preserves precious recollections of the matriarchal family; he tells
us that when it existed man, even if he were a hundred years old,
lived with his prudent mother,—he was fed in her house like a great
child. (Works and Days, V. 129-130.) It was not the woman who then had
the "child's brain", but the man; everything seems in fact to prove
that her intelligence was the first to develop. This intellectual
superiority caused her to be deified before man in the primitive
religions of Egypt, the Indies, Asia and Greece, and caused the first
inventions of the arts and trades, with the exception of metal working,
to be attributed to goddesses and not to gods. The Muses, originally
three in number, were in Greece, even in preference to Apollo, the
goddesses of poetry, music and the dance. Isis, "mother of corn ears
and lady of bread," and Demeter, lawgiver, had taught the Egyptians and
Greeks the tillage of barley and wheat and made them renounce their
anthropophagic repasts. The woman appeared to the pre-patriarchal man,
like the Germans whom Tacitus knew, as having within herself something
holy and providential, _aliquid sanctum et providum_ (Germania VIII).
Her prudence and foresight gave her this divine character. Must we
conclude that this intellectual superiority, which manifested itself
when the economic environment is rudimentary, is a natural phenomenon?
But, in any case, it may be asserted that the vitality of woman is
superior to that of man. The life insurance companies of the United
States, England and Holland, which do not base their calculation upon
scientific fairy tales of the intellectuals but upon mortality tables,
pay woman an annuity below that which they give man, because her
probabilities of death are less. Here for example is the annuity paid
for a capital of $1,000 by American and Dutch companies:[36]
New York. Holland.
Age. Men. Women. Men. Women.
50 years $ 76.47 $ 69.57 $ 76.80 $ 73.60
60 years 97.24 88.03 98.50 93.50
70 years 134.31 122.48 142.00 136.70
80 years 183.95 168.00 222.70 211.70
It may be objected that man, leading a more active life, is more
subject to accidents, diseases, and other causes of death, and that
consequently the prolonged life of woman does not prove the higher
vitality of her organism, but the advantages of a life less subject to
accident.
The answer to this objection is found in the statistics of the various
nations. There is in no country a perfect equilibrium between the
number of women and that of men; for 1,000 men there are in Belgium
1,005 women, in France 1,014, in England 1,062, in Scotland 1,071 and
in Norway 1,091. Nevertheless in these countries with the feminine
preponderance there is an excess of masculine births: of the whole
of Western Europe for every 1000 girls there are born from 1,040 to
1,060 boys. If, in spite of this excess of masculine births, more
girls survive, it is because the greater mortality of the boys shows
the balance in favor of the girls; and this higher mortality cannot
be explained by the life of man being more subject to accident, since
it is observed at an early age, notably during the first two years.
All the diseases of childhood, with the exception of diphtheria and
whooping cough, are to a perceptible extent more fatal among boys than
among girls; from zero to five years the male sex is particularly
frail; at all ages, except between ten and fifteen years, the male
mortality is in excess of the female.
The superior vitality of the female sex is also noticeable in
the greater ease with which it builds up its organism. M. Iribe,
superintendent of the sanitarium of Hendaye, to which are sent Parisian
children from three to fourteen years of age, who are afflicted with
anaemia, incipient tuberculosis, scrofula and rickets, reports that at
the time of their dismissal, at the end of six months, the progress in
weight, girth and chest development is incomparably higher in the girls
than in the boys, the increase in weight is double and often more.
The same statement has been made by other superintendents of
sanitariums. (Bulletin Medical, No. 81, 1903.)
Woman undeniably possesses a greater vitality than man. M. Gustav
Loisel has made inquiry "as to whether this difference existed in
embryonic life, and what may be its cause?" He has communicated the
results of his inquiries to the Biological Society of Paris, which
published them in its Bulletin of November 6, 1903.
M. Loisel availed himself of 792 weights and measurements made upon 72
foetuses at the Maternity Hospital of Paris by C. E. Legou;[37] from
the following weights of the foetuses at three, four, five and six
months he obtains the following figures:
Males. Females. Differences.
