THE EVOLUTION OF SEX IN ADOLESCENCE
"I am for you and you are for me,
Not only for your own sake, but for others' sakes,
Envelop'd in you, sleep great heroes and bards,
They refuse to awake at the touch of any man but me."
_Walt Whitman._
I
A French biologist has discovered that when a female oyster is starved,
and its constitution thus deteriorated, it becomes transformed into a
male.
The male oyster must be inferior, therefore, in organisation to the
female. Its constitutional potential is less, since the constitutional
potential of the female contains both its own, and the potential of the
male. And the lesser, it is admitted, cannot contain the greater;
although higher evolutionary forms, when subjected to conditions which
preclude them from sustaining these their higher forms, may lapse to
modes less complex.
Further and more striking examples of such Sex-transformation are
afforded by so-called "mules," or "neuters," which occur in other
species. A well-known case is that of a pea-hen belonging to Lady Tynte.
Having laid eggs from which chicks were raised, this pea-hen, after
moulting, developed feathers proper to the other sex; appearing like a
pied peacock. In the third year the same phenomenon occurred in her; she
developed spurs, moreover, resembling those of the cock. _She never bred
after this change in her plumage._
As already mentioned, kindred phenomena of sex-metamorphosis are
observed in women after operations involving removal of reproductive
glands.
That the female is, indeed, a more complex order of organisation than
the male, is not to be doubted, since masculine characteristics emerge
from it when it lapses from its normal of condition.
Adolescence as it occurs in the boy and in the girl emphasises this
conclusion.
To the age of twelve or thereabouts, the normal boy- and girl-child are
like enough to one another; smooth-skinned, active, simple creatures.
The boy is, normally, larger, sturdier, stronger and rougher than the
girl. But, save for the cut of their hair and of their clothes, the two
are very similar.
With the transition to manhood and womanhood, respectively, notable
differences accrue, however.
From having been a strong, young, active, boy-like creature,
now--provided her development be allowed to take the normal course--the
girl loses physical activity and strength. A phase of invalidation sets
in. Instinctively, she no longer runs and romps. New languors invest her
in mind and in body. She is indisposed to brain-work or to much
exertion. She lounges and muses. Her mind is clouded with the mists of
awakening sensibilities. She suffers from lassitudes.
She becomes a complex of disabilities, indeed; disabilities which in
delicate, sickly or over-taxed girls, show in chlorosis, anaemia,
hysteria and other ills. Obviously, profound changes, with
re-adjustments of her constitutional resources, are taking place in her.
And most significant of these is that which shows like an _arrest_ of
development, physical and intellectual. Because, normally, she develops
but little further along direct lines of intellect and muscle. Yet that
she is still developing, and this upon wholly new--subtler, higher and
more complex lines, is manifest at the end of this transition-period
whence she emerges, a woman.
Her developmental arrest and her disabilities (resulting from an
intensification of Recessive processes in her) are seen now to have
subserved a phase of higher evolution. Nature suddenly locked the door
upon her differentiating and escaping energies, in order that these
might be conserved and knit into organisation. The active muscularity
she has lost reappears in the new factors of symmetry and delicate
modelling of limb; in repose and grace of movement. The straight, slim,
boy-like lines of the hoyden girl have evolved into the curves and
rounded suppleness and beauties of a woman. The girlish, agile and
abrupt movements have passed into a woman's poise and grace. The
unformed features of the child have become now delicately modelled; the
curveless, emotionless lips have bloomed into the flower-like, rosy
fullness of a woman's mouth; passionate and tender. New mystery and
brilliance light her eyes. Eyes and brows are charged with potencies;
with seriousness, with modesty, serenity, elusiveness. Hair and hands,
voice and expression, have become transfigured by the magic of a
re-creative impulse which has regenerated her whole being.
So too her brain development, arrested along lines of concrete
intellection, is seen to have evolved to higher, subtler forms of
mentality; to be instinct with delicacy, sympathy, tact, and with that
incalculable mode of supra-conscious cerebration which is intuition. In
so far as she is of high, womanly type, she is now warm and emotional,
sympathetic, intuitive; consciously pure, yet delicately passionate.
