THE DETERMINATION OF SEX
We must regard life as essentially female, since there is no choice but
to look upon living forms which have no sex as female, and since we know
that in many of the lower forms of life there is possible what is called
parthenogenesis or virgin-birth. It has, indeed, been ingeniously argued
by a distinguished American writer, Professor Lester Ward,[4] that the
male sex is to be looked upon as an afterthought, an ancillary
contrivance, devised primarily for the advantages of having a second
sex--whatever those advantages may exactly be; and secondarily, one
would add, becoming useful in adding fatherhood to motherhood upon the
psychical plane of post-natal care and education as well.
But whatever was the historical or evolutionary origin of sex, we may
here be excused for attaching more importance--for it is of great
practical consequence--to the origin or determination of sex in the
individual. At what stage and under what influences did the child that
is born a girl become female? To what extent can we control the
determination of sex? Why are the numbers of the sexes approximately so
equal? What determines the curious disproportions observed in many
families, which may be composed only of girls or only of boys; and, as
is asserted, also observed after wars and epidemics or during sieges,
when an abnormally high proportion of boys is said to be born? These are
some of the deeply interesting questions which men have always attempted
to answer--with the beginnings of substantial success during the present
century at last.
In general it is true that, the more we learn of the characters and
histories of living beings, the more importance we attach to nature or
birth and the less to nurture or environment, vastly important though
the latter be. Thus to the student of heredity nothing could well seem
more improbable, at any rate amongst the higher animals, than that
characters so profound as those of sex should be determined by nurture.
He simply cannot but believe that the sex of the individual is as inborn
as his backbone, and as incapable of being created by varying conditions
of nurture. The causation of sex is therefore really a problem in
heredity; and we may most confidently assert, in the first place, that
the sex of every human being is already determined at the moment of
conception when, indeed, the new individual is created: determined then
by the nature and constitution of the living cells--or of one of
them--which combine to form the new being. Subsequent attempts to affect
the sex, as by means of the mother's diet and the like, are palpably
hopeless from the outset and always will be. This is by no means to say
that conditions affecting the mother--as, for instance, the
semi-starvation of a prolonged siege--may not affect the construction of
the germ-cells which she houses, and which are constantly being formed
within her from the mother germ-cells, as they are called. But any given
final germ-cell, such as will combine with another from an individual of
the opposite sex to form a new being, is already determined, once for
all, to be of one sex or the other. We naturally ask, then, how the two
parents are concerned in this matter; and the first remarkable answer
returned by the Mendelian workers during the last three or four years is
that it is the mother who determines the sex of her children in the case
of all the higher animals. Her contribution to the new being is called
the ovum, and it is believed that ova are of two kinds, or, we are quite
right in saying, of two sexes.
Those who are now working at these problems experimentally, actually
seeing what happens in given cases, and whom we may for convenience call
Mendelians after the master who gave them their method and their key,
have latterly obtained results the main tenour of which must be stated
here, as they indicate the lines of a portion of the succeeding
argument. The task was to attack experimentally the determination of
sex--a fascinating problem for which so many solutions that failed to
hold water have been found, but hitherto no others. In finding the
answer to it, as they appear certainly to have done so far as the higher
animals are concerned, the Mendelians are also beginning to ascertain,
as we shall see, certain basal facts as to the composition or
constitution of the individual; and to us, who wish to know exactly
what a woman is, and what she is as distinguished from a man, this
discovery is of the most vital importance. The experimental facts are
not yet numerous, and if they were not consonant with facts of other
orders, it would be rash to proceed; but it will be evident, in the
sequel, that common experience is well in accord with the experimental
evidence.
It appears that, amongst at any rate the higher animals, the sex of
offspring is determined by the nature of the mother's contribution. The
cell derived from the father is always male--as goes without saying, we
might add, if we knew little of the subject. But the ovum, the cell
derived from the mother, may carry either femaleness or maleness. When
an ovum bearing maleness meets the invariably maleness-bearing sperm,
the resultant individual is a male, of course, and he is male all
through. But when an ovum bearing femaleness meets a sperm, the
resulting individual is female, femaleness being a Mendelian "dominant"
to maleness; if both be present, femaleness appears. The female,
however, is not female all through as the male is male all through. So
far as sex is concerned, he is made of maleness _plus_ maleness; but she
is made of femaleness _plus_ maleness. In Mendelian language the male is
homozygous, so-called "pure" as regards this character. But the female
is heterozygous, "impure" in the sense that her femaleness depends upon
the dominance of the factor for femaleness over the factor for maleness,
which also is present in her. In the Mendelian terminology, she is an
instance of impure dominance. The observed practical equality in the
numbers of the two sexes is in exact accord with this interpretation of
the facts, this proportion being the expected and observed one in many
other cases which doubtless depend upon parallel conditions of the
reproductive cells.
