n 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.