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- Herausgeber: Books on Demand
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Feminism, the extremist-and of late years the predominant cult of the Woman's Movement, is Masculinism. It makes for such training and development in woman, of male characteristics, as shall equip her to compete with the male in every department of life; academic, athletic, professional, political, industrial. And it neither recognises nor admits in her natural aptitudes differing from those of men, and fitting her, accordingly, for different functions in these. It rejects all concessions to her womanhood; even to her mother-function. It repudiates all privileges for her. Boldly it demands a fair field only and no favour; equal rights, political and social, identical education and training, identical economic opportunities and avocations, an identical morale, personal and public. In Woman and Labour, Miss Olive Schreiner sums in a line the Feminist objective: "We take all labour for our province." And this is the text of the Feminist creed; the elimination of sex-differences and the abolition of sex-distinctions in every department of life and activity.
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Feminism and Sex-Extinction
Feminism and Sex-ExtinctionFOREWORDBOOK ICHAPTER ICHAPTER IICHAPTER IIICHAPTER IVCHAPTER VBOOK IICHAPTER ICHAPTER IICHAPTER IVCHAPTER VCHAPTER VICHAPTER VIICHAPTER VIIICHAPTER IXAPPENDIXCopyrightFeminism and Sex-Extinction
Arabella Kenealy
FOREWORD
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
IMPASSIONED FALLACIES OF FEMINISM
"The sexual love which has its origin in what is external and accidental may easily be turned to hate, a kind of madness that is nourished on discord; but that love, on the other hand, is lasting which has its source in freedom of soul and in the will to bear and bring up children."—Spinoza.
I
There is no subject save that of Religion about which so much impassioned fallacy has been spoken and written as has been spoken and written round the Woman Question.
For more than half a century—since Mill wrote his famousSubjection, indeed—it has become an increasing vogue to regard Woman as a martyr; more or less sainted, more or less crushed and effaced beneath the iron-heeled tyrannies, personal, economic, and political, of the oppressor, Man. And it has been in the spirit of this conviction and in fervid endeavours—indignant and chivalrous on the part of the one sex, and still more indignant and but little less chivalrous on the part of the other—to liberate unhappy victims from a barbarous oppression, that most of the impassioned fallacy has been spoken and written, and doughty deeds done.
At the certain cost, therefore, of being stigmatised as a reactionary (severely qualified), I propose to unmask some of these which I believe to be baseless obsessions, and to present a wholly new—and, I hope, a more veracious and inspiring version of the case between the sexes.
To begin with, I assert boldly that the so-called Subjection of Woman, very far from having been a cruel injustice merely, on the part of man, has served, on the contrary, as a blessing and an inestimable benefit not only to herself but to the Race bound up in her. A blessing often rough and painful in its methods, during epochs when all other methods were both rough and painful, attended, too, by wrongs and cruelties; yet, in the main, operating vastly to her well-being and advancement and, in hers, to those of the Race.
Looking back upon the hard and bloody routes of Evolution whereby the human Races have attained to present-day developments, we see our forbears groping blindly, fighting blindly, advancing blindly; stumbling, falling, picking up again; making new departures only hopelessly to lose the road; making new departures, now to find it and trudge on. In all its painful and laborious phases, a terrible and sordid climb. Yet, nevertheless, in its great annals of Ascent, a noble and a wondrous March of Progress.
And whether we are Religionists or Evolutionists—or are sufficiently broad-minded to be both—the history of Life is seen to have been a history of deathless effort, never ceasing, never waning; renewed with every generation; intensified by every further acquisition of new power, as, with every further recognition of new goals and problems, the ever-increasing Purpose and the ever-increasing perplexity and complexity of The Purpose revealed itself at every step. It becomes increasingly clear, moreover, that Creation, or Creative Evolution (to employ Professor Bergson's phrase), has been the resultant of a progressive aggregation of Atomic Matter about some vast immanentIdea, slowly and by infinitesimal degrees materialising in the objective. Very much as bricks are grouped about the pre-conceived plan of a house, and could not be assembled in the building of the simplest tool-hut without predetermination of the site of every brick, and of the relation of every brick to every other.
And in all those past ages of conflict, bringing Order out of Chaos, Progress out of Order, and an ever-increasing domination of blind Energy and Inorganic Matter by Mind and Purpose, the fighting male it has been who, in his conquest of the Earth as in his conquest of other fighting males, both brute and human, has borne the greater heat and burden of the day. Women have striven also—toil has been the crux of their development as of their mates. But men have striven twofold. While women toiled in the security of homes, the sword, the blunderbuss or press-gang, or the equivalent of these, according to the epoch, awaited men and still await them at most street-corners of the arduous male career.
Women have suffered more,psychically; because this way lay their nature and their human lot. Men have suffered more,materially; because here lay theirs. And since advancement comes by suffering, women are reaping to-day the harvest of past travail of their sex, in the higher psychical development which now characterises that sex. During centuries when men were vastly too hard-pressed by the struggle for barest existence to have been aware that they possessed souls, women were privileged to be aware of theirs—by the affliction thereof.
