If we go back to the earliest forms of life, where the unit is simply a
minute mass of protoplasm surrounded by a cell wall, we find each of
these divisions to be a complete individual. It can feed itself, that
its life may go on to-day; it can fight or run away, that it may be here
to fight to-morrow; and by a process of division it can create a new
life so that its existence may continue across the generations. With
such units it is quite conceivable that life might go on through all
eternity, death following birth, were it not that protoplasm contains
within itself a principle of change. Life and change are synonymous.
And this change moves ever toward a complexity, which we call
development, where cells unite in a larger life, and functions and
organs are specialized. Thus there comes a time when the part split off
carries with it power to eat and digest, to fight or run away, but only
half the power of procreation. This half unit, this incomplete
individual, is either male or female, and from this time on, the epic of
life gathers around the search of these half-lives for their
complements. The force that impels to this search, while at first
valuable only for the perpetuation of the generations, gathers into
itself modifying feeling and desires and, at a later period, ideas and
ideals, which finally, when men and women appear, make it the greatest
of all the shaping forces in life.[1]
[1] The fact that sexual selection does not play the part in organic
evolution which Darwin assigned it does not affect this statement. See
chapter on Sexual Selection in YVES DELAGEE and MARIE GOLDSMITH, _The
Theories of Evolution_, New York: Huebsch, 1912.
Of course, in such a sweeping statement as this, one must include under
sex hunger all the forces that drive men and women to seek each other's
society, rather than that of their own sex. In this sense, it can be
truly said that it gives a motive for our care of offspring, and for
all our other most self-forgetful devotions, our finest altruisms, our
most polished expressions in language, manners and dress. It justifies
labor, ambition, and at times even self-effacement. It underlies nearly
all the lyric expressions in art; furnishes almost the only theme for
that delineation of modern life which we call the novel; and is a main
support for music, painting, statuary and belles-lettres. It gives us
the institution of the family, which is the parent of the state; it is
closely allied to religion; and in our individual lives it lifts us to
the heights of self-realization and happiness, or plunges us down to the
depths of degradation and tragedy.
While this sex hunger belongs equally to men and women, it has come to
be associated with women, until we even speak of them as "the sex."
Hence, when we are discussing women, we are generally discussing the sex
interest common to both men and women, and this disturbs our point of
view. The fact is that sex interest is a common possession, that the
unit in human life, even more than among lower animals, is always a male
and a female bound together by love. Just as a body can function in
sleep or under the influence of a narcotic, for a time seemingly
independent of the mind, so a man or a woman can live for a time in
seeming independence of the opposite sex; but from any biological point
of view, such a separate existence of male and female is only a
transient effort. The half-life must find its mate or, after a few brief
days, it dies, leaving its line extinct. For all the larger purposes of
life, man is but a half-creature, and woman is equally a fragment.
It is, of course, conceivable that these two halves of the biological
unit might have been made, or might have developed, alike in everything
except the sexual function. At least they might have been as much alike
as men are alike. They might have been of the same size, possessed of
the same strength, of the same figures and gestures, complexion and
hair. Their voices might have been alike. They might have had the same
kinds of nervous systems, with the same desires, feelings, ideas and
tendencies. In the assertions and arguments born of intellectual,
industrial, social and political readjustments, it is often assumed
that this is the case. Differences are minimized or denied, and an
attempt is made to resolve the world of men and women into a world of
human beings capable of living together in mingled competitions and
coöperations, regardless of sex, except where the reproductive process
is considered. But this view is superficial; born of argument it breaks
down when confronted by any body of significant facts.
Again, it has happened that in the long struggle of developing
civilization, sometimes one and sometimes the other sex has gained what
has seemed an advantage over the other, just as in the development of
any man's individual life, his brain may gain a seeming advantage over
his stomach, so that it has more than its fair share of nourishment and
activity. Arguing from such a case, we might declare the brain superior
to the stomach in power, health and function; but in the long
accounting, all such temporary superiorities are wiped out. So with men
and women, seeming advantages for either are gained only at the expense
of the common life; and in the last analysis, each finds his individual
value only in the common life of the unit.
