It is a remarkable proof of the general indifference with which in Europe even the fairly constant and prominent characteristics of the psychology of women have been treated until recent times that, so far as I am aware,—­though I have made no special research to this end,—­no one before the end of the eighteenth century had recorded the fact that the act of suckling tends to produce in women voluptuous sexual emotions.  Cabanis in 1802, in the memoir on “Influence des Sexes” in his Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l’Homme, wrote that several suckling women had told him that the child in sucking the breast made them experience a vivid sensation of pleasure, shared in some degree by the sexual organs.  There can be no doubt that in healthy suckling women this phenomenon is exceedingly common, though in the absence of any methodical and precise investigation it cannot be affirmed that it is experienced by every woman in some degree, and it is highly probable that this is not the case.  One lady, perfectly normal, states that she has had stronger sexual feelings in suckling her children than she has ever experienced with her husband, but that so far as possible she has tried to repress them, as she regards them as brutish under these circumstances.  Many other women state generally that suckling is the most delicious physical feeling they have ever experienced.  In most cases, however, it does not appear to lead to a desire for intercourse, and some of those who make this statement have no desire for coitus during lactation, though they may have strong sexual needs at other times.  It is probable that this corresponds to the normal condition, and that the voluptuous sensations aroused by suckling are adequately gratified by the child.  It may be added that there are probably many women who could say, with a lady quoted by Fere,[20] that the only real pleasures of sex they have ever known are those derived from their suckling infants.

It is not difficult to see why this normal association of sexual emotion with suckling should have come about.  It is essential for the preservation of the lives of young mammals that the mothers should have an adequate motive in pleasurable sensation for enduring the trouble of suckling.  The most obvious method for obtaining the necessary degree of pleasurable sensation lay in utilizing the reservoir of sexual emotion, with which channels of communication might already be said to be open through the action of the sexual organs on the breasts during pregnancy.  The voluptuous element in suckling may thus be called a merciful provision of Nature for securing the maintenance of the child.