Having seen the disproportionate degree of sex-distinction in humanity
and its greater manifestation in the female than in the male, and having
seen also the unique position of the human female as an economic
dependant on the male of her species, it is not difficult to establish a
relation between these two facts. The general law acting to produce this
condition of exaggerated sex-development was briefly referred to in the
second chapter. It is as follows: the natural tendency of any function
to increase in power by use causes sex-activity to increase under the
action of sexual selection. This tendency is checked in most species by
the I force of natural selection, which diverts the energies into other
channels and developes race-activities. Where the female finds her
economic environment in the male, and her economic advantage is directly
conditioned upon the sex-relation, the force of natural selection is
added to the force of sexual selection, and both together operate to
develope sex-activity. In any animal species, free from any other
condition, such a relation would have inevitably developed sex to an
inordinate degree, as may be readily seen in the comparatively similar
cases of those insects where the female, losing economic activity and
modified entirely to sex, becomes a mere egg-sac, an organism with no
powers of self-preservation, only those of race-preservation. With these
insects the only race-problem is to maintain and reproduce the species,
and such a condition is not necessarily evil; but with a race like ours,
whose development as human creatures is but comparatively begun, it is
evil because of its check to individual and racial progress. There are
other purposes before us besides mere maintenance and reproduction.
It should be clear to any one accustomed to the working of biological
laws that all the tendencies of a living organism are progressive in
their development, and are held in check by the interaction of their
several forces. Each living form, with its dominant characteristics,
represents a balance of power, a sort of compromise. The size of earth’s
primeval monsters was limited by the tensile strength of their material.
Sea monsters can be bigger, because the medium in which they move offers
more support. Birds must be smaller for the opposite reason. The cow
requires many stomachs of a liberal size, because her food is of low
nutritive value; and she must eat large quantities to keep her machine
going. The size of arboreal animals, such as monkeys or squirrels, is
limited by the nature of their habitat: creatures that live in trees
cannot be so big as creatures that live on the ground. Every quality of
every creature is relative to its condition, and tends to increase or
decrease accordingly; and each quality tends to increase in proportion
to its use, and to decrease in proportion to its disuse. Primitive man
and his female were animals, like other animals. They were strong,
fierce, lively beasts; and she was as nimble and ferocious as he, save
for the added belligerence of the males in their sex-competition. In
this competition, he, like the other male creatures, fought savagely
with his hairy rivals; and she, like the other female creatures,
complacently viewed their struggles, and mated with the victor. At other
times she ran about in the forest, and helped herself to what there was
to eat as freely as he did.
There seems to have come a time when it occurred to the dawning
intelligence of this amiable savage that it was cheaper and easier to
fight a little female, and have it done with, than to fight a big male
every time. So he instituted the custom of enslaving the female; and
she, losing freedom, could no longer get her own food nor that of her
young. The mother ape, with her maternal function well fulfilled, flees
leaping through the forest,—plucks her fruit and nuts, keeps up with the
movement of the tribe, her young one on her back or held in one strong
arm. But the mother woman, enslaved, could not do this. Then man, the
father, found that slavery had its obligations: he must care for what he
forbade to care for itself, else it died on his hands. So he slowly and
reluctantly shouldered the duties of his new position. He began to feed
her, and not only that, but to express in his own person the thwarted
uses of maternity: he had to feed the children, too. It seems a simple
arrangement. When we have thought of it at all, we have thought of it
with admiration. The naturalist defends it on the ground of advantage to
the species through the freeing of the mother from all other cares and
confining her unreservedly to the duties of maternity. The poet and
novelist, the painter and sculptor, the priest and teacher, have all
extolled this lovely relation. It remains for the sociologist, from a
biological point of view, to note its effects on the constitution of the
human race, both in the individual and in society.
When man began to feed and defend woman, she ceased proportionately to
teed and defend herself. When he stood between her and her physical
environment, she ceased proportionately to feel the influence of that
environment and respond to it. When he became her immediate and
all-important environment, she began proportionately to respond to this
new influence and to be modified accordingly. In a free state, speed was
of as great advantage to the female as to the male, both in enabling her
to catch prey and in preventing her from being caught by enemies; but,
in her new condition, speed was a disadvantage. She was not allowed to
do the catching, and it profited her to be caught by her new master.