Let us try then to see what the special characteristics of women are,
ignoring as far as possible the accidental variations of individuals,
and the temporary advantages or disadvantages due to economic or
ideational forces, and all assertions of what would be if things were
not as they are.
While the whole matter of sex differences is in a state of unsettlement,
it seems very certain that males are more active and more variable than
females. This superabundant vitality appears in the males of the higher
animals in secondary sex characteristics, such as more abundant and
unnecessary hair and feathers, tusks, spurs, antlers, wattles, brilliant
colors and scent pouches. It also appears in mating calls, songs, and
general carriage of the body. Correspondingly, the female is smaller,
duller colored, and less immediately attractive than the male.
All the studies that have been made on men and women, also confirm our
ordinary observation that men are taller, heavier, stronger and more
active than women, and this holds true in all stages of civilization,
wherever tests have been made. In strength, rapidity of movement, and
rate of fatigue Miss Thompson's studies[2] show that men have a very
decided advantage over women. Thus in strength tests, the men in Yale
have double the power of women in Oberlin;[3] while our college athletic
records place men far ahead of women in all events requiring strength
and endurance.
[2] HELEN B. THOMPSON, _Psychological Norms in Men and Women_, p. 167.
University of Chicago Press, 1903.
[3] THOMAS, _Sex and Society_, p. 21. University of Chicago Press, 1907.
The differences in structure between men and women are such as to
correspond with the functional differences just stated. A woman's bones
are smaller in proportion to her size, than are those of a man. The body
is longer, the hips broader, and the abdomen more prominent. Relatively
to the length of the body, the arms, legs, feet and hands are shorter
than in men, the lower leg and arm are shorter in proportion to the
upper leg and arm. Man has the long levers and the active frame. One has
only to look at two good statues of a man and a woman to realize the
greater strength and activity of the man.
Woman, as she actually appears in modern society, is also less subject
to variation than man;[4] she is much less liable to be a genius or an
idiot than her brother.[5] She offers greater resistance to disease,
endures pain and want more stoically, and lives longer; so that while
more boys than girls are born in all parts of the world, where
statistics are kept, in mature years women always outnumber men.
[4] KARL PEARSON denies this. See _The Chances of Death_, Vol. I, p.
256. London, 1897.
[5] C.W. SALEEBY, in _Woman and Womanhood_, p. 54, New York, Mitchell
Kennerley, 1911, maintains that woman is biologically more variable than
man, and that woman's less variable activity is due to her training.
All these statements are summed up by saying that not only in women, but
in most female animals of the higher orders, life is more anabolic than
in males. They tend to more static conditions; they collect, organize,
conserve; they are patient and stable; they move about less; they more
easily lay on adipose tissue. Compared with the female, the male animal
is katabolic; he is active, impulsive, destructive, skilful, creative,
intense, spasmodic, violent. Such a generalization as this must not be
pushed too far in its applications to our daily life; but as a statement
of basal differences it seems justified by ordinary observation as well
as by scientific tests.[6]
[6] PATRICK GEDDES and ARTHUR THOMPSON, in _The Evolution of Sex_, D.
Appleton & Co., 1889, first advanced this position.
Meantime, it is probably true that the female, as mother of the race, is
more important biologically than the male, since she both furnishes germ
plasm and nourishes the newly conceived life. The latest studies, along
lines laid down by Mendel, seem to indicate that the female brings to
the new creation both male and female attributes, while the male brings
only male qualities. Thus when either sex sinks into insignificance, as
sometimes happens in lower forms of life, it is generally the male which
exists merely for purposes of reproduction.[7]
[7] C.W. SALEEBY, _Woman and Womanhood_, Chapter V. New York: Mitchell
Kennerley, 1911.