The immediate purpose of this fencing of the women behind the stronger frames, the stronger wills, and stronger brains of fighting males was the Racial one, of course. While men battled with environment and with alien aggressors for their lives and for their food, as for those of the family, the sheltered women were alike the loom and cradle of the Race. As well, they made havens, or homes, for the fighters to return to for sleep and refreshment. They plied a simple, primitive agriculture, practised a primitive healing art, and otherwise evolved The Humanities. But since mortal power is limited, power expended in one direction is power withdrawn from some other. Power spent in battle is power lost to progress. The woman who, with the instinct for home and as shelter for her babes, laid the foundations of Architecture in a hut of mud, was enabled to do this solely by virtue of masculine protection.
It is in peace only that Progress arises, in leisure that The Arts evolve. And woman, walled in by the lives of the males, found leisure of body and mind to pluck flowers for the adorning of her hut, to shape platters of clay, and, later, even for embellishment of these with crude designs. Thus she was the first artist.
The fighting male was—by necessity—destructive. He invented a club. The female was—by privilege—constructive. She invented the needle (a fish-bone, doubtless). And while the male transmitted to offspring his virile fighting and destructive qualities, woman tempered and humanised these by incorporating with them her milder traits and artistries of peace. Lacking the male aggressive and protective faculties, however, increasing in skill and resource with his ever further Adaptation to (and of) environment, woman's gentler and humanising aptitudes would have had neither opportunity for evolution, nor scope for exercise and further sway.
II
I have been reading an account, by a naturalist, of some phases in the life-history of crabs. And it is interesting to find even among creatures so low in the Life-scale (although Darwin regarded these as the most intelligent ofcrustaceæ) that same instinct of protection of the female which is seen in the higher orders of creation.
A crab, being encased in an unyielding shell, is able to increase its growth only by "casting" its shell and developing one of larger size over its increased bulk. During the interval between casting an old shell and acquiring a new one, the crab in its soft, pulpy condition is readily injured, or falls prey to its natural enemies. To protect itself as well as may be, it shelters in rocky crevices or in other available hiding-places. This shell-casting occurs in both sexes, of course. But the circumstances under which the change is made differ widely in the sexes. For while the male-crab has no protector during his defenceless, shell-less state, his shell is cast a month or more earlier than occurs in the female; after which he feeds up, in order to be in superior fighting trim for her protection during her shell-casting phase. Fishermen describe him as then spreading himself over her as a hen covers her chicks, and in her defence desperately attacking all comers. The result of such protection of the female is that, although males are larger and fiercer, "hen-crabs" are numerous, while males are scarce.
The like is true of nearly every species. The males protect the females. Even the gorilla, savage and most terrible of beasts, lies at night on guard beneath the tree in which his mate and offspring sleep. If need arise, he fights to the death in their defence.
With regard to the chivalrous devotion of male-birds, Olive Schreiner thus comments inWoman and Labour(an example of that I have ventured to describe as the "impassioned fallacy" hurtling round the Woman Question): "Along the line of bird-life and among certain of its species, sex has attained its highest æsthetic, and one might almost say intellectual, development on earth ... represents the realisation of the highest sexual ideal which haunts humanity."
(This however, less, I fear, to accredit the male-sex with chivalry than to discredit the human male by ornithological comparison!)
* * * * *
One does not profess that such protective rôle of males—beast and bird and crab—is the outcome of sentiment. It is instinctive, subconscious. Nature's purpose being to preserve and to perpetuate species, she achieves this by safeguarding the female. The province of the male in reproduction is but slight and brief. It exacts so little from him as to interfere not at all with those other masculine activities which are the function of his sex.
Whereas, as Professor Lester Ward says, "Woman [and the female of all species]isthe Race." Out of her blood and bone and vital powers she evolves and fashions it, nurtures and ministers to it.
III
For the preservation of species, two rôles are essential: the Male rôle of Combat, demanding strength and boldness, resource and fighting-quality, in order to protect and provide for the female and offspring; and the Female rôle of Devotion and Self-surrender, in order to nurture offspring ante-natally, and, after birth, to nurture and to tend its helplessness.
Now all but biologists, perhaps, take it as matter-of-course that Love had its origin in Sex.
Seeing love between the sexes as the strongest and most dominant of the civilised passions, it is natural to infer that it was born of the instinctive attraction between male and female, and that this instinctive attraction, with the growth and expansion of faculty, mental and temperamental, has evolved to the high and tender issues to be found in latter-day romantic passion; theme of poets, novelists, artists; richest and most exquisite of life's emotions; inspiration and motive of the finest human achievements. A passion which, for a space at least, transfigures the natures and ennobles the lives of all but the crass and the sordid.