Grammes. Grammes.
Total weight 1908.18 1708.11 200.07 in favor of males
Kidneys 16.87 17.19 2.67 in favor of males
Superrenal glands 5.15 6.43 0.32 in favor of females
Liver 88.35 96.31 1.28 in favor of females
Spleen 2.59 2.38 7.90 in favor of females
Thymus 3.89 3.97 0.21 in favor of males
Heart 10.97 12.60 0.08 in favor of females
Lungs 47.29 44.62 1.63 in favor of females
Brain 236.94 235.17 1.17 in favor of males
"These figures thus show us," says M. Loisel, "a preponderance already
existing in favor of the females as regards the kidneys, the superrenal
glands, the liver, the thymus and the heart; this predominance is the
more noticeable since the total weight of the body is larger in the
male than in the female."
If now we take the relation between the total weight and the weight of
the organs which are heaviest in the male, we find that the proportion
is still in favor of the female:
PROPORTION OF TOTAL WEIGHT.
Males. Females.
Spleen 1 to 736 1 to 718
Lungs 1 to 40 1 to 38
Brain 1 to 8 1 to 7
The organs here examined, brain included, are thus absolutely or
relatively heavier in the female foetus than in the male foetus.
M. Loisel has also examined into the proportion of the weights of
the different organs to the total weight according to the age of the
foetus. He has prepared a table, from which I take only the figures
concerning the brain:
Proportion of
AGE TOTAL WEIGHT weight of brain
to total weight.
Males Females Males Females
Grammes Grammes
3 Months 58.33 65.96 1/6.5 1/7
4 Months 167.25 182.58 1/7.3 1/6.6
5 Months 336.33 295.00 1/7.6 1/7.5
6 Months 732.58 636.00 1/8.3 1/7.3
The weight of the male foetus, which is below that of the female
foetus, at three months, when the sex has just been determined, grows
more rapidly and the proportion between the weight is always to the
advantage of the females from the fourth month on.
"To sum up," says M. Loisel, "all the organs are heavier in the female
foetus than in the male foetus up to about the fourth month. The
predominance then passes over to the male, but only for the lungs
and the organs for sex-union, thus the cardiac muscle always remains
heavier in the female. The organs which are of real service to the
individual during the embryonic life always remain more developed in
the female sex.
If now we consider that the differences in favor of the females are
especially in the liver, the heart, the superrenal glands and the
kidneys, we shall come to the conclusion that the greater vitality of
the female organisms corresponds to their being better nourished and
better purified."[38]
III.
The superior organization possessed by woman at birth, assuring her
throughout her life a much greater vitality, is probably demanded
by the part she plays in the production of the species, a part
altogether more prolonged and exhausting than that of the man who,
when fertilization is accomplished, has no more to do, while then
the travail of woman begins, to continue during long months, through
pregnancy and after birth. The women of savage tribes suckle their
children for two years and more. It sometimes happens that the male
pays dear for his inutility; after union, the bees kill the males,
and the male spider must hastily take himself off that he may not be
devoured by the larger and stronger female. Among the Sakawas, at
the annual feast of Mylitta Anaitis, they sacrificed at Babylon the
handsome slave who had just united with the priestess who incarnated
the Assyrian goddess. This bloody religious ceremonial must have been a
reproduction of an Amazonian custom.
The life of savagery and barbarism permits woman to develop her
superiority from birth; each sex there has its special function; it
is the division of labor in embryo. The man, whose muscular system is
more developed, "fights, hunts, fishes and sits down," according to the
Australian native, he regards all the rest as under the jurisdiction
of woman, whose function puts brain activity into play at an earlier
epoch. She has charge of the communal house, which often shelters a
clan of more than one hundred individuals; she prepares clothing from
skins and other raw materials; she charges herself with the cultivation
of the garden, the rearing of domestic animals and the manufacture
of household utensils; she preserves, economizes, cooks, distributes
the provisions, vegetable and animal, which have been gathered during
the course of the year; and like the Valkyries of the Scandinavians
and the Keres of the pre-Homeric Greeks, she accompanies the warrior
on the field battle, aids in the fray, raises him up if he is wounded
and cares for him; her assistance is so appreciated that, according to
Tacitus, the barbarians who under the leadership of Civilis revolted
against Vespasian, were seized with pity for the Roman soldiers because
their wives did not accompany them when they marched to combat.