The differences in the nervous systems of men and women are now fairly
established on the quantitative side. Marshall has shown that if we
compare brain weight with the stature in the two sexes there is a slight
preponderance of cerebrum in males; but if the other parts of the brain
are taken into consideration, the sexes are equal.[8] Havelock Ellis has
carefully gathered the results of many investigators and declares that
woman's brain is slightly superior to man's in proportion to her
size.[9] But these quantitative differences are now felt to have
comparatively little significance; and of the relative qualities of the
brain substance in the two sexes we know nothing positively. In fact, if
we give a scientist a section of brain substance he cannot tell whether
it is the brain of a man or a woman.
[8] MARSHALL, _Journal of Anatomy and Physiology_, July, 1892.
[9] HAVELOCK ELLIS, _Man and Woman_, p. 97, Contemporary Science Series.
It is very probable that the average woman's mind is capable of much the
same activity as the average man's mind, given the same heredity and the
same training. They are both alike capable of remarkable feats of
imitation, and an ordinarily intelligent man could probably learn to
wear woman's clothes, and walk as she generally walks, so as to deceive
even a jury of women, if there were a motive to justify the effort.
Women also can perform, and they do perform, most of the feats of men.
At the same time it is desirable to note present differences in modes of
thinking and feeling, for while they may have been produced by
environment and ideals, and may hence give way to education, they must
be reckoned with in making the next steps. In the chapter on education
we shall discuss certain academic peculiarities of women's minds, but
here we are interested in seeing what fundamental differences
characterize the thinking of the sexes.
Women seem more subject to emotional states than men;[10] and this
general observation agrees with the fact that the basal ganglia of the
brain are more developed in women than in men, and these parts of the
brain seem most intimately concerned with emotional activity. Whether
emotion follows acts or leads to acts remains a disputed question, but
certainly emotion gives charm and significance to life and distinguishes
modes of thinking. Particularly in the dramatic art, this quality of
mind gives women special excellence. The fact that she more often
appeals to emotion than to reason, as cause for action, in no way marks
her as inferior to man, but simply as different. As Ellen Key says:
"There is nothing more futile than to try to prove the inferiority of
woman to man, unless it be to try to prove her equality."[11]
[10] HELEN BRADFORD THOMPSON, _Psychological Norms in Men and Women_, p.
171, University of Chicago Press, 1903.
[11] ELLEN KEY, _Love and Ethics_, p. 52. New York: Huebsch, 1911.
Most women think in particulars as compared with men. The individual
circumstance seems to them very important; and it is hard for them to
get away from the concrete. On the other hand, a man's thinking is more
impersonal and general; and he is more easily drawn into abstractions.
It is true that woman's domestic life would naturally develop this
quality but we are not now concerned with the question of origins. Most
women find it easy to live from day to day; the man is more given to
systematizing and planning. Thus in offices, men are more efficient as
heads of departments, while women handle details admirably. In public
life we have recently seen thousands of women eager to depose a United
States Senator, accused of polygamy, without regard to the bearing of
the concrete act on constitutional guarantees. Women have done little
with abstract studies like metaphysics; they have done much with the
novel, where ideas are presented in the concrete and particular.
This habit of dealing with particulars, and disinclination for
abstraction, leads easily to habitual action. It is easy for women to
stock up their lower nerve centers with reflex actions. This, of course,
goes along with the general anabolic characteristics of the sex. Hence
women are the conservers of traditions; rules of conducting social
intercourse appeal to them; and they are the final supporters of
theological dogmas.[12] Women naturally uphold caste, and Daughters of
the Revolution and Colonial Dames flourish on the scantiest foundations
of ancestral excellence. Man, on the other hand, is more radical and
creative. He has perfected most of our inventions; he has painted our
great pictures; carved our great statues; he has written music, while
women have interpreted it.
[12] HELEN B. THOMPSON, _Psychological Norms in Men and Women_, p. 171,
University of Chicago Press, 1903.