From a crude and sexless hoyden, she has evolved into an exquisite
complexity; invested all round with higher values, human and psychical.
As in their earliest beginnings, however, so now again the Woman-traits
manifest as Unfitnesses. Her new departure has actually undone in her
much that had been achieved in physical adaptation.
Biologists, observing this arrest of development in the female, have
interpreted it as sign of an organisation inferior to that of the male.
In point of fact, the contrary is the case. Her arrest of development
along lines of masculine inherence no more proves her inferior to the
male than does the human developmental arrest along lines of that tail
our ape-progenitor possessed, prove the human inferior to the
ape-species.
This arrest of tail-development occurred first in the female, doubtless;
being one of those evolutionary mutations in the direction of advance of
Type which are engendered in her sex; and which are characterised by a
conversion to higher potential, of differentiations in respect of
adaptation to environment that have been achieved in the male.
Conversion of male Fitness to female Unfitness, therefore.
Seeing that the ape is vastly more adapted than is man to natural
environment, it is obvious that the trend of adaptation to environment,
far from having been along lines of evolving ape to man, must have been
always, on the contrary, impelling reversion of the human to the
ape-type. Darwin relates how he and Huxley, watching some boys bathing,
"marvelled over the fact, seeming especially strange when they are no
longer disguised by clothes, that human beings should dominate over all
other creatures and play the wonderful part they do on earth."
Hugo de Vries says: "Natural Selection (whereof Adaptation is _modus
operandi_) ... does not single out the best variations, but simply
destroys the larger number of those which are, from some cause or other,
unfit for their present environment. In this way it keeps the strains up
to the required standard."
While Hoffding states explicitly: "Adaptation and Progress are not the
same."
Clearly there are Dual Principles operating in progressive development;
one adapting the organism to environment, the other adapting it to the
Typal model inherent in species.
II
In the male of stock impoverished by artificial conditions of
civilisation, the transition to manhood is attended likewise by some
languors, physical and mental. New powers are being developed and
occasion more or less strain upon the constitution--a strain wherewith
our present-day masters and pastors, in their zeal of intensive culture,
reckon far too little. In healthy boys this is in no way comparable,
however, with the constitutional stress which adolescence causes in
healthy girls. The youth continues to wax in strength of brain and body.
The arrest, or involution, normal to the girl, does not occur in him.
While she becomes gentler and more tranquil, by reason of a new poise in
her of mind and body, he becomes forceful and restless by reason of a
new release in him of energy. Yet though he gains in strength of brain
and body by this further differentiation of his resources into concrete
faculty and virile energy, he lapses notably in organisation. From the
supple, fine-skinned boy--clear-eyed, sweet-voiced, womanly almost in
refinement and comeliness--he grows large and hard and muscular; more or
less sinewy and rough-hewn, according as he is, or is not, manly of
type. His skin loses its fine grain and smoothness, becoming coarser and
hirsute; thus reverting, in degree, to the inferior, animal grade of
skin. His voice falls nearly an octave, lapsing from sweetness and
purity to gruffness and volume. Obviously--although all this being
normal, the male has a virile charm and handsomeness of his own--man's
is notably a less highly and subtly-evolved organisation than is
woman's.
In the boy, is seen a progressive adaptation of body and brain to
environment, in order to fit him for his man's task of coping with and
advancing the conditions of life, material and ethical. And for this,
the more delicate and sensitive woman-physique, demanding more of vital
conservation for its upkeep, would be a handicap.
Biological adaptation for his part in reproduction occurs too. But the
male development at this epoch is pre-eminently one of adaptation to
environment; equipping him with bone and muscle, brain and enterprise,
aggressiveness, initiative and energy. Racially indispensable as the
reproductive function is in him, it is obviously incidental and
subordinate to his general development.
The girl's transition to womanhood is seen, on the contrary, to be one
almost entirely of adaptation, physiological and psychical, to the
functions of wifehood and child-bearing. Her growth ceases. She loses,
in place of gaining, nerve and muscle-power. While, in becoming
emotional, her changed mentality unfits far more than it fits her to
cope with life at first hand; with life unadapted, that is, and herself
unshielded by the male. Her intelligence at eighteen is normally less
keen and active--although of higher and more subtle quality and
trend--than it had been at twelve.
