Only thus is the fact explainable that insanity among single women
occurs with greatest frequency between the ages of 25 and 35, that is to
say, the time when the bloom of youth, and, along therewith, hope
vanishes; while with men, insanity occurs generally between the ages of
35 and 50, the season of the strongest efforts in the struggle for
existence.

"It certainly is no accident that, hand in hand with increasing
celibacy, the question of the emancipation of woman has come ever more
on the order of the day. I would have the question looked upon as a
danger signal, set up by the social position of woman in modern
society--a position that grows ever more unbearable, due to increasing
celibacy; I would have it looked upon as the danger signal of a
justified demand, made upon modern society, to furnish woman some
equivalent for that to which she is assigned by Nature, and which modern
social conditions partly deny her."[63]

And Dr. H. Plotz, in his work, "Woman in Nature and Ethnography,"[64]
says in the course of his explanation of the results of ungratified
sexual instincts upon unmarried women: "It is in the highest degree
noteworthy, not for the physician only, but also for the anthropologist,
that there is an effective and never-failing means to check this process
of decay (with old maids), but even to cause the lost bloom to return,
if not in all its former splendor yet in a not insignificant
degree,--_pity only that our social conditions allow, or make its
application possible only in rare instances_. The means consist in
regular and systematic sexual intercourse. The sight is not infrequent
with girls, who lost their bloom, or were not far from the withering
point, yet, the opportunity to marry having been offered them, that,
shortly after marriage, their shape began to round up again, the roses
to return to their cheeks, and their eyes to recover their one-time
brightness. _Marriage is, accordingly, the true fountain of youth for
the female sex._ Thus Nature has her firm laws, that implacably demand
their dues. No 'vita praeter naturam,' no unnatural life, no attempt at
accommodation to incompatible conditions of life, passes without leaving
noticeable traces of degeneration, upon the animal, as well as upon the
human organism."

As to the effect that marriage and celibacy exercise upon the mind, the
following figures furnish testimony. In 1882, there were in Prussia, per
10,000 inhabitants of the same conj