Plato likewise who, like the chosen ones initiated in the Eleusinian
Mysteries, was more informed regarding ancient customs than is
supposed, makes the women to be present in the battles of the warriors
of his Republic.
These multiple and diverse functions, which obliged woman to reflect,
to calculate, to think of the morrow and to look ahead at long range,
must necessarily have developed her intellectual faculties; thus the
craniologists say that only a slight difference exists between the
cranial capacity of the two sexes in the negroes, the Australians,
and the red skins, while they find that it goes on increasing among
civilized people. Woman is for the careless and improvident savage, a
providence; she is the prudent and prescient being who presides over
his destinies from birth to death. Man, making his religions with
the events and the intellectual acquisitions of his daily life, was
thus obliged to begin by deifying woman. The pre-Homeric Greeks and
Romans had placed their destinies under the control of goddesses,
the Fates—Moirai, Parcae—whose name signifies in the Latin language
"sparing," "economic," and in the Greek the part which falls to each
one in the distribution of food or of booty.
If we relieve the rich and poetical Greek mythology of the symbolical,
allegorical and mystical lucubrations with which the philosophers
and the poets of the classical epoch and the Alexandrine period have
overloaded and complicated it, and which the German mythologists,
servilely copied by those of France and England, have carried on to
their own more perfect confusion, it becomes an inestimable storehouse
of prehistoric customs which preserves the memory of the manners
which travelers and anthropologists now observe living again among
the savages and barbarous nations of Africa and the New World. The
mythological legend furnishes us with information of the relative value
of feminine and masculine intelligence among the Greeks, before they
had entered upon the patriarchal period.
Jupiter, the "father of the gods", as Homer, Hesiod and Aeschylos
call him, after having driven the feminine divinities from Olympus,
enthroned there the patriarchate, which for some generations had
been established upon earth; the religious heaven always reflects
terrestrial manners as the moon reflects the light of the sun. But
Jupiter, who like every barbarian, knew how to use his fists (Iliad
XV. 228), who boasted that he was the strongest of the gods, and who
to dominate the others kept next his throne two servants, Force and
Violence, always ready to obey his orders, was inadequately prepared by
his intellectual qualities to replace woman in the government of the
Olympian family; in order to supply the capacities which were lacking
to him, Hesiod tells us that he married Metis, "the wisest among
mortals and gods." The savage and the barbarian, that he may take into
himself the courage of a fallen enemy, devours his throbbing heart;
Jupiter carried off Metis to assimilate her cunning, her prudence
and her wisdom, for her name in the Greek language has these diverse
meanings; these qualities were considered as belonging to woman.
But the process of assimilation took some time, if we may judge from
the rascally farce played upon him by Prometheus. The latter killed
and butchered an enormous ox, in one pile he placed the flesh which
he covered with the skin upon which he deposited the entrails; in
another pile he put the bare bones which he adroitly concealed under
heaps of fat. "You have divided the parts very badly," said the father
of gods and men. "Most worthy Jupiter, greatest of living gods,
take the part that your wisdom counsels you to choose," replied the
astute Prometheus. The ruler of the heavens, listening only to his
gluttony, laid both hands upon the heap of fat amid the laughter of
the Olympians; his wrath was terrible when he saw the bare bones.
(Theogony 435 _et seq._) Such a farce would hardly have been played in
the Olympian heaven had it not been that on the earth similar tests had
been required to prove to the Father that his intellectual faculties
did not justify him in taking the place of the Mother in the leadership
of the family and the management of its property.