Indications of Nature which point unmistakably to diametrically
different modes of culture and of training for the sexes, and, in
consequence, to wholly different applications of their respective powers
and aptitudes in every department of life.
In the boy, the Male-traits receive, with adolescence, a great influx of
energy; wholly dominating the Woman-traits which had made him more or
less a feminine creature.
More and more each day, the potential virile in his every cell asserts
itself in structure and in function; dominating the Woman-traits
inherent in him. He waxes big and strong of body; restless and active of
mentality. And the less, within normal limits, virility has been
prematurely forced in him by too hard strain of mind or body, the better
for the evolution of his manhood. Unless the Woman-traits have been
unduly drilled and hardened out of him, they will now refine, inspire
and fructify his awakening masculine powers. The too hard struggle for
existence put, by necessity, on boys of the poorer classes, and, in the
higher classes, forced on sensitive boys called upon, too young, to
fight for survival in the semi-savage communities that public schools
are, hardens them too soon and too summarily, and thus frustrates their
best development.
It is said that there is no atrocity a boy-community will not commit.
In this stage of development, the moral consciousness of the _genus_ is
at low ebb. The accentuation of Male-traits now occurring occasions a
recrudescence of primal instincts. And the collective atmosphere such
recrudescence engenders in a boy-community, marooned in school-life
apart from the refining, softening influences of home and womenkind, is
only too often an evil and a demoralising one. Boarding-schools should
be abolished; good day-schools substituted.
More than at any other phase of his existence, the masculine needs now
the Woman-influences from _without_; because the Woman-traits _within_
are, for a period, submerged beneath a surge of Maleness.
Notwithstanding these obvious truths, however, during the years when
body and mind should be adapting gradually, consciously and
subconsciously, to the social environment wherein their lives are to be
passed; when the mental horizon should be expanding simultaneously with
the expanding intelligence, when the moral should be rising to the new
demands upon it, boys are imprisoned in scholastic institutions, where
they are hemmed in by routine and restrictions, in an atmosphere of
puerile conceptions, puerile traditions, puerile conventions and
associations; their chief outlet and respite the narrow rules and the
narrowing absorptions of so-called "Games," supervised by martinet
Games-masters.
And then, when we bring them to the field of life, we are surprised to
find many of them unintelligent, unadapted, unadaptable; resourceless,
inept and incompetent. Cooped during those impressionable years in a
wholly artificial environment, when confronted by the world of living
actualities, which is not ruled by similar narrow restrictions, nor
shaped upon the artificial forms and puerile misconceptions in which
their young ductile natures have been run and have set--they show
themselves wholly unfitted for life, with its varied, difficult and
complex conditions and adjustments. They have become, in point of fact,
mentally and temperamentally "provincial."
The good form which some of them acquire is derived less from
school-ethics or training than from an aristocratic strain of boys with
whom they have been associated. And being acquired, when it is not the
form of their own social order, it appears only too frequently as a
counterfeit; engendering insincerity and snobbishness, and marring
individuality.
It has seemed to me that, in both sexes, the first seven years of
life--during which native faculty and attribute are evolving at great
pace--are a phase in which the Recessive, or anabolic, mode,
conservative of the resources and vitalising of the tissues, is in the
ascendant. The true child of both sexes is normally, during these years,
a typification of the Woman-traits; receptive, plastic, gentle,
affectionate, trustful, intuitive, emotional; quickly fatigued, quickly
recuperative; more or less lovely and angelic. In this phase, native
intuitive faculty makes children sometimes phenomenal; lightning
calculators, musical prodigies, precocious poets, artists. So too, their
marvellously rapid apprehension of the complex meanings and
implications of life betokens Supra-conscious mentality.
At seven years old and thence onward to fourteen, a male, and katabolic,
phase sets in. Phenomenal faculty vanishes. Concrete development of
body, brain and energy proceeds apace. The child becomes active,
intelligent, enterprising, inquiring. The boy becomes appreciably male;
the girl more or less of a hoyden, more male, indeed, than she is
normally at any other period of her existence. Unless, that is, this
hoyden phase is rendered permanent in her by masculine training.
