Sexual ethics : a study of borderland questions / by Robert Michels.

  • Robert Michels
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sexual ethics : a study of borderland questions / by Robert Michels. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    certain questions in a manner altogether different from men. For example, the urgent problem of how any professional occupation is to be harmonised with the claims of parenthood, must of necessity receive a different solution in man’s case and in woman’s, above all when approached from the medical point of view. But from a purely educational standpoint, the divergence is not apparent, for man and woman, father and mother alike, have, or should have, to face the same dilemma; for both have parental duties to fulfil; and for both, these are sometimes hard to harmonise with the claims of professional life. Never- theless, it is harder for the woman to decide this problem, and to reconcile these conflicting claims: in part owing to the unwholesome economic order in which we live; in part owing to the obstacles which the married woman who desires to give due weight to the claims of the intellectual life commonly en- counters from her husband; and in part owing to a number of psycho-physical considerations peculiar to her sex, and, above all, to the claims which the immature child makes upon its mother.1 It follows from these considerations that it is far harder for the intellectual woman than it is for the man of corre- sponding abilities to reconcile these conflicting claims without suffering in health, intelligence, or affections, or it may be in all of these ways at once. Is it then surprising that we should find intellectual women to be scarce, in view of the unceasing desertions from their ranks dependent on the causes here analysed? 1 Marianne Weber contends that a woman who has to work for her living is necessarily unfitted for the fulfilment of her maternal duties. (Beruf und Ehe [“Occupation and Marriage”], Schonberg. Berlin, 1906.)