Along with these fixed qualities of action, women have a tendency to
indirection when they advance. We say they have diplomacy, tact and
coquetry, while man is more direct and bald in his methods. Of course,
one easily understands how these qualities may have arisen, since "fraud
is the force of weak natures," and woman has always been driven to
supplement her weakness with tact, from the days of Jael and Delilah
down to the present day adventuress.
These qualities of mind naturally drive women to literary interests
which are concrete, personal and emotional. Men turn more easily than
women to the abstract generalizations of science. Of course, there are
marked exceptions to these general statements, in both sexes. Madame
Curie, who was recently a candidate for the honors of the French
Academy, and who, in 1911, was given the Nobel prize for her
distinguished services to chemistry, is but one of many women who are
famous to-day in the world of science. Still the private life of these
women, as in the case of Sónya Kovalévsky, seems to bear out our general
conclusion. Men, on the other hand, as milliners and editors of ladies'
journals, show marked skill in catering to women's tastes; but on the
whole the differences indicated seem important and widely diffused.
Another profound difference between men and women is the woman's greater
tendency to periodicity in all her functions and adjustments to
life.[13] In all normal societies the life of the man is fairly regular
and constant from birth to old age. He moves along lines mainly
predetermined by his heredity and his environment, his habits and his
work. Even puberty is less disturbing in its effect upon a boy than upon
a girl; and often by eighteen we can anticipate the life of a young man
with great accuracy. The one element in his life hardest to forecast is
the effect of his love-affairs.
[13] See chapter on Periodicity in G. STANLEY HALL'S _Adolescence_, Vol.
I, p. 472.
With a woman, it is quite different. As a girl, the period of puberty
produces profound changes; and after that, for more than thirty years
she passes through periodical exaltations and depressions that must play
a large part in determining her health, happiness and efficiency. In the
forties, comes another great change which affects her life to a degree
strangely ignored by those who have dealt with her possibilities in the
past.[14]
[14] KARIN MICHAËLIS, _The Dangerous Age_, John Lane Co., 1911, is said
to have sold 80,000 in six weeks when it first appeared in Berlin. _The
Bride of the Mistletoe_, by JAMES LANE ALLEN (Macmillan), deals with the
same period.
But the great element of uncertainty, always fronting the girl and young
woman, is marriage. Marriage for her generally means abandonment of old
working interests, and a substitution of new; it brings her geographical
change; new acquaintances and friendships; and the steady adjustment of
her personal life to the man she has married in its relation to
industry, religion, society and the arts. If children come to her, they
must inevitably retire her from public life, for a time, with the danger
of losing connections which comes to all who temporarily drop out of the
race.
A boy, industrious, observant, with some power of administration,
studies mining engineering, moves to a mining center and expresses his
individual and social powers along the lines of his work until he is
sixty. The women who impinge against his life may deflect him from the
mines in California to those in Australia, or from the actual work of
superintendence to an office; or from an interest in Browning to
Tennyson; or from Methodism to Christian Science. The girl with
industrious and observant interests studies stenography and
type-writing, moves to the vicinity of offices, but is then caught up in
the life of a farmer-husband who shifts her center of activity to a farm
in Idaho where she must devote herself to entirely different activities,
form new associations, think in new terms, respond to new emotions, and
adjust herself to her farmer-husband's personality. When, after
twenty-five years, she has reared a family of children, and when
improved circumstances enable them to move up to the county seat, she
confronts many of the conditions for which she originally prepared
herself, but with farm habits, diminishing adaptability and diminishing
power of appealing to her husband. His powers are still comparatively
unimpaired, and as a dealer in farm produce or farm machinery his
interests undergo slight change. In general, it may be said that a
woman's life falls into three great periods of twenty-five years each.
The first twenty-five years of childhood and girlhood is a time of
getting ready for the puzzling combination of her personal needs as a
human being, her needs as a self-supporting social unit, and her
probabilities of matrimony. The second twenty-five years, the domestic
period of her life, is a time of adjustments as wife and mother, which
may instead prove to be a period of barren waiting, or a time of
professional and industrial self-direction and self-support. The third
twenty-five years is a time of mature and ripened powers, of lessened
romantic interests, and if the preceding period has been devoted to
husband and children, it is often a time of social detachment, of
weakened individual initiative, of old-fashioned knowledge, of
inefficiency, of premature retirement and old age.