At fourteen, with the evolution of sex, the sex of boy and girl, with
its respective opposite modes of constitution and of function, makes for
marked development, each along its characteristic lines.
III
The French have a saying: _La femme est une malade_. Woman is not, of
course, an invalid. Nature does not fashion invalids. Woman's
organisation is normally delicate and sensitive and highly strung,
because of its special and complex sex-differentiation. She resembles
the child, in that howsoever healthful (in proportion, indeed, as she is
normal and healthfully organised) her cells of brain and body re-act
resiliently and vitally to all the agencies, physical and psychical,
about her.
This sensitive re-activity is not only a sign, it is, as well, a
_source_ of health. Because the greater delicacy and sensitiveness of
organisation which characterise women and children, resulting in their
quick re-activity to deleterious conditions, secure a permanently more
highly-vitalised condition of body than is the case with man, whose
cells are less sensitive, more tolerant of fatigue, of cold, and of
other injurious agents. Immunity against injurious factors is the
parent of degeneracy. Life being re-activity, in terms of living
processes, to the factors of environment, such immunity entails loss of
vital re-activity to _vivifying_ as much as against deteriorative
factors.
We complain that Nature, in place of making our bodies of cast iron, so
to speak, makes them, on the contrary, vulnerable at every point. The
reason is, surely, that the less we are constituted like cast iron--the
more vital and complex, intelligent and responsive, our tissues are,
accordingly--the more conducive to change and advance (because the more
sensitively re-active to subtler and psychical stimuli) they are
likewise. We cannot be, at the same time, hardy and obtuse, yet
exquisitely sensitive. Living tissue-cells are characterised, beyond all
other developments, by a range of contrasting abilities. An arm serves
as softest cushion for a child's head, or, by stiffening of its muscles,
becomes rigid as steel. An eye that sees for miles will focus to a
pin-point. But being, as we are, still in the making, our tissues
necessarily have limitations--and the defects, accordingly, of both
their sets of qualities. High sensitiveness of function is necessarily
attended by corresponding complexity and delicacy of structure. Such
structural delicacy obliges us to adapt environment to its complexities.
It is thus an incentive to progress.
It obliges us, as well, to moderate our activities, and, by thus
restricting the output of our cruder powers, our resources are husbanded
and directed into higher channels.
The purpose of the complex differentiations which handicap the
adolescent girl is obvious. The curving bones, the expanding pelvis, the
rounded contours, the inhibited muscles, the languors and recurring
disabilities, are designed to restrict activity, physical and mental.
Physicists tell us that the Conservation of Motion and the Conservation
of Energy are one and the same thing. This must be true, as well, of
_Vital_ Energy. The conservation of Vital Activity subtends the
Conservation of Vital resources. The new developments are by no means
incidental merely to the new processes; they are an integral part of The
Plan. In half-closing the doors on avenues of active output, Nature
conserves the Woman-powers for more intrinsic use. Every brain and
body-cell is raised thereby to higher levels both of constitution and of
function.
As stored _mechanical_ energy becomes transformed into the higher form
of _electrical_ energy, so the power stored in Woman's anabolic cells is
raised to higher evolutionary forms. Thus she becomes fitted to be
mother of the Child--the blossom of the Race. Her part in the child will
contain the inherence of these new higher evolutionary values, as the
father's part in it will contain the inherence of the concrete powers he
has developed. And while her body spontaneously raises all its issues in
order to fit her to be a Mother, so it develops powers and functions
adapting her to serve as soft environment, physical and attributal, for
the rearing of her child.
All this complex differentiation and evolution are designed, as well, to
adapt woman for the love-passion, and to draw and bind her mate to her.
And Nature has so cunningly interwoven the two plans and the two
developments that, for the most part, those physical traits and
emotional attributes which best qualify for motherhood most potently
attract and closely attach the woman's mate to her.
Woman is "_une malade_," because, throughout the more than thirty years
of her potential maternity, she suffers periodically those which,
biologically speaking, are _minor childbirths_; each entailing a cycle
of complex physiological processes, with more or less considerable
constitutional and nervous stress, debility and incapacitation. Nature
exacts from her this recurring toll to Life and to the Race, not only to
preserve in her, in healthful and efficient function, the power and
mechanism of actual child-bearing, but (only second in importance)
perpetually to recruit her emotional womanhood and wifehood.