Free creatures, getting their own food and maintaining their own lives,
develope an active capacity for attaining their ends. Parasitic
creatures, whose living is obtained by the exertions of others, develope
powers of absorption and of tenacity,—the powers by which they profit
most. The human female was cut off from the direct action of natural
selection, that mighty force which heretofore had acted on male and
female alike with inexorable and beneficial effect, developing strength,
developing skill, developing endurance, developing courage,—in a word,
developing species. She now met the influence of natural selection
acting indirectly through the male, and developing, of course, the
faculties required to secure and obtain a hold on him. Needless to state
that these faculties were those of sex-attraction, the one power that
has made him cheerfully maintain, in what luxury he could, the being in
whom he delighted. For many, many centuries she had no other hold, no
other assurance of being fed. The young girl had a prospective value,
and was maintained for what should follow; but the old woman, in more
primitive times, had but a poor hold on life. She who could best please
her lord was the favorite slave or favorite wife, and she obtained the
best economic conditions.
With the growth of civilization, we have gradually crystallized into law
the visible necessity for feeding the helpless female; and even old
women are maintained by their male relatives with a comfortable
assurance. But to this day—save, indeed, for the increasing army of
women wage-earners, who are changing the face of the world by their
steady advance toward economic independence—the personal profit of women
bears but too close a relation to their power to win and hold the other
sex. From the odalisque with the most bracelets to the débutante with
the most bouquets, the relation still holds good,—woman’s economic
profit comes through the power of sex-attraction.
When we confront this fact boldly and plainly in the open market of
vice, we are sick with horror. When we see the same economic relation
made permanent, established by law, sanctioned and sanctified by
religion, covered with flowers and incense and all accumulated
sentiment, we think it innocent, lovely, and right. The transient trade
we think evil. The bargain for life we think good. But the biological
effect remains the same. In both cases the female gets her food from the
male by virtue of her sex-relationship to him. In both cases, perhaps
even more in marriage because of its perfect acceptance of the
situation, the female of genus homo, still living under natural law, is
inexorably modified to sex in an increasing degree.
Followed in specific detail, the action of the changed environment upon
women has been in given instances as follows: In the matter of mere
passive surroundings she has been immediately restricted in her range.
This one factor has an immense effect on man and animal alike. An
absolutely uniform environment, one shape, one size, one color, one
sound, would render life, if any life could be, one helpless, changeless
thing. As the environment increases and varies, the development of the
creature must increase and vary with it; for he acquires knowledge and
power, as the material for knowledge and the need for power appear. In
migratory species the female is free to acquire the same knowledge as
the male by the same means, the same development by the same
experiences. The human female has been restricted in range from the
earliest beginning. Even among savages, she has a much more restricted
knowledge of the land she lives in. She moves with the camp, of course,
and follows her primitive industries in its vicinity; but the war-path
and the hunt are the man’s. He has a far larger habitat. The life of the
female savage is freedom itself, however, compared with the increasing
constriction of custom closing in upon the woman, as civilization
advanced, like the iron torture chamber of romance. Its culmination is
expressed in the proverb: “A woman should leave her home but three
times,—when she is christened, when she is married, and when she is
buried.” Or this: “The woman, the cat, and the chimney should never
leave the house.” The absolutely stationary female and the wide-ranging
male are distinctly human institutions, after we leave behind us such
low forms of life as the gypsy moth, whose female seldom moves more than
a few feet from the pupa moth. She has aborted wings, and cannot fly.
She waits humbly for the winged male, lays her myriad eggs, and dies,—a
fine instance of modification to sex.
To reduce so largely the mere area of environment is a great check to
race-development; but it is not to be compared in its effects with the
reduction in voluntary activity to which the human female has been
subjected. Her restricted impression, her confinement to the four walls
of the home, have done great execution, of course, in limiting her
ideas, her information, her thought-processes, and power of judgment;
and in giving a disproportionate prominence and intensity to the few
things she knows about; but this is innocent in action compared with her
restricted expression, the denial of freedom to act. A living organism
is modified far less through the action of external circumstances upon
it and its reaction thereto, than through the effect of its own
exertions. Skin may be thickened gradually by exposure to the weather;
but it is thickened far more quickly by being rubbed against something,
as the handle of an oar or of a broom. To be surrounded by beautiful
things has much influence upon the human creature: to make beautiful
things has more. To live among beautiful surroundings and make ugly
things is more directly lowering than to live among ugly surroundings
and make beautiful things. What we do modifies us more than what is done
to us. The freedom of expression has been more restricted in women than
the freedom of impression, if that be possible. Something of the world
she lived in she has seen from her barred windows. Some air has come
through the purdah’s folds, some knowledge has filtered to her eager
ears from the talk of men. Desdemona learned somewhat of Othello. Had
she known more, she might have lived longer. But in the ever-growing
human impulse to create, the power and will to make, to do, to express
one’s new spirit in new forms,—here she has been utterly debarred. She
might work as she had worked from the beginning,—at the primitive labors
of the household; but in the inevitable expansion of even those
industries to professional levels we have striven to hold her back. To
work with her own hands, for nothing, in direct body-service to her own
family,—this has been permitted,—yes, compelled. But to be and do
anything further from this she has been forbidden. Her labor has not
only been limited in kind, but in degree. Whatever she has been allowed
to do must be done in private and alone, the first-hand industries of
savage times.
