Читать книгу The Physical Life of Woman: Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother - George H. Napheys - Страница 24

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It does not follow, because a girl is capable of marriage, that she is fit for it. Science teaches us many valid objections to too early unions. It goes farther, and fixes a certain age at which it is wisest for woman to marry. This age is between twenty and twenty-five years.

Anatomists have learned that after puberty the bones of a woman's body undergo important modifications to fit her for child-bearing. This requires time, and before twenty the process is not completed. Until the woman is perfect herself, until her full stature and completed form are attained, she is not properly qualified to assist in perpetuating the species.

We might urge that up to this moment neither does her self-knowledge qualify her to choose a life-companion, nor can her education be finished, nor is her experience sufficient for her to enter on the duties of a matron. But we do not appeal to these arguments. There are others still more forcible. If her own health, life, and good looks are of value to her, if she has any wish for healthy, sound minded children, she will refrain from premature nuptials.

A too youthful wife finds marriage not a pleasure but a pain. Her nervous system is prostrated by it; she is more liable to weakness and diseases of the womb; and if of a consumptive family, she runs great risk of finding that fatal malady manifest itself after a year or two of wedded life. It is very common for those who marry young to die young.

From statistics which have been carefully compiled, it is proven that the first labors of very young mothers are much more painful, tedious, and dangerous to life, than others. As wives, they are frequently visited either with absolute sterility, and all their lives must bear the reproach of barren women, or, what to many is hardly less distasteful, they have an excessively numerous family.

What adds to their sufferings in the latter event, is that the children of such marriages are rarely healthy. They are feeble, sickly, undersized, often with some fault of mind or body, which is a cross to them and their parents all their lives. They inherit more readily the defects of their ancestors, and, as a rule, die at earlier years than the progeny of better-timed unions.

These considerations are formidable enough, it would seem, to prevent young girls from marrying, without the need of a law, as exists in some countries. Moreover, they are not imaginary, but real, as many a woman finds out to her cost.

The objections to marriage after the age of twenty-five are less cogent. They extend only to the woman herself. She should know that the first labors of wives over thirty are nearly twice as fatal as those between twenty and twenty-five. Undoubtedly nature points to the period between the twentieth and twenty-fifth year as the fittest one for marriage in the woman.