In establishing the claim of excessive sex-distinction in the human
race, much needs to be said to make clear to the general reader what is
meant by the term. To the popular mind, both the coarsely familiar and
the over-refined, “sexual” is thought to mean “sensual”; and the charge
of excessive sex-distinction seems to be a reproach. This should be at
once dismissed, as merely showing ignorance of the terms used. A man
does not object to being called “masculine,” nor a woman to being called
“feminine.” Yet whatever is masculine or feminine is sexual. To be
distinguished by femininity is to be distinguished by sex. To be
over-feminine is to be over-sexed. To manifest in excess any of the
distinctions of sex, primary or secondary, is to be over-sexed. Our
hypothetical peacock, with his too large and splendid tail, would be
over-sexed, and no offence to his moral character!
The primary sex-distinctions in our race as in others consist merely in
the essential organs and functions of reproduction. The secondary
distinctions, and this is where we are to look for our largest
excess—consist in all those differences in organ and function, in look
and action, in habit, manner, method, occupation, behavior, which
distinguish men from women. In a troop of horses, seen at a distance,
the sexes are indistinguishable. In a herd of deer the males are
distinguishable because of their antlers. The male lion is distinguished
by his mane, the male cat only by a somewhat heavier build. In certain
species of insects the male and female differ so widely in appearance
that even naturalists have supposed them to belong to separate species.
Beyond these distinctions lies that of conduct. Certain psychic
attributes are manifested by either sex. The intensity of the maternal
passion is a sex-distinction as much as the lion’s mane or the stag’s
horns. The belligerence and dominance of the male is a sex-distinction:
the modesty and timidity of the female is a sex-distinction. The
tendency to “sit” is a sex-distinction of the hen: the tendency to strut
is a sex-distinction of the cock. The tendency to fight is a
sex-distinction of males in general: the tendency to protect and provide
for, is a sex-distinction of females in general.
With the human race, whose chief activities are social, the initial
tendency to sex-distinction is carried out in many varied functions. We
have differentiated our industries, our responsibilities, our very
virtues, along sex lines. It will therefore be clear that the claim of
excessive sex-distinction in humanity, and especially in woman, does not
carry with it any specific “moral” reproach, though it does in the
larger sense prove a decided evil in its effect on human progress.
In primary distinctions our excess is not so marked as in the farther
and subtler development; yet, even here, we have plain proof of it.
Sex-energy in its primal manifestation is exhibited in the male of the
human species to a degree far greater than is necessary for the
processes of reproduction,—enough, indeed, to subvert and injure those
processes. The direct injury to reproduction from the excessive
indulgence of the male, and the indirect injury through its debilitating
effect upon the female, together with the enormous evil to society
produced by extra-marital indulgence,—these are facts quite generally
known. We have recognized them for centuries, and sought to check the
evil action by law, civil, social, moral. But we have treated it always
as a field of voluntary action, not as a condition of morbid
development. We have held it as right that man should be so, but wrong
that man should do so. Nature does not work in that way. What it is
right to be, it is right to do. What it is wrong to do, it is wrong to
be. This inordinate demand in the human male is an excessive
sex-distinction. In this, in a certain over-coarseness and hardness, a
too great belligerence and pride, a too great subservience to the power
of sex-attraction, we find the main marks of excessive sex-distinction
in men. It has been always checked and offset in them by the healthful
activities of racial life. Their energies have been called out and their
faculties developed along all the lines of human progress. In the growth
of industry, commerce, science, manufacture, government, art, religion,
the male of our species has become human, far more than male. Strong as
this passion is in him, inordinate as is his indulgence, he is a far
more normal animal than the female of his species,—far less over-sexed.
To him this field of special activity is but part of life,—an incident.
The whole world remains besides. To her it is the world. This has been
well stated in the familiar epigram of Madame de Staël,—“Love with man
is an episode, with woman a history.” It is in woman that we find most
fully expressed the excessive sex-distinction of the human
species,—physical, psychical, social. See first the physical
manifestation.
To make clear by an instance the difference between normal and abnormal
sex-distinction, look at the relative condition of a wild cow and a
“milch cow,” such as we have made. The wild cow is a female. She has
healthy calves, and milk enough for them; and that is all the femininity
she needs. Otherwise than that she is bovine rather than feminine. She
is a light, strong, swift, sinewy creature, able to run, jump, and
fight, if necessary. We, for economic uses, have artificially developed
the cow’s capacity for producing milk. She has become a walking
milk-machine, bred and tended to that express end, her value measured in
quarts. The secretion of milk is a maternal function,—a sex-function.