Our growth in industry has been not only in kind, but in class. The
baker is not in the same industrial grade with the house-cook, though
both make bread. To specialize any form of labor is a step up: to
organize it is another step. Specialization and organization are the
basis of human progress, the organic methods of social life. They have
been forbidden to women almost absolutely. The greatest and most
beneficent change of this century is the progress of women in these two
lines of advance. The effect of this check in industrial development,
accompanied as it was by the constant inheritance of increased racial
power, has been to intensify the sensations and emotions of women, and
to develope great activity in the lines allowed. The nervous energy that
up to present memory has impelled women to labor incessantly at
something, be it the veriest folly of fancy work, is one mark of this
effect.
In religious development the same dead-line has held back the growth of
women through all the races and ages. In dim early times she was sharer
in the mysteries and rites; but, as religion developed, her place
receded, until Paul commanded her to be silent in the churches. And she
has been silent until to-day. Even now, with all the ground gained, we
have but the beginnings—he slowly forced and disapproved beginnings—of
religious equality for the sexes. In some nations, religion is held to
be a masculine attribute exclusively, it being even questioned whether
women have souls. An early Christian council settled that important
question by vote, fortunately deciding that they had. In a church whose
main strength has always been derived from the adherence of women, it
would have been an uncomfortable reflection not to have allowed them
souls. Ancient family worship ran in the male line. It was the son who
kept the sacred grandfathers in due respect, and poured libations to
their shades. When the woman married, she changed her ancestors, and had
to worship her husband’s progenitors instead of her own. This is why the
Hindu and the Chinaman and many others of like stamp must have a son to
keep them in countenance,—a deep-seated sex-prejudice, coming to slow
extinction as women rise in economic importance.
It is painfully interesting to trace the gradual cumulative effect of
these conditions upon women: first, the action of large natural laws,
acting on her as they would act on any other animal; then the evolution
of social customs and laws (with her position as the active cause),
following the direction of mere physical forces, and adding heavily to
them; then, with increasing civilization, the unbroken accumulation of
precedent, burnt into each generation by the growing force of education,
made lovely by art, holy by religion, desirable by habit; and, steadily
acting from beneath, the unswerving pressure of economic necessity upon
which the whole structure rested. These are strong modifying conditions,
indeed.
The process would have been even more effective and far less painful but
for one important circumstance. Heredity has no Salic law. Each girl
child inherits from her father a certain increasing percentage of human
development, human power, human tendency; and each boy as well inherits
from his mother the increasing percentage of sex-development, sex-power,
sex-tendency. The action of heredity has been to equalize what every
tendency of environment and education made to differ. This has saved us
from such a female as the gypsy moth. It has held up the woman, and held
down the man. It has set iron bounds to our absurd effort to make a race
with one sex a million years behind the other. But it has added terribly
to the pain and difficulty of human life,—a difficulty and a pain that
should have taught us long since that we were living on wrong lines.
Each woman born, re-humanized by the current of race activity carried on
by her father and re-womanized by her traditional position, has had to
live over again in her own person the same process of restriction,
repression, denial; the smothering “no” which crushed down all her human
desires to create, to discover, to learn, to express, to advance. Each
woman has had, on the other hand, the same single avenue of expression
and attainment; the same one way in which alone she might do what she
could, get what she might. All other doors were shut, and this one
always open; and the whole pressure of advancing humanity was upon her.
No wonder that young Daniel in the apocryphal tale proclaimed: “The king
is strong! Wine is strong! But women are stronger!”