The higher position in the family and society, which man conquered
by brute force, while it compelled him to a mental activity to which
he was little accustomed, at the same time put at his disposal
opportunities for reflection and development which constantly
increased. Woman, "subdued," as the Greek expression has it, shut up in
the narrow circle of the family, the leadership of which had been taken
from her, and having little or no contact with the outside world, saw
on the contrary a great reduction of the means of development which
she had enjoyed, and to complete her subjection she was forbidden the
intellectual culture which was given to man. If in spite of these
fetters and these disadvantages, the disastrous effects of which cannot
be exaggerated, the brain of woman continued to evolve, it was because
woman's intelligence profited through the progress realized by the
masculine brain; for one sex transmits to the other the qualities which
it has acquired; thus pullets of certain varieties inherit the spurs
which are highly developed among the cocks, while in other varieties
they transmit to the males their exaggerated crests. "It is fortunate,"
says Darwin upon this point, "that the equal transmission of the
characteristics of both sexes has been a general rule in the whole
series of mammals, otherwise, it is probable that man would have become
as superior to woman in intellectual power as the peacock is to the
female in ornamental plumage." (Descent of Man—Sexual Selection, VIII
and XIX.)
But defects as well as valuable qualities are transmitted from one sex
to the other: if woman has profited by the brain-growth of man, he
has in his turn been retarded in his development by the sluggishness
in the development of woman's brain, produced by the reduction to the
smallest minimum of intellectual activity to which he has condemned
her. The breeders who seek the choicest results are as careful to
have irreproachable females as males; amateur cockfighters attach as
much importance to the selection of the pullets as to the cocks, they
produce only from those which are armed with spurs and which have the
fighting spirit. It may be said that humanity, since it emerged from
communism of the clan to live under the system of private property, has
been developed by the efforts of one sex alone and that its evolution
has been retarded through the obstacles interposed by the other sex.
Man by systematically depriving woman of the means of development,
material and intellectual, has made of her a force retarding human
progress.
In fact if we study and compare the different periods of savagery
and barbarism, we cannot but observe the continuous and remarkable
progress in human mind, because women and men, exercising freely their
physical and mental faculties, contribute equally to the evolution of
the species; this has been retarded ever since humanity entered into
the period of civilization and private property, because then woman,
constrained and confined in her development, cannot contribute to
it in so effective a way. The senile stagnation in which China has
vegetated for more than a thousand years can only be attributed to
the degradation of woman, which has gone to the point of the cruel
mutilation of her feet that she may be imprisoned the more closely
in the woman's quarters. Europe also suffers from the degradation of
woman, since in spite of the extraordinary material progress of these
last two thousand years and the increasing and no less extraordinary
accumulation of human knowledge, it cannot be maintained that the
brain of the civilized modern exceeds in power and capacity that of
the Greeks of the classic epoch, which extends from the seventh to
the fourth century before the Christian era. It is certain that a
Victor Hugo, a Zola, or any university graduate or doctor has stored
in his brain an abundance of positive and diversified conceptions not
possessed by Aeschylus, Anaxagoras, Protagoras and Aristotle, but that
does not prove that his imagination and his intelligence, or that of
his contemporaries is more rich, more varied and more vast than that of
the generations of Ionia and Attica, who were the artificers of that
incomparable budding and blossoming of science, philosophy, literature
and art at which history marvels and who reveled in that subtle and
paradoxical play of sophistical philosophy, the like of which has not
again been seen. The sophists—Photagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Plato,
etc., stated, discussed and solved the problems of the spiritualistic
philosophy and many others besides: yet the Hellenes of Asia Minor and
of Greece had emerged from barbarism only a few centuries before. Many
reasons may be cited to explain this arrest in human development, but
the principal one is the subjection of woman.
IV.
