volume and strength of nearly all the muscles of the body. 3 It 

 is evident from this that gestation is not only a functional completion, 

 but it is necessary to structural maturity, and to me it seems a natural 

 corollary that it has an equal effect in increasing mental vigor. Hav- 

 ing shown that marriage is in obedience to a physiological law, and 

 that maternity is necessary to insure mental and bodily health in the 

 mass of women, it is proper for us to ascei'tain if the last of these 

 conditions gestation is not of itself, physically and mentally, an 

 obstacle to professional life in women. The physical incapacity is 

 too evident to need any comment. 



Mentally, the changes undergone are most singular and multiform, 

 and operate upon the cultivated and ignorant alike. Dr. Montgom- 

 ery, speaking of the nervous irritability of pregnancy, says: "It dis- 

 plays itself under a gi-eat variety of forms and circumstances, render- 



1 Bourgeois, "The Passions in their Relation to Health and Disease," p. 162, et seq. 



2 Dr. Alfred Wiltshire, " On the Influence of Childbearing on the Muscular Develop- 

 ment of Women." Transactions of the Edinburgh Obstetrical Society, vol. ii., p. 237. 