To the young man confronting life the world lies wide. Such powers as he
has he may use, must use. If he chooses wrong at first, he may choose
again, and yet again. Not effective or successful in one channel, he may
do better in another. The growing, varied needs of all mankind call on
him for the varied service in which he finds his growth. What he wants
to be, he may strive to be. What he wants to get, he may strive to get.
Wealth, power, social distinction, fame,—what he wants he can try for.
To the young woman confronting life there is the same world beyond,
there are the same human energies and human desires and ambition within.
But all that she may wish to have, all that she may wish to do, must
come through a single channel and a single choice. Wealth, power, social
distinction, fame,—not only these, but home and happiness, reputation,
ease and pleasure, her bread and butter,—all, must come to her through a
small gold ring. This is a heavy pressure. It has accumulated behind her
through heredity, and continued about her through environment. It has
been subtly trained into her through education, till she herself has
come to think it a right condition, and pours its influence upon her
daughter with increasing impetus. Is it any wonder that women are
over-sexed? But for the constant inheritance from the more human male,
we should have been queen bees, indeed, long before this. But the
daughter of the soldier and the sailor, of the artist, the inventor, the
great merchant, has inherited in body and brain her share of his
development in each generation, and so stayed somewhat human for all her
femininity.
All morbid conditions tend to extinction. One check has always existed
to our inordinate sex-development,—nature’s ready relief, death. Carried
to its furthest excess, the individual has died, the family has become
extinct, the nation itself has perished, like Sodom and Gomorrah. Where
one function is carried to unnatural excess, others are weakened, and
the organism perishes. We are familiar with this in individual cases,—at
least, the physician is. We can see it somewhat in the history of
nations. From younger races, nearer savagery, nearer the healthful
equality of pre-human creatures, has come each new start in history.
Persia was older than Greece, and its highly differentiated sexuality
had produced the inevitable result of enfeebling the racial qualities.
The Greek commander stripped the rich robes and jewels from his Persian
captives, and showed their unmanly feebleness to his men. “You have such
bodies as these to fight for such plunder as this,” he said. In the
country, among peasant classes, there is much less sex-distinction than
in cities, where wealth enables the women to live in absolute idleness;
and even the men manifest the same characteristics. It is from the
country and the lower classes that the fresh blood pours into the
cities, to be weakened in its turn by the influence of this unnatural
distinction until there is none left to replenish the nation.
The inevitable trend of human life is toward higher civilization; but,
while that civilization is confined to one sex, it inevitably
exaggerates sex-distinction, until the increasing evil of this condition
is stronger than all the good of the civilization attained, and the
nation falls. Civilization, be it understood, does not consist in the
acquisition of luxuries. Social development is an organic development. A
civilized State is one in which the citizens live in organic industrial
relation. The more full, free, subtle, and easy that relation; the more
perfect the differentiation of labor and exchange of product, with their
correlative institutions,—the more perfect is that civilization. To eat,
drink, sleep, and keep warm,—these are common to all animals, whether
the animal couches in a bed of leaves or one of eiderdown, sleeps in the
sun to avoid the wind or builds a furnace-heated house, lies in wait for
game or orders a dinner at a hotel. These are but individual animal
processes. Whether one lays an egg or a million eggs, whether one bears
a cub, a kitten, or a baby, whether one broods its chickens, guards its
litter, or tends a nursery full of children, these are but individual
animal processes. But to serve each other more and more widely; to live
only by such service; to develope special functions, so that we depend
for our living on society’s return for services that can be of no direct
use to ourselves,—this is civilization, our human glory and
race-distinction.
All this human progress has been accomplished by men. Women have been
left behind, outside, below, having no social relation whatever, merely
the sex-relation, whereby they lived. Let us bear in mind that all the
tender ties of family are ties of blood, of sex-relationship. A friend,
a comrade, a partner,—this is a human relative. Father, mother, son,
daughter, sister, brother, husband, wife,—these are sex-relatives. Blood
is thicker than water, we say. True. But ties of blood are not those
that ring the world with the succeeding waves of progressive religion,
art, science, commerce, education, all that makes us human. Man is the
human creature. Woman has been checked, starved, aborted in human
growth; and the swelling forces of race-development have been driven
back in each generation to work in her through sex-functions alone.
This is the way in which the sexuo-economic relation has operated in our
species, checking race-development in half of us, and stimulating
sex-development in both.