When girls in course of developing the maternal function, with all its
attendant psychical implications, are strained by athletics, by
over-culture or industrial exhaustion, the vital resources are so
diverted from the evolution of this function as to cause incapacitation
in them, partial or complete, for wifehood, and for the bearing of sound
and fine offspring. Sterilisation, absolute or partial, is induced; with
dwarfed structure, blighted emotions and warped instincts. Even in women
who have developed normally, disease or atrophy of reproductive organs
may follow constitutional strain or undue effort.
Toll to Life, in genesis of potential lives, is exacted likewise from
the male. It is a reflex in him of the vital maternal function, inherent
in his Woman-side. And this perpetual Life-tax upon his energies so
reduces these as to temper his physical and nervous activities and his
bent for individuation, and thus inhibits him from squandering his whole
potential of Life-power in volitional output. Thus is preserved in him
that normal proportion between Individuation and Perpetuation which
Herbert Spencer describes as existing in inverse ratio to one another.
Thus also is preserved in him the normal mental balance between the Male
and the Female departments of his dual brain. Men muscularly or
intellectually overactive become lopsided and ineffective; restless and
wasteful of their forces, chill and sterile of temperament; having lost
that fine fructifying calm wherein creative potential is engendered for
concrete achievement; having lost also that equipoise of faculty
whereon mental and moral stability depend.
* * * * *
The Life-tax levied on the male is incomparably less, however, than that
exacted of the female.
IV
It is because of their _anabolic_ mode of tissue-cells, less wasteful
upon the material plane, that girls and women normally require less food
than boys and men do. Notwithstanding that their bodies are more highly
nourished than are those of males. Healthy young women continue to be
plump and pretty, healthful and active on bread-and-butter, fruits and
sweetmeats. While mannish women, whose physiology has deteriorated to
the _katabolic_, disruptive and forceful, male mode, possess frequently
the hungry appetites of men; not only for food but for drink. And yet
withal, they are lean and for the most part plain, and poorly nourished.
With the wane in her of the _anabolic_ mode of cellular conservation,
and the release thereby of vital resources which, sealed up in her
tissue-cells at adolescence, remain invested in organisation during her
years of possible motherhood, woman in whom sex is not highly developed
reverts more or less (as does the constitutionally-deteriorated oyster)
to the masculine type. She lapses to a _katabolic_ metabolism.
At middle-age, accordingly, provided she be still healthy, she derives a
considerable accession of energy, physical and intellectual. Now for the
first time relieved of the Life-tax upon her resources, her powers are
released from bond, and become more fully available for individuation
and personal activity.
At the same time, with this conversion of constitutional investment to
the form of current and available energy, there occurs a
proportional--sometimes a very signal--impoverishment of organisation;
and, after a phase of recrudescent emotionalism, a cooling and thinning
of passional feeling. Because such realisation of invested vital capital
is inevitably the precursor of decline. Thenceforward her cells, no
longer sustaining their high evolutionary states, generate more of
concrete energy, and endow her with increased powers of action. But
their conditional deterioration is manifest in general deterioration of
physique, of looks, and frequently of health.
Not seldom, indeed, when her constitutional reserves had been previously
depleted by over-expenditure, physical or mental, the cell-deterioration
of this epoch lapses to serious disease or disability; to rheumatism,
gout, cancer or other perverted forms.
With the constitutional and biological changes come psychical changes
too. In women in whom sex is not highly-specialised, middle-age entails,
with its quasi-masculine physical phase, quasi-masculine mental traits.
They may become strenuous and combative, sometimes difficult and
domineering. Perhaps they attach themselves to political and ethical
"anti"-movements, as arena for their new combativeness, their augmented
intellection, and increased physical activity.
In the most womanly of women also (as in men at a later epoch) there
occurs at this period a natural transposition of the parental traits of
Altruism and Chivalry to the impersonal plane; moving them to mother and
father the world in general, by way of Charity, Philanthropy, Reform.
V
Is it not waste of power and faculty, is asked, for able and cultured
women to permit their development, physical and mental, to adapt to the
simple requirements of a nursery?