The cow is over-sexed. Turn her loose in natural conditions, and, if she
survive the change, she would revert in a very few generations to the
plain cow, with her energies used in the general activities of her race,
and not all running to milk.
Physically, woman belongs to a tall, vigorous, beautiful animal species,
capable of great and varied exertion. In every race and time when she
has opportunity for racial activity, she developes accordingly, and is
no less a woman for being a healthy human creature. In every race and
time where she is denied this opportunity,—and few, indeed, have been
her years of freedom,—she has developed in the lines of action to which
she was confined; and those were always lines of sex-activity. In
consequence the body of woman, speaking in the largest generalization,
manifests sex-distinction predominantly.
Woman’s femininity—and “the eternal feminine” means simply the eternal
sexual—is more apparent in proportion to her humanity than the
femininity of other animals in proportion to their caninity or felinity
or equinity. “A feminine hand” or “a feminine foot” is distinguishable
anywhere. We do not hear of “a feminine paw” or “a feminine hoof.” A
hand is an organ of prehension, a foot an organ of locomotion: they are
not secondary sexual characteristics. The comparative smallness and
feebleness of woman is a sex-distinction. We have carried it to such an
excess that women are commonly known as “the weaker sex.” There is no
such glaring difference between male and female in other advanced
species. In the long migrations of birds, in the ceaseless motion of the
grazing herds that used to swing up and down over the continent each
year, in the wild, steep journeys of the breeding salmon, nothing is
heard of the weaker sex. And among the higher carnivora, where longer
maintenance of the young brings their condition nearer ours, the hunter
dreads the attack of the female more than that of the male. The
disproportionate weakness is an excessive sex-distinction. Its injurious
effect may be broadly shown in the Oriental nations, where the female in
curtained harems is confined most exclusively to sex-functions and
denied most fully the exercise of race-functions. In such peoples the
weakness, the tendency to small bones and adipose tissue of the
over-sexed female, is transmitted to the male, with a retarding effect
on the development of the race. Conversely, in early Germanic tribes the
comparatively free and humanly developed women—tall, strong, and
brave—transmitted to their sons a greater proportion of human power and
much less of morbid sex-tendency.
The degree of feebleness and clumsiness common to women, the comparative
inability to stand, walk, run, jump, climb, and perform other
race-functions common to both sexes, is an excessive sex-distinction;
and the ensuing transmission of this relative feebleness to their
children, boys and girls alike, retards human development. Strong, free,
active women, the sturdy, field-working peasant, the burden-bearing
savage, are no less good mothers for their human strength. But our
civilized “feminine delicacy,” which appears somewhat less delicate when
recognized as an expression of sexuality in excess,—makes us no better
mothers, but worse. The relative weakness of women is a sex-distinction.
It is apparent in her to a degree that injures motherhood, that injures
wifehood, that injures the individual. The sex-usefulness and the human
usefulness of women, their general duty to their kind, are greatly
injured by this degree of distinction. In every way the over-sexed
condition of the human female reacts unfavorably upon herself, her
husband, her children, and the race.
In its psychic manifestation this intense sex-distinction is equally
apparent. The primal instinct of sex-attraction has developed under
social forces into a conscious passion of enormous power, a deep and
lifelong devotion, overwhelming in its force. This is excessive in both
sexes, but more so in women than in men,—not so commonly in its simple
physical form, but in the unreasoning intensity of emotion that refuses
all guidance, and drives those possessed by it to risk every other good
for this one end. It is not at first sight easy, and it may seem an
irreverent and thankless task, to discriminate here between what is good
in the “master passion” and what is evil, and especially to claim for
one sex more of this feeling than for the other; but such discrimination
can be made.
It is good for the individual and for the race to have developed such a
degree of passionate and permanent love as shall best promote the
happiness of individuals and the reproduction of species. It is not good
for the race or for the individual that this feeling should have become
so intense as to override all other human faculties, to make a mock of
the accumulated wisdom of the ages, the stored power of the will; to
drive the individual—against his own plain conviction—into a union sure
to result in evil, or to hold the individual helpless in such an evil
union, when made.