Nevertheless—Love did not arise out of sex. The sex-relation in primal men and women held no element of affection; no sympathy, tenderness, self-sacrifice, or other attribute of Love. On the part of the female, it was compulsory surrender and the habit of surrender to superior strength, mitigated, doubtless, by a subconscious instinct to secure offspring. In the male, it was impulse as tyrannous and selfish as was the instinct to kill. Like the instinct to kill, a factor in it made for fitness for survival. There was in it, accordingly, an element of instinctive selection. But the selection made for survival-fitness merely in the mate. It owed nothing to sentimental appeal exercised by one female, and lacking in another. The instinct to mate was implanted by Nature for the continuation of species. If its observance contained an element of gratification, it held no more of reciprocity than did the gratification of that stronger lust, to kill, include a consideration of the feelings of the prey, or than greed of any other form of possession extends a grace of reciprocal benefit to the thing acquired.
Modern savages have no conception of sexual love. There are no love-songs, no courtship, no affection in their matings. The males marry mainly in order to secure wives to work for them. And they select strong women because these are best fitted for work. Or they select women who have some or another small possession. Biological instinct is a factor, doubtless, but it is not a factor of sentiment.
In his fine book,Natural Law in the Spiritual World, Professor Drummond says:
"Probably we have all taken for granted that husbands and wives have always loved one another. Evolution takes nothing for granted ... in the lower reaches of Human Nature, husband and wife do not love one another ... for the vast mass of mankind during the long ages which preceded historic times, conjugal love was probably all but unknown....
"The idea that the existence of sex accounts for the existence of love is untrue. Marriage among early races has nothing to do with love. Among savage peoples, the phenomenon everywhere confronts us of wedded life without a grain of love. Love then is no necessary ingredient of the sex-relation; it is not an outgrowth of passion. Love is love and has always been love, and has never been anything lower."
Even to-day, despite the evolution of the higher faculties, despite long centuries of inherited habit and tradition, and despite the circumstance that in all the nobler types of men and women the sex-instinct is spiritualised by affection and understanding—Even in this late day of civilisation, the male sex-instinct may be seen still in all its native tyranny and selfishness; seeking gratification in sensuality and cruelty, with callous disregard alike of the welfare as of the suffering of its victim. In the violation of women and children that occurs both in peace and in war, the instinct manifests as an impulse of aggression, and the sex-function as one of brutality or ruthless lust.
IV
Respecting the origin of Mind and Emotion, Charles Darwin said:
"In what manner the mental powers were first developed in the lowest organisms, is as hopeless an inquiry as how life itself first originated."
And Huxley:
"I know nothing, and never hope to know anything of the steps by which the passage from molecular movement to states of consciousness is effected. The two things are on two utterly different platforms, the physical facts go along by themselves and the mental facts go along by themselves."
While Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace (the biologist who was working out the theory of Natural Selection simultaneously with Darwin, both unaware that the other was working in the same direction) attributes to a Creative act of God, all the moral and intellectual qualities which have been super-added in man to those lesser and simpler ones he possesses in common with the higher animals. Wallace describes this as a "Divine Influx," and regards it as being wholly distinct and apart from the slow and gradual processes of Natural Selection.
But yet, in point of fact, what was it that inspired and energised the earlier processes, if not this same Divine Influx? The simpler processes must, from their earliest rudimentary beginnings, have been leading up to the later and more complex. And the later and more complex were, surely, continuous with the simpler—since Nature abhors miracles, and works by slow progressive biological sequences.
Nothing shows as more impersonal than a crystal; cold, hard, senseless, motionless. And yet in crystals is the element of Life, even the power of reproduction, showing factors of sex already operative in them. While living bodies, charged with warmth, mobility, sentience, intelligence, have Inorganic Matter for their basis of construction. And that Inorganic elements are very far from being the impersonal things they seem, but are linked by subtle correspondences to living Mind and vital powers, is shown by their effects on living processes and consciousness. Given as medicines, digestion (which is a species of rapid evolution from lower to higher forms of energy) develops such vital inherences within them as prove their apparent impersonality to contain a principle continuous not only with living processes, but with the highest mentality.
Professor Leduc observes in his illuminating book, "The Mechanism of Life," "the ordinary physical forces have, in fact, a power of organisation infinitely greater than has been hitherto supposed by the boldest imagination."
Coralline structures and beautiful shells, fungi, leaves, and plants bearing coloured, flowerlike blooms spring into growth when a formless fragment of calcium salt is dropped into a chemical solution. And these "Osmotic growths," artificially produced, possess far greater complexity of structure and of function than do the simpler living organisms of Nature.
The evidences of a Vast Stupendous Plan, which every further scientific discovery still further emphasises, are slowly forcing from our men of Science the confession that behind the marvellous phenomena their findings reveal, and which they are powerless to explain, must lie a Cause, occult and irresistible, an Impulse, all-pervading, incomprehensible.
Bergson describes anélan vital—a living impetus—determining such phenomena.
In his Presidential address to the British Association at Dublin, in 1908, Professor J. S. Haldane summed up as follows the position of Physiological Science: "The point now reached is that the conceptions of Physics and Chemistry are insufficient to enable us to understand physiological phenomena."
Weismann says: "Behind the co-operating forces of Nature, we must admit a Cause ... inconceivable in its nature, of which we can only say one thing with certainty, that it must be theological."
