Every now and then a wife does away with her husband in order to collect the insurance. Women sometimes throw vitriol in the face of a rival. Blackmail is often a feminine weapon, writes Dr. Louis E. Bisch in "Your Life."
We read about mothers who abandon, even kill, their own helpless children. The women of the French Revolution knitted in public while aristocratic heads rolled into the basket almost at their feet. During that same revolution Charlotte Corday stabbed demagogue Morat to death while he was in his bath, How is it possible that the greatest cruelty, the most evil thoughts and deeds, can be found in a sex that likewise is the embodiment of love, sacrifice, beauty, tenderness, humility, kindness—the most idealistic concepts of which the human race is capable? Can woman be this sublime product of civilization and still remain savage?
This contradiction in woman is confusing until one realizes two fundamental characteristics of her make-up. One is that woman is emotionally incomplete; the other is that woman demands love to complete herself. Woman's entire make-up is conditioned by her procreativ ability. Whether she marries or not, has chil dren or not, pursues a career of her own or not, she cannot sidetrack the psychic effect which the organs of reproduction produce upon her, This creates mental unrest aimed at fulfilment of completion, Through love, woman binds man to herself. It's a kind of love that gives pleasure to man as a balancing factor what woman receives from him. From this variety of love arise all the noble qualities of self-effacement and nobility with which we associate woman, and which ramify to children and others. Deprive woman of man's love, however, and the baser, more savage qualities' of her instinctive nature try to assert themselves.
T do not mean to imply, of course, that every woman is conscious of her motherhood urge or even consciously links her desire to love and beloved with her instinct to reproduce, Love to the average woman is an entity and functions alone.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.