Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 995 pages of information about Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6.

Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 995 pages of information about Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6.
any further movement.  Many of the early Protestant Reformers, especially in Germany, were prepared to admit a considerable degree of vital flexibility in sexual relationships.  Thus Luther advised married women with impotent husbands, in cases where there was no wish or opportunity for divorce, to have sexual relations with another man, by preference the husband’s brother; the children were to be reckoned to the husband ("Die Sexuelle Frage bei Luther,” Mutterschutz, Sept., 1908).
In England the Puritan spirit, which so largely occupied itself with the reform of marriage, could not fail to be concerned with the question of sexual variations, and from time to time we find the proposal to legalize polygyny.  Thus, in 1658, “A Person of Quality” published in London a small pamphlet dedicated to the Lord Protector, entitled A Remedy for Uncleanness.  It was in the form of a number of queries, asking why we should not admit polygamy for the avoidance of adultery and infanticide.  The writer inquires whether it may not “stand with a gracious spirit, and be every way consistent with the principles of a man fearing God and loving holiness, to have more women than one to his proper use....  He that takes another man’s ox or ass is doubtless a transgressor; but he that puts himself out of the occasion of that temptation by keeping of his own seems to be a right honest and well-meaning man.”
More than a century later (1780), an able, learned, and distinguished London clergyman of high character (who had been a lawyer before entering the Church), the Rev. Martin Madan, also advocated polygamy in a book called Thelyphthora; or, a Treatise on Female Ruin.  Madan had been brought into close contact with prostitution through a chaplaincy at the Lock Hospital, and, like the Puritan advocate of polygamy, he came to the conclusion that only by the reform of marriage is it possible to work against prostitution and the evils of sexual intercourse outside marriage.  His remarkable book aroused much controversy and strong feeling against the author, so that he found it desirable to leave London and settle in the country.  Projects of marriage reform have never since come from the Church, but from philosophers and moralists, though not rarely from writers of definitely religious character.  Senancour, who was so delicate and sensitive a moralist in the sexual sphere, introduced a temperate discussion of polygamy into his De l’Amour (vol. ii, pp. 117-126).  It seemed to him to be neither positively contrary nor positively conformed to the general tendency of our present conventions, and he concluded that “the method of conciliation, in part, would be no longer to require that the union of a man and a woman should only cease with the death of one of them.”  Cope, the biologist, expressed a somewhat more decided opinion.  Under some circumstances, if all three parties agreed, he saw no objection to polygyny or polyandry.  “There
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Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.