On the moral side, as Professor Thomas has so admirably pointed
out,[15] women have evolved a morality of the person and of the family,
while men have evolved a morality of the group and of property. Since
men have had a monopoly of property and of law-making they have shaped
laws mainly for the protection of property, and in a secondary degree
for the protection of the person. Under these laws a man who beats
another nearly to death is less severely punished than one who signs the
wrong name to a check for five dollars. Man's katabolic nature and his
greater freedom have given him almost a monopoly of crime under these
laws which he has made. Offences against the coming generation, against
health, social efficiency and good taste have until recently been left
to the tribunal of public opinion as expressed in social usage; and
here, as we have seen, women are generally the judges and executioners.
In this, her own field of moral judgment, woman is idealistic and
uncompromising. If one of her sisters falls from virtue she will often
pursue her unmercifully. If a man, on the other hand, commits a burglary
or forgery her sympathy and mercy may make her a very lenient judge.
[15] WILLIAM I. THOMAS, _Sex and Society_, p. 149. University of Chicago
Press, 1907. ELLEN KEY, in _Love and Marriage,_ G.P. Putnam's Sons,
1911, traces the same lines of growth.
In æsthetics, the differences follow the same general law. Women express
beauty in themselves; jewels are for their ornament; and rooms are
furnished as a setting for themselves. The lives of millions of workers
go to the adornment of women. In painting they sometimes excel, but a
Madame Le Brun does her best work when she paints herself and her child,
and when Angelica Kauffmann would paint a vestal virgin, she drapes a
veil over her own head and transfers her features to the canvas.
Sculpture and architecture are too impersonal and abstract to attract
much attention from women at present. Even a sculptor like Mrs. Bessie
Potter Vonnoh finds her truest theme in statuettes of mothers with their
children about them.
During the past few years psychologists have paid great attention to
secondary sex characteristics of the mind, and doubtless many qualities
of the thought and feeling of men and women owe their origin to the same
source as brilliant plumage, antlers, combs and wattles. Thus the shy,
retiring, reticent, self-effacing, languishing, adoring excesses of
maidenhood and the peculiar psychological manifestations of the late
forties must probably be understood from this point of view. So, also,
must the bold, swaggering, assertive, compelling bearing of youth be
interpreted. The shy or modish, dandified, lackadaisical cane-carrying
youth is naturally disliked as a sexual perversion.
Women alone, whether individually or in groups, tend to develop certain
hard, dry, arid qualities of mind and heart, or they become emotional
and unbalanced. Losing a sense of large significances, they become
overcareful, saving, sometimes penurious, while in matters of feeling
they lavish sentiment and sympathy on unimportant pets and movements.
Men, when alone, become selfish, coarse, and reckless; their judgments
become extravagant and their pursuits remorseless.
Thus it is certainly true that men and women supplement each other in
the subjective as in the objective life. Man creates, woman conserves;
man composes, woman interprets; man generalizes, woman particularizes;
man seeks beauty, woman embodies beauty; man thinks more than he feels,
woman feels more than she thinks. For new spiritual birth, as for
physical birth, men and women must supplement each other.
To be a woman then, is to be for twenty-five years a girl and then a
young woman, capable of feeding and protecting herself, possessed of
preparing and conserving powers superior to her brothers. After that,
for twenty-five years, she is a human being primarily devoted to
romanticism, finding her largest fulfilment only in wifehood and
motherhood, direct or vicarious; in the last twenty-five years, she
should be a wise woman, of ripe experience, carrying over her gathered
training and powers to the service of the group. All this time she is,
like the man, an incomplete creature, realizing her greatest power and
her greatest service only when working in loving association with the
man of her choice.