Such is the condition of humanity, involving most evil results to its
offspring and to its own happiness. And, while in men the immediate
dominating force of the passion may be more conspicuous, it is in women
that it holds more universal sway. For the man has other powers and
faculties in full use, whereby to break loose from the force of this;
and the woman, specially modified to sex and denied racial activity,
pours her whole life into her love, and, if injured here, she is injured
irretrievably. With him it is frequently light and transient, and, when
most intense, often most transient. With her it is a deep, all-absorbing
force, under the action of which she will renounce all that life offers,
take any risk, face any hardships, bear any pain. It is maintained in
her in the face of a lifetime of neglect and abuse. The common instance
of the police court trials—the woman cruelly abused who will not testify
against her husband—shows this. This devotion, carried to such a degree
as to lead to the mismating of individuals with its personal and social
injury, is an excessive sex-distinction.
But it is in our common social relations that the predominance of
sex-distinction in women is made most manifest. The fact that, speaking
broadly, women have, from the very beginning, been spoken of
expressively enough as “the sex,” demonstrates clearly that this is the
main impression which they have made upon observers and recorders. Here
one need attempt no farther proof than to turn the mind of the reader to
an unbroken record of facts and feelings perfectly patent to every one,
but not hitherto looked at as other than perfectly natural and right. So
utterly has the status of woman been accepted as a sexual one that it
has remained for the woman’s movement of the nineteenth century to
devote much contention to the claim that women are persons! That women
are persons as well as females,—an unheard of proposition!
In a “Handbook of Proverbs of All Nations,” a collection comprising many
thousands, these facts are to be observed: first, that the proverbs
concerning women are an insignificant minority compared to those
concerning men; second, that the proverbs concerning women almost
invariably apply to them in general,—to the sex. Those concerning men
qualify, limit, describe, specialize. It is “a lazy man,” “a violent
man,” “a man in his cups.” Qualities and actions are predicated of man
individually, and not as a sex, unless he is flatly contrasted with
woman, as in “A man of straw is worth a woman of gold,” “Men are deeds,
women are words,” or “Man, woman, and the devil are the three degrees of
comparison.” But of woman it is always and only “a woman,” meaning
simply a female, and recognizing no personal distinction: “As much pity
to see a woman weep as to see a goose go barefoot.” “He that hath an eel
by the tail and a woman by her word hath a slippery handle.” “A woman, a
spaniel, and a walnut-tree,—the more you beat ’em, the better they be.”
Occasionally a distinction is made between “a fair woman” and “a black
woman”; and Solomon’s “virtuous woman,” who commanded such a high price,
is familiar to us all. But in common thought it is simply “a woman”
always. The boast of the profligate that he knows “the sex,” so recently
expressed by a new poet,—“The things you will learn from the Yellow and
Brown, they’ll ’elp you an’ ’eap with the White”; the complaint of the
angry rejected that “all women are just alike!”—the consensus of public
opinion of all time goes to show that the characteristics common to the
sex have predominated over the characteristics distinctive of the
individual,—a marked excess in sex-distinction.
From the time our children are born, we use every means known to
accentuate sex-distinction in both boy and girl; and the reason that the
boy is not so hopelessly marked by it as the girl is that he has the
whole field of human expression open to him besides. In our steady
insistence on proclaiming sex-distinction we have grown to consider most
human attributes as masculine attributes, for the simple reason that
they were allowed to men and forbidden to women.
A clear and definite understanding of the difference between
race-attributes and sex-attributes should be established. Life consists
of action. The action of a living thing is along two main
lines,—self-preservation and race-preservation. The processes that keep
the individual alive, from the involuntary action of his internal organs
to the voluntary action of his external organs,—every act, from
breathing to hunting his food, which contributes to the maintenance of
the individual life,—these are the processes of self-preservation.
Whatever activities tend to keep the race alive, to reproduce the
individual, from the involuntary action of the internal organs to the
voluntary action of the external organs; every act from the development
of germ-cells to the taking care of children, which contributes to the
maintenance of the racial life,—these are the processes of
race-preservation. In race-preservation, male and female have
distinctive organs, distinctive functions, distinctive lines of action.
In self-preservation, male and female have the same organs, the same
functions, the same lines of action. In the human species our processes
of race-preservation have reached a certain degree of elaboration; but
our processes of self-preservation have gone farther, much farther.
All the varied activities of economic production and distribution, all
our arts and industries, crafts and trades, all our growth in science,
discovery, government, religion,—these are along the line of
self-preservation: these are, or should be, common to both sexes. To
teach, to rule, to make, to decorate, to distribute,—these are not
sex-functions: they are race-functions. Yet so inordinate is the
sex-distinction of the human race that the whole field of human progress
has been considered a masculine prerogative. What could more absolutely
prove the excessive sex-distinction of the human race? That this
difference should surge over all its natural boundaries and blazon
itself across every act of life, so that every step of the human
creature is marked “male” or “female,”—surely, this is enough to show
our over-sexed condition.
