468 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the latter case the mother's attention is divided. But this is a fallacy. 

 Everybody knows that the one child of the wealthy and highly educated 

 couple is generally a spoiled child and has as a rule, poor health ; while 

 the six or eight children of the poor and moderately educated woman 

 are exceedingly strong and lusty. But even supposing that the highly 

 educated woman were able and willing to bear and rear her children 

 like any other woman, she has one drawback from having a fairly 

 large family, and that is the lateness at which she marries, the average 

 being between twenty-six and twenty-seven years. Now, as a woman of 

 that age should marry a man between ten and fifteen years older than 

 herself, for a woman of twenty-seven is as old as a man of forty for 

 the purpose of marriage, both she and her husband are too old to 

 begin the raising of an ordinary sized family. Men and women of 

 that age are old maids and old bachelors. They have been living their 

 own lives during their best years; they have become set in their ways, 

 they must have their own pleasures; in a word, they have become 

 selfish. And, after having had one or at the most two children, the 

 woman objects to having any more, and this is the beginning of the 

 end of marital happiness. The records of our divorce courts show in 

 hundreds of instances, that there was no trouble in the home while 

 the woman was performing her functions of motherhood, but that 

 trouble began as soon as she began to shirk them. Hundreds of 

 thousands of men at the present day are married, but have no wives; 

 and while this sad state of affairs occurs occasionally among the moder- 

 ately educated, it exists very frequently among the highly educated. 



Is the health of the women at the present day worse than it was in 

 the time of our grandmothers? Are the duties of wifehood and 

 motherhood really harder to perform now than they were one hundred 

 years ago? Without hesitation the answer to both questions is 'Yes.' 

 Not only are the sexual and maternal instincts of the average woman 

 becoming less and less from year to year; the best proof of which is 

 later and later marriages and fewer and fewer children; but, in the 

 writer's opinion, the majority of women of the middle and upper classes 

 are sick and suffering before marriage and are physically disabled from 

 performing physiological functions in a natural manner. At a recent 

 meeting of a well-known society of specialists for obstetrics and diseases 

 of women, one of the fellows with the largest practise in the largest 

 city on this continent stated that it was physically impossible for the 

 majority of his patients to have a natural labor, because their power 

 to feel pain was so great, while their muscular power was so little. 

 On these two questions the whole profession is agreed, but I am 

 bound to say that there is a difference of opinion as to the reason. 

 Several of the most distinguished fellows of the above society claim 

 that the generally prevalent breakdown of women is due to their inor- 