Drummond says: "Evolution is Advolution,—better, it is Revelation—the phenomenal expression of the Divine, the progressive realisation of the Ideal, the Ascent of Love."
If, then, we admit Life to be the product of a Divine Influx, whereby Inorganic Matter has been, by way of evolutionary processes, increasingly empowered to fructify in living form and faculty, Human Attributes are seen to be the flower of Spiritual seed, which, sown in Life, has germinated; has struck roots of biological function into living flesh and put forth leaves in living traits; has developed in physiological processes and blossomed in powers of Mind and of body. And as the stronger and deeper the grip of its roots in the earth, the taller and nobler the oak towers heavenward, so it must be with human characteristics. The deeper and more firmly the seedling faculties strike roots in living function, the fuller and more potent springs the impulse toward that evolutionary perfection which is the goal of Human Being.
If, however, living processes are the resultant of a Divine Influx, they are Spiritual processes. Life is then a manifestation in Matter, of Spirit. All the developments of Life are Spiritual phenomena, therefore. The imperfection and evil found in living creatures are not attributes of Life. They are crudities of rudimentary organisation, or are failures in or aberrations from the normal development of Life.
V
In the Evolution of Faculty, living traits are seen to have been all the while attaining to higher power by the differentiation and development of special organs to subserve their fuller function, their finer conscious apprehension, and their more complex manifestation on the material plane.
The brain has been specialised thus to serve as the organ of Consciousness; the eye, of Vision; the ear, of Hearing; the hand, of Touch and of manipulation. The lowest organisms possess no such specialised organs of sense or of consciousness. Nor are they equipped with special reproductive organs. They reproduce by cleavage; by budding a small portion of themselves, which, when separated, grows to a mature organism.
With other differentiations and specialisations of Function and Faculty, there has developed—for the all-important racial purpose of creating ever higher and more potent living species—the highly-complex human reproductive system, which, by its close and subtle nervous alliance with the brain, has become the medium and the instrument of a new and irresistible emotion. So that it serves not only for the perpetuation of a complex species, but, moreover, for the attraction, by natural affinity, of the mates best suited to one another.
And in course of evolutionary progress, the emotion of Love has been all the while more and more so leavening and inspiring sex-attraction with its purer and more tender attributes, that human passion has come to combine—in those of higher nature—the flame and energy of physical attraction with the tenderness and devotion of altruistic affection. With the result that human parenthood, thus quickened and spiritualised, has become ever further empowered to evolve more highly intelligised, more beautiful and more efficient types of offspring.
That Passion, pure and simple, has evolved out of the Male sex-instinct is certain. Even in its chivalrous development of romantic passion, are found, in transfigured form, that flame and urgence for possession which manifest crudely and cruelly in the primal male-instinct. Without this virile ardour, indeed, the sex-relation is but a poor and tepid, or a cold and sensual thing.
Yet Passion is not Love.
That meekness and forbearance, humility and self-surrender have been reared in the Female sex-instinct of submission to passion (primarily in aversion and fear more often than in acquiescence) is equally certain. And without these chastening factors to temper, soften and anneal, the sex-relation is a fierce and tyrannous concern. But no more than passion, is submission Love. Neither in passion nor in submission, pure and simple, is there joy of surrender or welding communion.
Nevertheless, since every human faculty must have its roots in living function, and every living function must possess some physical organ in which its processes occur, from what human function sprang the Love that is selfless, altruistic and pitiful; soul and inspiration of the most sacred emotions—self-sacrifice, charity, mercy, devotion, tenderness? In what nursery of Human Consciousness was this fair and gentle blossom sown; to spring, to develop, and to make for gracious growth?
Since, although it has come to lend its purity and sweetness to the Sex-passion, it neither sprang from nor has been reared in sex-instinct, is it a product of Parental Affection? Is it an evolution of the self-negation and the tenderness of parents for their children?
VI
Throughout Nature, the parental instinct is seen as a unique development, detached from and high above all other developments. Demanding, as it does, the complete surrender and self-denying labours of one individual in the interests of another, it differs from and traverses all other dictates. It impels a creature whose every instinct it had been—whose religion of biological survival it had been, indeed—to be wholly self-centred in its every aim and action, all at once to make another creature the focus of its interests and efforts. Where for a scratch, for a glance, the fierce female would have fallen tooth and nail upon another, now she surrenders meekly to the pangs of bringing offspring into life—and straightway licks and suckles the frail being that has riven her. Where she would furiously have driven off, or would have killed, another creature that approached her food, now she gives herself as food for this. Where lesser Fitness for survival on another's part had been signal for making such her prey, now Unfitness in the extremest degree claims her devotion and care.
Superfluous to cite cases of maternal altruism. The mildest and most timid among creatures becomes fierce and courageous in defence of her young. Style it "merely instinct," if you will. It is none the less heroic on the part of every individual that obeys it, and does not obey it blindly and mechanically merely, but employs all her poor wit and resource to suit her heroism to the special circumstance.
Without care and attention from the moment of its birth, the life of an infant would be reckoned in hours. The higher the organism, the more and for the longer period its infancy exacts unceasing devotion and nurture.