Little by little, very slowly, and with most unjust and cruel
opposition, at cost of all life holds most dear, it is being gradually
established by many martyrdoms that human work is woman’s as well as
man’s. Harriet Martineau must conceal her writing under her sewing when
callers came, because “to sew” was a feminine verb, and “to write” a
masculine one. Mary Somerville must struggle to hide her work from even
relatives, because mathematics was a “masculine” pursuit. Sex has been
made to dominate the whole human world,—all the main avenues of life
marked “male,” and the female left to be a female, and nothing else.
But while with the male the things he fondly imagined to be “masculine”
were merely human, and very good for him, with the female the few things
marked “feminine” were feminine, indeed; and her ceaseless reiterance of
one short song, however sweet, has given it a conspicuous monotony. In
garments whose main purpose is unmistakably to announce her sex; with a
tendency to ornament which marks exuberance of sex-energy, with a body
so modified to sex as to be grievously deprived of its natural
activities; with a manner and behavior wholly attuned to sex-advantage,
and frequently most disadvantageous to any human gain; with a field of
action most rigidly confined to sex-relations; with her overcharged
sensibility, her prominent modesty, her “eternal femininity,”—the female
of genus homo is undeniably over-sexed.
This excessive distinction shows itself again in a marked precocity of
development. Our little children, our very babies, show signs of it when
the young of other creatures are serenely asexual in general appearance
and habit. We eagerly note this precocity. We are proud of it. We
carefully encourage it by precept and example, taking pains to develope
the sex-instinct in little children, and think no harm. One of the first
things we force upon the child’s dawning consciousness is the fact that
he is a boy or that she is a girl, and that, therefore, each must regard
everything from a different point of view. They must be dressed
differently, not on account of their personal needs, which are exactly
similar at this period, but so that neither they, nor any one beholding
them, may for a moment forget the distinction of sex.
Our peculiar inversion of the usual habit of species, in which the male
carries ornament and the female is dark and plain, is not so much a
proof of excess indeed, as a proof of the peculiar reversal of our
position in the matter of sex-selection. With the other species the
males compete in ornament, and the females select. With us the females
compete in ornament, and the males select. If this theory of
sex-ornament is disregarded, and we prefer rather to see in masculine
decoration merely a form of exuberant sex-energy, expending itself in
non-productive excess, then, indeed, the fact that with us the females
manifest such a display of gorgeous adornment is another sign of
excessive sex-distinction. In either case the forcing upon girl-children
of an elaborate ornamentation which interferes with their physical
activity and unconscious freedom, and fosters a premature
sex-consciousness, is as clear and menacing a proof of our condition as
could be mentioned. That the girl-child should be so dressed as to
require a difference in care and behavior, resting wholly on the fact
that she is a girl,—a fact not otherwise present to her thought at that
age,—is a precocious insistence upon sex-distinction, most unwholesome
in its results. Boys and girls are expected, also, to behave differently
to each other, and to people in general,—a behavior to be briefly
described in two words. To the boy we say, “Do”; to the girl, “Don’t.”
The little boy must “take care” of the little girl, even if she is
larger than he is. “Why?” he asks. Because he is a boy. Because of sex.
Surely, if she is the stronger, she ought to take care of him,
especially as the protective instinct is purely feminine in a normal
race. It is not long before the boy learns his lesson. He is a boy,
going to be a man; and that means all. “I thank the Lord that I was not
born a woman,” runs the Hebrew prayer. She is a girl, “only a girl,”
“nothing but a girl,” and going to be a woman,—only a woman. Boys are
encouraged from the beginning to show the feelings supposed to be proper
to their sex. When our infant son bangs about, roars, and smashes
things, we say proudly that he is “a regular boy!” When our infant
daughter coquettes with visitors, or wails in maternal agony because her
brother has broken her doll, whose sawdust remains she nurses with
piteous care, we say proudly that “she is a perfect little mother
already!” What business has a little girl with the instincts of
maternity? No more than the little boy should have with the instincts of
paternity. They are sex-instincts, and should not appear till the period
of adolescence. The most normal girl is the “tom-boy,”—whose numbers
increase among us in these wiser days,—a healthy young creature, who is
human through and through, not feminine till it is time to be. The most
normal boy has calmness and gentleness as well as vigor and courage. He
is a human creature as well as a male creature, and not aggressively
masculine till it is time to be. Childhood is not the period for these
marked manifestations of sex. That we exhibit them, that we admire and
encourage them, shows our over-sexed condition.