Uncultured and more or less brainless women of an inferior class, it is
said, should be adequate, surely, to cope with the minds and the needs
of these immature beings.
Immature they are, in truth. But they are nevertheless strangely
complex; exquisitely sensitive. And they are men and women in the
making--or the marring. Behind the eyes of any child that looks at you
in dumb and wistful impotence to express itself, to defend itself, to
provide and to care for itself, may lie the mind, in bud, of a
Shakespeare, of a Newton, of a Shelley; of a Florence Nightingale, a
Mrs. Somerville, a Charlotte Bronte.
How the most ordinary child, indeed, of cultured parents suffers acutely
in feeling, and deteriorates in mind and character under the regime of
blundering rebuffs, scoldings and misapprehensions, he meets at every
turn in the nursery ruled by a crude, hard woman of the labouring
classes!
How, when they have grown older in years but are still only young in
understanding, all youth suffers from the shallow motherhood that was
kind, maybe, and helpful to it in its childhood, but fails it utterly in
the stress and difficulties of its teens!
True motherhood is the greatest of the Creative Arts; Mother-craft, the
most vital and complex of the Sciences. Life has never received more
than a tithe of that which Nature destined for it, owing to lack of
mother-nurture. Genius has never fruited to full bloom and potence,
because the mothers have so seldom realised the greatness of their task.
Nearly all the records of childhood that writers have given us are
annals of bewildered mental suffering and of moral torture, which have
left their evil mark in injured health or warped mentality--not seldom
in both.
The home, with all the intuitive wisdoms, the powers and sympathies and
the maternal ministry of a true mother, is indispensable to the nurture
of Individualism, and thereby to the evolution of human character and
faculty.
The true home is the temple of the soul. Souls are exquisitely
sensitive, infinitely shy. And only in the warm and fostering
atmosphere of kindred beings do they find courage to unfold in living
attribute. Every home should be a unique environment, pre-eminently
specialised and adapted to the evolution of the young and tender
nursling-individualities shaping in it. To uproot these prematurely from
their native soil and transplant them in an alien one, is to blight
nascent talent and to warp character. For the reason that it
necessitates too early individuation, with precocious development of
self-protective and other qualities of worldly expedience.
To plant out the shivering, exquisitely sensitive seedling, the human
Babe, in the chill, communal atmosphere of a Creche or other
institution, is as inhuman a social crime as it is an inhuman social
crime to defraud its mother of her highest evolutionary impulse and
function in the nurture of her little one--a responsibility she has
incurred, a privilege she has earned by right of her maternity.
In her nursery, the mind of woman opens new windows of illumination,
glimpses new vistas of thought and emotion, higher and lovelier
apprehensions of the profounder meanings of Life. In her nursery, her
eyes learn tenderness, her voice sweet modulation, her speech new purity
and fondness.
In good and happy homes where young persons, in place of being banished
to schools, grow up in the natural bracing and inspiring atmosphere of
parental influence and affection, Sex evolves new issues, in those
attractions and sympathies of its Contrasting Traits which are evoked by
the relations of mother and son, of father and daughter, of brother and
sister.
Under modern conditions, in which children and young persons renew
intermittent acquaintance merely with parents and brothers and sisters
during brief holiday visits--returning home, with every added term of
absence, more and more strangers to their kin, their personalities and
interests increasingly detached from those of the home circle--such
potent and inspiring developments of sex are vanishing.
A wide gulf, truly, separates from their fathers these modern
self-centred, self-opinionated young sportswomen and over-academised
girls. The charming filial relation, engendering new and tender
sex-amenities in the daughter's hero-worship and reliance on the manhood
of her sire, in the father's protective chivalry and recruital of his
youth in the company and interests of his young daughter, is waning
toward extinction. The vast majority of fathers feel dismally
constrained, indeed, and out of countenance in the presence of their
girls--so smart and sophisticated, so superior, critical and
self-sufficing are our latter-day school and college-maidens. For the
most part, their own daughters are the last among womenkind to whom men
turn, to reap something of the freshness and fairness of the younger
generation they have sown and laboured for.
While the up-to-date mother aspires to no higher or more beautiful place
in her boy's life and affections than that of "good chum!"