Fish and moth and other species of low order are cast off in the egg. Chicks scramble out of the shell.
The higher their grade in the scale of organisation and intelligence, the more helpless and incapable young creatures are to feed and to fend for themselves. Kittens are born blind and helpless, but after a few days they see and crawl about. The elephant-mother suckles and safeguards her baby-elephant for two whole years.
Now, were there no purpose in all this—Were it not that such devotion to offspring serves as impulse and spur to the evolution and development of faculty in parents, Nature, in planning the complex human species, would, surely, have endowed the human infant and child with fuller powers of self-preservation.
Were there other functions and aptitudes the exercise whereof would better stimulate and foster human progress, it is inconceivable that children would be, and would be for so long, the helpless, feckless, dependent mortals that they are.
For ten long lunar months, the human babe is part of its mother; homed in the nest of her body, warmed by her warmth, fed by her blood. She breathes for it, digests for it, assimilates for it, exercises for it. For ten further lunar months, it is dependent upon her for the food by which it lives. For nearly a year, save for an inept power of creeping, with but small sense of direction, it requires to be moved and carried everywhere. For years it must be washed, dressed, combed, laid down to sleep at night, got up in the morning, taken for rides or for walks, played with, bidden, chidden; comforted, warmed, cooled; defended, cherished, instructed—in a hundred ways to be gently and progressively adapted to life, by way of a more or less highly-specialised environment. Even when no longer helpless, it must be provided for in the matters of housing, food, clothing, education. It must be instructed in a means of livelihood, and started on its young career.
Among the poorer classes the child depends upon its hard-worked parents for a period varying between twelve and sixteen years. In the professional classes, the young son and daughter are not fully qualified for independent existence before the ages of twenty-three or twenty-five. In ill-health, in brain defect, and in other incapacities, parents must provide for their offspring for life.
And seeing how the demands of the young, and the response and exactions of the parents multiply and amplify proportionally with the higher evolution of both, we are forced to believe that the small survival-value of the child, owing to its native unadaptedness to environment, is part of The Plan, and that it subserves some high and complex purpose in human development.
VII
An essential obligation of Parenthood is, that, in order to fulfil this duly, the parents require to undergo a wholly new and intrinsic adjustment of faculty. Having arrived already at a complex adaptation to a complex civilised environment, in physique and character, in mentality and habit, now, by a revolutionary reversal of their human progress, they must re-adapt to the simplest of all creatures and conditions—a helpless, puling infant in a cradle.
Where they had had a whole world, perhaps, of intellectual interests and social pursuits to engage them, now they forgather beside a cot and—according as they are human or are not—lose themselves, brain and heart and soul, in the puling, impotent thing. They make themselves eyes and ears, arms and legs for it; carriage, chair and bed. They gaze, entranced, upon the marvel of the opening and shutting of its eyes. It yawns; they tremble lest it dislocate a jaw. It sneezes; now they shudder lest it may have taken cold. It gurgles, and they are transported to a seventh heaven.
Never has either been equally fluttered at their recognition by an exalted personage as both exult when flattered by the flicker of an eyelash that it distinguishes its father from its mother; or either from its nurse. Both perhaps are self-contained and philosophic beings, yet its cry distracts them; scatters their composure to the winds. The inept thing cannot even tell them what it wants. Its cry for food is much the same as is its cry when it requires to be laid down, or lifted up. When its milk is not sweet enough, its inarticulate fury is expressed in notes identical—so far as they can judge—with those of its impotent wrath when a pin-point pricks it.
But whatsoever the cause, to the winds the parental composure is scattered, as hither and thither they scurry, distraught, seeking a reason and a remedy. And this, of course, had been their tyrant's purpose. He had meant to strike panic in his parents' hearts. He was vexed or empty, or was otherwise uneasy. And behold the penalties of those who suffer him to be vexed or empty, or otherwise uneasy!
And whether they are rough, hard-working persons who have neither time nor taste for fuss and nonsense; whether they are the Archbishop of Canterbury and Mrs. Archbishop, Sir Isaac and Lady Newton, or the Emperor and Empress of Japan, it is all the same to Baby. No other uses have they in his absurd judgment than to obey his slightest gurgle.
And the wonder of the business is that they too—provided they be normal, wholesome-minded, natural-hearted persons—are of similar opinion. Even a Professor of Archæology must feel a twinge of some emotion when his first baby cuts its first tooth. King Lion himself suffers it with patience when his cub scratches his royal countenance, or gets its milk-teeth into his prize-bone.
The whole face of the earth is transformed by the Baby, indeed. And how much it is transformed for the better! It is not too much to say that it is humanised, redeemed. The most grudging of curmudgeons murmurs only a little to surrender his place at the fire to The Baby. The thirsty thief forbears to drink his infant's milk.
In his great story,The Luck of Roaring Camp, Bret Harte has shown, and has shown as probable, the uplifting and regenerating influence that "The Luck"—its mother a sinner, its father, Heaven alone knew who!—exercised upon a rough community of vicious men.
"It wrastled wi' my finger," says one in an awed whisper. To cover sentiment he adds, "the durn'd little cuss!" But carefully he segregates the member sanctified by the tiny, satin touch, from the other fingers of his wicked hand.
CHAPTER II
INCREASING DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MALE AND FEMALE SEX-CHARACTERISTICS AND FUNCTIONS ARE THE MAIN FEATURE OF HUMAN ADVANCE
"The most beautiful witness to the Evolution of Man is the Mind of a little child.... It was ages before Darwin or Lamarck or Lucretius, that Maternity, bending over the hollowed cradle in the forest for a first smile of recognition from her babe, expressed the earliest trust in the doctrine of development. Every mother since then is an unconscious Evolutionist, and every little child a living witness to Ascent."—Professor Drummond.
I
Tracing the attribute of Love to its source in the parental function, it becomes clear that this function cannot be dismissed thus in a phrase.
There are two parents. And the parts played by these, respectively, not only differ widely in their nature, but they are signally disproportionate in their share of the labours involved. For while the male bears the brunt of the struggle with environment, for his own and for survival of his mate and offspring, upon the female falls the biological stress of pregnancy and lactation, and the material cares of upbringing.
The reproductive function of the male is but slight and cursory. With the female lies the tax of havening the embryo before birth, of nurturing it with her blood and substance, of suffering the drain it makes upon her vital energy, the burden of its weight; with, finally, the anguish and the dangers of delivery. And having come through all this, the subconscious and involuntary sacrifice is replaced by further—but now voluntary sacrifices. She not only continues to feed it with her living substance, but she employs brain and wit and bodily effort in tending, safeguarding and rearing it.
Meanwhile the sire—among the lower creatures, at all events—detaches himself with lordly indifference from any portion in these later, as he went free of the earlier obligations. He shares his prey with her and with their young. He defends them from the natural enemies of all. Sometimes he condescends to play for minutes with his cubs. But excepting among birds, the male parent takes little or no part in the upbringing of his family.
As with Love, so with Fatherhood, we take it as matter-of-course that this sprang and has evolved to present developments directly out of natural instinct. But as Love did not evolve out of the sex-instinct, neither did father-love evolve from a paternal instinct inherent in the lower animals and in primal man.
Of this, Professor Drummond says:
"The world was now beginning to fill with Mothers, but there were no Fathers, ... while Nature has succeeded in moulding a human Mother and a human child, he still wanders in the forest, a savage and unblessed soul.
"This time for him is not lost. In his own way he also is at school, and learning lessons which will one day be equally needed by humanity. The acquisitions of the manly life are as necessary to human character as the virtues which gather their sweetness by the cradle; and these robuster elements—strength, courage, manliness, endurance, self-reliance—could only have been secured away from domestic cares.... The Evolution of a Father is not so beautiful a process as the Evolution of a Mother, but it was almost as formidable a problem to attack.... If Maternity was at a feeble level in the lower reaches of Nature, Paternity was non-existent.... When we leave the Birds and pass on to the Mammals, the Fathers are nearly all backsliders. Many are not only indifferent to their young, but hostile; and among the Carnivora the Mothers have frequently to hide their little ones in case the father eats them."
In place of saying, therefore, that Love sprang in, and has developed from the exercise of the parental function, we must say that Love—in all its higher aspects—sprang and has developed in thematernalfunction.
But since every attribute, in order to be conscious and realised, is not only rooted but is reared in living function—out of what living function did Mother-love evolve? In the exercise of what vital processes has it been fostered and furthered?
In so far as these involve sacrifice of self in the interests of the child, the maternal ante-natal processes are processes of self-surrender. But these, when once incurred, are subconscious and involuntary. The prospective mother has no choice but to submit to physiological exactions.
And only a few women—those in whom maternal love is deep beyond the average—feel affection for their infants before birth.
Since love must have an object upon which to exercise its faculties and lavish its devotion, it is not, therefore, until the babe is in the mother's arms that the Love-attribute begins to function. And then the primal fount of all conscious and voluntary human selflessness and sacrifice springs afresh in the individual when, in yearning toward the helpless being in her arms, she wells with tenderness and gives herself to be its life.
In the altruistic tender yearning of the mother to her babe, whereat her blood transforms itself to milk, Human Love first sprang and functioned consciously.
This is my Body which is given for you.... This is my Blood ... which is shed for you.
Says Goethe, "There is no outward sign of courtesy that does not rest on a deep moral foundation." He might have added "and on a great biological function." Every act of voluntary sacrifice, every impulse of compassion, mercy, tenderness, devotion, has had its inspiration and its source in this which is discredited by some as being a merely physical, and is despised, accordingly, as being an inferior process; this mystical transmutation of the mother's blood to milk, and the self-forgetting yearning wherein she yields herself as food for offspring. By the evolution, upon ever higher planes of consciousness, of this primarily instinctive sacrifice, not only Motherhood but Fatherhood too, and the Love-passion between the sexes have been fructified and purified, and uplifted down the ages. Other acts of devotion arise out of maternal ministry. But this is the intrinsic source of all.
Travelling up through all the rudimentary phases of development, simultaneously and side by side with the male fierce methods for the Survival ofFitness, there was evolving in the female, subconsciously and secretly, this sacramental impulse which was to inaugurate a new era—an era wherein charity and ruth were to be born as response to the claims ofUnfitness.
The first woman who, of her free-will, gave her breast to her babe was the Mother of all the Humanities. She it was who prepared the way for the coming of Christ. By her, Love entered first into human consciousness.
And by countless generations of such willing tender sacrifice upon the part of mothers, human love has climbed out of the darkness of blind subconscious instinct into the Light of a great transfiguration.
It is weighty evidence of the evolutionary impulse inherent in the function of Lactation, that the development of this maternal trait engenders species so far higher in organisation and morale than those of creatures unequipped to suckle offspring, as to set the Mammalia in a class by themselves in the van of progressive advance. The higher organisation and morale of such result not only from the self-surrendering instinct in the mothers of species, but doubtless also from the superior nutrition promoted in the developing tissues of the young of species, by the highly-individualised food elements which are secreted by the maternal living cells.
The vital significance of this new potence in blood to transform itself to milk for sustenance of offspring is emphasised by the fact that the Mammalia are warm-blooded creatures. While that this new quickening of Life by the altruistic parental instinct originates in the female shows her as medium of that Divine Influx inspiring Creative Evolution, and evolving faculty by way of living function.
II
The question now arises: If Love and the higher affections had their origin in the maternal function, how happens it that man, in whom this capacity is absent, and who is devoid, moreover, of an inherent paternal instinct, has come, notwithstanding, to possess these higher affections?
One may answer off-hand, with the lightness of the tyro, that these have been transmitted to him by maternal inheritance.
But complex biological problems are not thus easily explained. Nature works by processes, not by implications. And the physical functions and the mental attributes of the sexes are so dissimilar, and have, with evolution, so diverged by ever further accentuation, that we must seek for definite biological processes by way of which the male has become endowed with, and whereby his primal characteristics have been transformed by the evolution in him of the maternal instinct—under guise of the wholly new and alien trait of Fatherhood.
A study of Evolution shows the differentiation and intensification of Sex-characteristics to have been the main feature in Human advance, and to have been progressively achieved by incalculable centuries of increasing differentiation and intensification of two opposite orders of impulse and faculty.
In savages and in all the less civilised races, the personal and temperamental differences between the sexes are but slight, and last for no longer than a few years of life. As with other faculties, Sex-differentiations become ever further intensified and more complexly defined as development rises in the scale. Man becomes more man. Woman, more woman. Most notable during the period over which the human organisation sustains its maximum of condition, these Sex-characteristics take longer to arrive at their perfection, and are longer and more fully sustained in the higher races and organisms than is the case with the lower. Then, with that degeneration of tissue which sets in with on-coming age, the old man becomes womanish, the old woman mannish.
It cannot be doubted that human perfection reaches its climax in the accentuation of the differences between the Sex-characteristics, physical and mental, of the one sex from those of the other. The best types of men differ far more from the best types of women than inferior men and women differ from one another. In body and in attribute, the sexes are complementary and supplementary. And their dissimilarities are the measure of their complementary and supplementary values.
Their attraction to one another, their interest and happiness in one anothers' company, are proportional to the degree in which members of one sex supply for members of the other, sentiment and qualities lacking in their own. Mannish women and womanish men are alike incapable of experiencing and inspiring the love-passion, which charms and transfigures life for true man and true woman. These unfortunate, imperfect neuter-persons, because of the deficiency in them of normal sex attributes and impulse, are shut out from the richest and sweetest, most sacred emotions of Humanity—precisely as persons of defective brain are debarred from the richer and fuller appreciations and joys of consciousness.
And yet, apart and distinct from, although at the root of this abnormal neuterdom, wherein the traits of one sex are so antagonised by those of the other that the finest powers of both are nullified—normally, all men possess latent in them the qualities of Woman; all women have latent in them the qualities of Man. Otherwise, this third Neuter-gender—mannish women and womanish men—could not have come into being.
In crises of life and under other abnormal conditions, the dormant characteristics of the one sex are seen to emerge in members of the other, and to become dominant. A woman, in the face of danger, develops the strength, the courage and the material resource of a man. A man, when put to it, reveals the gentleness, patience and psychical resource of a woman. And in neither is this substitution of alien traits imitative, merely. That it is vital and intrinsic is shown by the fact that not only mental characteristics, but the body itself becomes transformed. If the circumstances—exposure to danger, to hard and rough physical labours or to mental exactions which are the normal of the male—continue for long, woman's physique, equally with her attributes, becomes increasingly virile of mode.
A kindred metamorphosis occurs in men. When called upon to exercise for any length of time the functions of a woman, beside a sick bed, for example—or, to state it otherwise, when the male in him no longer receives the stimulus of the natural male rôle and activities—man's virile qualities decline. He becomes emasculate.
So too in disease. With the vital powers at low ebb, man's virility ebbs low. He grows soft and sensitive, uncontrolled and emotional, loses energy and initiative; lapses in outlook and temperament from the masculine normal. In abnormal states of physical development, men are puerile or womanish.
Women, as result of like abnormal undevelopment, or after operative removal of reproductive organs (propter quos est mulier) become mannish of type. In extreme cases the figure changes to a strong and sturdy maleness, the voice drops to gruffness; manners and speech become terse and abrupt, the jaw squares; even moustache or beard may develop. Such women lose, perhaps, every womanly characteristic; refinement of form, mental delicacy and sensitiveness, emotion, subtlety. They lapse to the biological grade, not of cultured, but of rough working men. In lesser degrees of sex-extinction, such as are seen in many of our modern girls, de-sexed by masculine training, the subjects are boyish merely; lean, active, restless, hipless, breastless, lacking all those fair, delicate artistries of face and form, as likewise the complex sensibility and emotionalism which are the higher characteristics of their sex.
III
These and other singularities of the phenomenon indicate that man has, so to speak, a woman concealed in him; woman has a man submerged in her. The case suggests the little Noah and his wife of the toy weatherglass. Under some conditions the man in woman emerges temporarily. Under some conditions the woman in man reveals herself. But the emergence in the one sex of the characteristics of the other, when appreciable and permanent, is abnormal and unpleasing, and is obviously degenerative.
Man is at his best when the woman in him is dominated by his natural virile traits. Woman is at her best when the man in her is sheathed within her native womanliness. This way, each is a highly evolved and a finely-specialised creation.
Nevertheless, such possession, in latency, of the qualities of the other, not only enhances for members of both sexes the potence of their own, inspiring and enriching these, but it engenders more perfect sympathy and understanding between them. The woman in man endues him with intuitive apprehension of the Woman-nature; of its needs and modes, its disabilities, its sufferings and aspirations. The man in woman informs her of the intrinsic values of his sterner calibre, and thus lends her patience with his impatiences, moves her tenderness and care for him in his rougher, more arduous lot, wins her admiration of his enterprises and ambitions. Moreover, the man in her strengthens and intelligises her mental fibre, stiffens and renders more stable and effective her more pliant will and softer, more delicate aptitudes.
While she, in her turn, endows him with her intrinsic mentalities.
Masculine intellection, pure and simple, is initiative, vigorous, enterprising; analytical, logical, critical; its outlook rational and concrete, its disposition just and honest. Capable in the degree of its virility, of strenuous and sustained endeavour, of keen concentration and close application; taking nothing for granted, but questioning and demanding proof of all things, it is an admirable executive agent of Mind.Per se, however, it is rational and deductive, judicial and judicious, rather than inspirational and creative. The blending with it of the Woman-faculty in him quickens his male brain by contributing the emotional element; endues it with intuitive sensibility, fructifies it with female creativeness.
Thus it blossoms in Imagination—a new talent, which his natural intellectual energy and executive ability enable him to raise to highest issues in Inductive Science and the creative Arts.
Sex, with its phenomena of the characteristics of both sexes blended but, nevertheless, distinctive in the totally dissimilar constitution of members of both, presents an enigma which all the thinkers of all the ages have left unsolved.
What is its significance—what its explanation? How has it been possible—without miracle, but by way of biological sequences of form and process, of function and faculty—for the divergent characteristics, physical and mental, of the two sexes to have developed in both, not only without either order of characteristics (normally) neutralising those of the other, but, on the contrary, with both orders ever further intensifying their differences in the sex to which they belong?
By hereditary transmission. True! But by what precise means? Because Nature achieves her results always by the continuous operation of unerring Law and intensifying processes, not by eccentricities or deviations. When she seems to us to skip at random, it means that we have missed some intermediate footprints linking her progressive sequences in a long unbroken train.
This problem of human duality, physical and psychical, has baffled not biologists only, but philosophers, religionists and seers. It fills both life and literature with puzzles, paradoxes, incongruities. It has been the source of perpetual misapprehension, misconception, maladministration, personal and ethical.
It lies at the root of the whole Woman question. It has supplied the motive—and has made the mischief of the Feminist propaganda and practice.
Because, in view of the masculine qualities latent in women, allied with the circumstance that masculine powers are those most profitable and effective on the plane alike of physics and of economics, it has seemed an inevitable conclusion that these dormant male potentialities werepowers lying idle; virgin soil which, tilled and cultivated, would yield fruitful harvest. And this for the benefit not of woman solely, but of Humanity at large. Strangely enough, the converse proposition has not presented itself. A pity! For it might have brought enlightenment. Because it presents itself outright in the form of a patent absurdity.
Suppose a Man's Movement which should have had for aim the cult in males of their potential woman-qualities! Not for an instant could the project have found footing as being rational, its ends desirable, or as improving upon Nature. Everywhere is pity or contempt for the effeminate man. He is regarded as a poor creature, neither one thing nor the other; as little the peer of true man as he is notably an unworthy counterfeit of woman.