Surely there is great enlightenment here: for the discovery of the
factors determining sex is a very small affair compared with the
suggestive inference as to the constitution of womanhood. Let us compare
man and woman on the basis of this assumption.
In the man there is nothing but maleness. This is not to deny that he
may possess the protective instinct and the tender emotion which is its
correlate, even though these were undoubtedly feminine in origin. But it
is to deny that any injury to, or arrested development of, the male can
reveal in him characters distinctively female. He may fail to become a
man and may remain a boy; or, having been a man, he may perhaps return,
under certain conditions, to a more youthful state; but he will never,
can never, display anything distinctive of the woman.
Not such, however, must be the woman's case. If anything should
interfere with the development and dominance of the femaleness factor in
her, there is not another "dose" of femaleness, so to speak, to fall
back upon; but a dose of maleness. We may be right in thus seeking to
explain certain familiar phenomena, observed in women under various
conditions--as, for instance, the growth of hair upon the face in
elderly women, the assumption of a masculine voice and aspect, and so
forth. Such facts are frequently to be observed after the climacteric or
"change of life," which probably denotes the termination of the
dominance of the femaleness factor. They are also to be observed as a
consequence of operations much more commonly and irresponsibly performed
a few years ago than now, which abruptly deprived the organism of the
internal secretion through which, as we may surmise, the femaleness
factor in the germ makes its presence effective.
If these propositions are valid, they are certainly important. Our
attitude towards them will depend upon our estimates of the worth of
distinctive womanhood. We may regard it as a loss to society that what
might have been a woman should become only a sort of man of rather less
than average efficiency. Or we may hail with delight the possibility
that, after all, we may be able, by judicious education, to make men of
our daughters. But, whatever our estimates, certainly it is of great
interest to inquire how far and in what directions education may affect
the development of what was given in the germ. We cannot yet answer this
question. In a thousand matters it is all-important to know in what
degree education can control nature, but until we know what the nature
of the individual is we cannot decide. Professor Bateson has clearly
shown that we shall be able duly to estimate environment only when
Mendelian analysis has gone much further, and has instructed us in
detail as to the nature of the material upon which environment is to
act.
For instance, there is the well-established fact that women who have
undergone "higher education" show a low marriage-rate, and produce very
few children. However considered, the fact is of great importance. But
the right interpretation of it is not certain. There are women of a type
approaching the masculine, who are evidently so by nature. Is it these
women, already predestined for something other than distinctive
womanhood, that offer themselves for "higher education"? In other words,
is there a selective process at work, the results of which in choosing a
certain type of woman we attribute to the education undergone? If we
answer this question wrongly, and act upon our erroneous interpretation,
we shall certainly do grave injury to individuals and society.
Thus, we might roundly condemn the higher education of women _in toto_,
and hold up the "domestic woman" as the sole type to which every woman
can and must be made to conform. Or, on the other hand, we may argue
that it is well to provide suitable opportunities of self-development
for those women whose nature practically unfits them for the ordinary
career of a woman.
I do not think that any one who has had opportunities of first-hand
observation will question the presence in university and college
class-rooms of girls of the anomalous type. Each generation produces a
certain number of such. Probably no education will alter their nature in
any radical or effective way. On every ground, personal and social, we
must be right in providing for them, as for their brothers, all the
opportunities they may desire. But I am convinced that their relative
number is not large.
The great majority of those girls who are nowadays subjected to what we
call "higher education" are of the normal type; and this is none the
less true because the proportion of the anomalous is doubtless higher
here than in the feminine community at large. The ordinary observation
of those teachers who year by year see young girls at the beginning of
their higher education will certainly confirm the statement that by far
the greater number of them are of the ordinary feminine type. If this be
so, the necessary inference is that education _has_ a potent influence,
and that it must be held accountable for the observed facts of later
years, whether those facts please or displease us.
The human being is the most adaptable--that is to say, educable--of all
living creatures. This is true of women as well as men. The response of
girls to ideas, ideals, suggestion, the spirit of the group, is an
unquestioned thing. Further, there are basal facts of physiology,
ultimately dependent on the law of the conservation of energy, and the
circumstance that you cannot eat your cake and have it, which work
hand-in-hand, on their own effective plane, with the psychological
influences already referred to. All physiology and psychology lead us to
expect those results of "higher education" upon its subjects or victims
which, in fact, we find, and which, in the main, are indeed its results
and not dependent upon the exceptional natures of those subjected to it.
The more general higher education becomes, and the less selection is
exercised upon the candidates for it, the more evident, I believe, will
it appear that woman responds in high degree to the total circumstances
of her life; and that if we do not like the fruits of our labour it is
we indeed that are to blame.