A woman's voice differs from a man's not only in pitch but in timbre;
its quality suggests the sex. There is great scope for variety, from
the lowest contralto to the highest soprano, as there is in man's from
the lowest bass to the highest tenor; a variety so great that voices
differ as much as faces and can be instantly recognized; but unless it
has the proper sexual quality a voice affects us disagreeably. A
coarse, harsh voice has marred many a girl's best marriage chances,
while, on the other hand, it may happen that "the ear loveth before
the eye." Now what is true of the male and female voice holds true of
the male and female mind in all its diverse aspects. We expect men to
be not only bigger, stronger, taller, hardier, more robust, but more
courageous and aggressive, more active, more creative, more sternly
just, than women; while coarseness, cruelty, selfishness, and
pugnacity, though not virtues in either sex, affect us much less
repulsively in men than in women, for the reason that the masculine
struggle for existence and competition in business foster selfishness,
and men have inherited pugnacious instincts from their fighting
ancestors, while women, as mothers, learned the lessons of sympathy
and self-sacrifice much sooner than men. The distinctively feminine
virtues are on the whole of a much higher order than the masculine,
which is the reason why they were not appreciated or fostered at so
early an epoch. Gentleness, modesty, domesticity, girlishness,
coyness, kindness, patience, tenderness, benevolence, sympathy,
self-sacrifice, demureness, emotionality, sensitiveness, are feminine
qualities, some of which, it is true, we expect also in gentlemen; but
their absence is not nearly so fatal to a man as it is to a woman. And
as men gradually approach women in patience, tenderness, sympathy,
self-sacrifice, and gentleness, it behooves women to keep their
distance by becoming still more refined and feminine, instead of
trying, as so many of them do, to approach the old masculine
standard--one of the strangest aberrations recorded in all social
history.
Men and women fall in love with what is unlike, not with what is like
them. The refined physical and mental traits which I have described in
the preceding paragraphs constitute some of the secondary sexual
characters by which romantic love is inspired, while sensual love is
based on the primary sexual characters. Havelock Ellis (19) has well
defined a secondary sexual character as "one which, by more highly
differentiating the sexes, helps to make them more attractive to each
other," and so to promote marriages. And Professor Weissmann, famed
for his studies in heredity, opens up deep vistas of thought when he
declares (II., 91) that
"all the numerous differences in form and function
which characterize sex among the higher animals, all
the so-called 'secondary sexual characters,' affecting
even the highest mental qualities of mankind, are
nothing but adaptations to bring about the union of the
hereditary tendencies of two individuals."
Nature has been at work on this problem of differentiating the sexes
ever since it created the lowest animal organisms, and this fact,
which stands firm as a rock, gives us the consoling assurance that the
present abnormal attempts to make women masculine by giving them the
same education, employments, sports, ideals, and political aspirations
as men have, must end in ignominious failure. If the viragoes had
their way, men and women would in course of time revert to the
condition of the lowest savages, differing only in their organs of
generation. How infinitely nobler, higher, more refined and,
fascinating, is that ideal which wants women to differ from men by
every detail, bodily and mental; to differ from them in the higher
qualities of disposition, of character, of beauty, physical and
spiritual, which alone make possible the existence of romantic love as
distinguished from lust on one side and friendship on the other.