Capitalist production, which takes charge of most of the labors to
which woman devoted herself in the gentile house, has levied into its
army of wage-workers in factory, shop, office and schoolroom, the
wives and daughters of the working class and of the small bourgeoisie,
in order to procure cheap labor. Its pressing need of intellectual
capacities has set aside the venerable and venerated axiom of masculine
ethics: "to read, write and count ought to be all of a woman's
knowledge;" it has required that girls like boys be instructed in the
rudiments of the sciences. The first step once taken, they could not
be forbidden to enter the universities. They proved that the feminine
brain, which the intellectuals had declared a "child's brain," was as
capable as the masculine brain of receiving all scientific instruction.
The abstract sciences (mathematics, geometry, mechanics, etc.), the
first whose study had been accessible to woman, were also the first in
which they could give the measure of their intellectual capacities;
they are now attacking the experimental sciences (physiology, physics,
chemistry, applied mechanics, etc.), in America and Europe there arises
a throng of women who are marching on a level with men in spite of the
inferiority of the conditions of development in which they have lived
since their first infancy.
As Capitalism has not snatched woman from the domestic hearth and
launched her into social production to emancipate her, but to exploit
her more ferociously than man, so it has been careful not to overthrow
the economic, legal, political and moral barriers which had been raised
to seclude her in the marital dwelling. Woman, exploited by capital,
endures the miseries of the free laborer and bears in addition her
chains of the past. Her economic misery is aggravated; instead of being
supported by her father or husband, to whose rule she still submits,
she is obliged to earn her living; and under the pretext that she has
fewer necessities than man, her labor is paid less; and when her
daily toil in the shop, the office or school is ended, her labor in
the household begins. Motherhood, the sacred, the highest of social
functions, becomes in capitalistic society a cause of horrible misery,
economic and physiologic. The social and economic condition of woman is
a danger for the reproduction of the species.
But this crushing and pitiful condition announces the end of her
servitude, which begins with the establishment of private property and
which can end only with its abolition. Civilized humanity, oppressed
by the mechanical mode of production, turns its face toward a society,
based on common property, in which woman, delivered from the economic,
legal and moral chains which bind her, may develop freely her physical
and intellectual faculties, as in the time of the communism of the
savages.
The savages, to forbid primitive promiscuity and successfully restrain
the circle of sexual relations, found no other means than to separate
the sexes; there are reasons for believing that the women took the
initiative in this separation, which the specialization of their
functions consolidated and emphasized. This was manifested socially by
religious ceremonials and secret languages peculiar to each set and
even by struggles;[39] and after having taken the character of violent
antagonism, it ended in the brutal subjection of woman, which still
survives although it is progressively attenuated in proportion as the
competition of the two sexes becomes more general and intense upon
the economic field. But the modern antagonism will not end with the
victory of one sex over the other, for it is one of the phenomena of
the struggle of labor against capital, which will find its solution in
the emancipation of the working class in which women as well as men are
incorporated.
The technique of production which tends to suppress the specialization
of trades and functions and to replace muscular effort by attention
and intellectual skill and which, the more it is perfected, mingles
and confounds man and woman the more in social labor, will prevent the
return of the conditions which in savage and barbarous nations had
maintained the separation of the sexes. Common property will put an end
to the economic antagonism of specialization.
But if it is possible to catch a glimpse of the end of female servitude
and of the antagonism of the sexes and to conceive for the human
species an era of incomparable bodily and mental progress, brought
about by women and men of a high development in muscle and brain, it is
impossible to foresee the sexual relations of free and equal women and
men who will not be united nor separated by sordid material interests
and by the gross ethics engendered by such interests. But if we may
judge by the present and the past, men, in whom the genetic passion
is more violent and more continuous than in women—the same phenomenon
is observed in the males and females of the whole animal series—will
be obliged to exhibit their physical and intellectual qualities to
win their sweethearts. Sexual selection, which, as Darwin has shown,
fulfilled an important role in the development of the animal species
and which, with rare exceptions, has ceased to play this part in the
Indo-European races for about three thousand years, will again become
one of the most active factors in the perfecting of the human race.
Motherhood and love will permit women to regain the higher position
which she occupied in primitive societies, the memory of which has been
preserved by the legends and myths of the ancient religions.
FOOTNOTES: