The Purpose of Womanhood : Part 1

Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
by C. W. Saleeby, M.D.

(Page 3 of 23)

In due course we should have to discuss the little that is yet known and to discuss the much that is asserted by both sides, for this or that end, regarding the differences between men and women. By this we mean, of course, the natural as distinguished from the nurtural differences - to use the antithetic terms so usefully adapted by Sir Francis Galton from Shakespeare. Our task, we should soon discover, is not an easy one: because it is rarely easy to disentangle the effects of nature from those of nurture, all the phenomena, physical and psychical, of all living creatures being not the sum but the product of these two factors. The sharp allotment of this or that feature to nature or to nurture alone is therefore always wholly wrong: and the nice estimation of the relative importance of the natural as compared with the nurtural factors must necessarily be difficult, especially for the case of mankind, where critical observation, on a large scale, and with due control, of the effects of environment upon natural potentialities is still lacking.

But here, at least, we may unhesitatingly declare and insist upon, and should hereafter invariably argue from, the one indisputable and all-important distinction between man and woman. We must not commit the error of regarding this distinction as qualitative so much as quantitative: by which is meant that it really is neither more nor less than a difference in the proportions of two kinds of vital expenditure. Nor must we commit the still graver error of asserting, without qualification, that such and such, and that only, is the ideal of womanhood, and that all women who do not conform to this type are morbid, or, at least, abnormal. It takes all sorts to make a world, we must remember. Further, the more we learn, especially thanks to the modern experimental study of heredity, regarding the constitution of the individual of either gender, the more we perceive how immensely complex and how infinitely variable that constitution is. no more, the evidence regarding both the higher animals and the higher plants inclines us to the view, not unsupported by the belief of ages, that woman is even more complex in constitution than man, and therefore no less liable to vary within wide limits. On what one may term organic analysis, comparable to the chemist's analysis of a compound, woman may be found to be more complex, composed of even more numerous and more various elementary atoms, so to say, than man.

And if these new observations upon the nature of femaleness were not enough to warn the writer who should rashly propose, after the fashion of the unwise, who on every hand lay down the law on this matter, to state once and for all exactly what, and what only, every woman should be, we find that another long-held belief as to the relative variety of men and women has lately been found baseless. It was long held, and is still generally believed - in consequence of that universal confusion between the effects of nature and of nurture to which we have already referred - that women are less variable than men, that they vary within much narrower limits, and that the bias towards the typical, or mean, or average, is markedly greater in the case of women than of men. A vast amount of idle evidence is quoted in favor of a proposition which seems to have some a priori plausibility. It is said - of course, without any allusion to nurture, education, environment, opportunity - that such extreme variations as we call genius are much commoner amongst men than women: and then that the male gender also furnishes an undue proportion of the insane - as if there were no unequal incidence of alcohol and syphilis, the great factors of insanity, upon the two genders.

Nevertheless, observant members of either gender will either contradict one another on this point according to their particular opportunities, or will, on further inquiry, agree that women vary surely no less generally than men, at any rate within considerable limits, whatever may be the facts of colossal genius. Indeed, we begin to perceive that differences in external appearance, which no one supposes to be less general among women than among men, merely reflect internal differences; and that, as our faces differ, so do ourselves, every individual of either gender being, in fact, not merely a peculiar variety, but the solitary example of that variety - in short, unique. The analysis of the individual now being made by experimental biology lends abundant support to this view of the higher forms of life - the more abundant, the higher the form. So vast, as yet quite incalculably vast, is the number of factors of the individual, and such are the laws of their transmission in the germ-cells, that the mere mathematical chances of a second identical throw, so to speak, resulting in a second individual like any other, are practically infinitely small.

The greater physiological complexity of woman, as compared with man, lends especial force to the argument in her case. The remarkable phenomena of "identical twins," who alone of human beings are substantially identical, lend great support to this proposition of the uniqueness of every individual: for we find that this unexampled identity depends upon the fact that the single cell from which every individual is developed, having divided into two, was at that stage actually separated into two independent cells. Therefore producing two complete individuals of absolutely identical germinal constitution. In no other case can this be asserted; an. Therefore this unique identity confirms the doctrine that otherwise all individuals are indeed unique.

It is necessary to state this point clearly in the forefront of our argument, both lest the reader should suppose that some foolish ideal of feminine uniformity is to be argued for, and also in the interests of the argument as it proceeds, lest we should be ourselves tempted to forget the inevitable necessity - and, as will appear, the eminent desirability - of feminine, no less than of masculine, variety.

Nevertheless, there remains the fact that, in the variety which is normally included within the female gender, there is yet a certain character, or combination of characters, upon which, indeed, distinctive femaleness depends. It may in due course be our business to discuss the subordinate and relatively trivial differences between the genders, whether native or acquired; but we should encounter nothing of any moment compared with the distinction now to be insisted upon.

One may well suggest that insistence is necessary, for never, it may be supposed, in the history of civilization was there so widespread or so effective a tendency to declare that, in point of fact, there are no differences between men and women except that, as Plato declared, woman is in all respects simply a weaker and inferior kind of man. Great writer though Plato was, what he did not know of biology was eminently worth knowing, and his teaching regarding womanhood and the conditions of motherhood in the ideal city is more fantastically and ludicrously absurd than anything that can be quoted, I verily believe, from any writer of equal eminence. If, indeed, the teaching of Plato were correct, there would be no purpose in this book. If a girl is practically a boy, we are right in bringing up our girls to be boys. If a woman is only a weaker and inferior kind of man, those women - themselves, as a rule, the nearest approach to any evidence for this view - who deny the weakness and inferiority and insist upon the identity, are justified. Their error and that of their supporters is twofold.

In the first place, they err because, being themselves, as we should afterwards have reason to see, of an aberrant type, they judge women and womanhood by themselves, and especially by their abnormal psychological tendencies - notably the tendency to look upon motherhood much as the lower type of man looks upon fatherhood. It requires closer and more intimate study of this type than we can spare space for - more, even, than the state of our knowledge yet permits - in order to demonstrate how absurd is the claim of women. Therefore peculiarly constituted to speak for their gender as a whole.

But, secondly, those women and men who assert the doctrine of the identity of the genders are led to err, not because it can really be hidden from the most casual observer that there is a profound distinction between the genders, apart from the case of the defeminized woman - but because, by a surprising fallacy, they confuse the doctrine of gender-equality with that of gender-identity; or, rather, they believe that only by demonstrating the doctrine that the genders are substantially identical, can they make good their plea that the genders should be regarded as equal. The fallacy is evident, and would not need to detain us but for the fact that, as has been said, the whole tendency of the time is towards accepting it - the recent biological proof of the fundamental and absolute difference between the genders being unknown as yet to the laity. Yet surely, even were the facts less salient, or even were they other than they are, it is a pitiable failure of logic to suppose, as is daily supposed, that in order to prove woman man's equal one must prove her to be really identical in all essentials, given, of course, equal conditions. Controversialists on both sides, and even some of the first rank, are content to accept this absurd position.

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co., New York.
Copyright 1911 by Mitchell Kennerley.