MATRIMONIAL EXCESSES

“Very much of the nervousness and hysteria so common among women, arises from abuses of the sexual function: in single life it is often the result of excitement of the sexual organs, induced by reading ‘love-sick’ novels, and cherishing lascivious thoughts, while in married life it is from the overtaxation of the nervous system by marital excesses.SOAP 98.1

“I know the heart-history of many noble, high-toned women, whose whole being revolts at the use to which they are put! Yet their ideas of domestic peace are so exalted that, loyal and true, they submit themselves a constant sacrifice, and, by the mere force of will, keep alive the fire of love within their tortured souls; living martyrs are they, daily enduring a fiercer ordeal than any to which the Christian martyrs were subjected. Many of these husbands are all the wife could ask, except in this one thing, and never dream but that they love those whom they have promised to’honor and cherish;’ but it is a love so full of selfishness that it ceases to be true.”SOAP 98.2

“Our graveyards, could they speak, would send forth a sad and sickening wail from the young wives and mothers who have been placed there, the victims of matrimonial abuse of the sexual function. Our Greenwoods, our Auburns, and our Laurel Hills, are dotted with graves of young and middle-aged women, whose lives have been offered up as a sacrifice to the lustful passions of their husbands. And not always are these husbands ignorant of the result they are hastening; yet they will not pause in their guilty work, but deliberately and often furiously commit the murder for which, were justice meted out to them, they would ‘hang by the neck till they were dead,’ instead of being permitted to live and woo a second, a third, and sometimes even a fourth, victim to their base desires.”SOAP 99.1

“The human race are wondering and mourning over the ‘mysterious dispensations of Providence’ in permitting so much disease, and removing from earth so many of the middle-aged and the young; and we are exhorted to consider this a lesson God is teaching to prepare for death. The facts are these: people destroy their own lives, and the lives of their children, by their own sexual abuses, and God suffers them to die, because they have so often and so grossly violated the laws he has ordained, that they are not fit to live!”SOAP 99.2

“The foundation of this whole scheme of abuse of the sexual function is laid in the marriage-bed. Children who early fall into the habit of self-abuse, and young men and women who become libertines and prostitutes, are often not so much to blame as are the parents who, by their excesses in married life, entailed upon them a depraved organization.”SOAP 100.1