The Determination of Gender : Part 2

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

(Page 6 of 23)

In the man there is nothing but maleness. This is not to deny that he may possess the protective instinct and the tender emotion which is its correlate, even though these were undoubtedly feminine in origin. But it is to deny that any injury to, or arrested development of, the male can reveal in him characters distinctively female. He may fail to become a man and may remain a boy; or, having been a man, he may perhaps return, under certain conditions, to a more youthful state; but he will never, can never, display anything distinctive of the woman.

Not such, however, must be the woman's case. If anything should interfere with the development and dominance of the femaleness factor in her, there is not another "dose" of femaleness, so to speak, to fall back upon; but a dose of maleness. We may be right i. Therefore seeking to explain certain familiar phenomena, observed in women under various conditions - as, for instance, the growth of hair upon the face in elderly women, the assumption of a masculine voice and aspect, and so forth. Such facts are frequently to be observed after the climacteric or "change of life," which probably denotes the termination of the dominance of the femaleness factor. They are also to be observed as a consequence of operations much more commonly and irresponsibly performed a few years ago than now, which abruptly deprived the organism of the internal secretion through which, as we may surmise, the femaleness factor in the germ makes its presence effective.

If these propositions are valid, they are certainly important. Our attitude towards them will depend upon our estimates of the worth of distinctive womanhood. We may regard it as a loss to society that what might have been a woman should become only a sort of man of rather less than average efficiency. Or we may hail with delight the possibility that, after all, we may be able, by judicious education, to make men of our daughters. But, whatever our estimates, certainly it is of great interest to inquire how far and in what directions education may affect the development of what was given in the germ. We cannot yet answer this question. In a thousand matters it is all-important to know in what degree education can control nature, but until we know what the nature of the individual is we cannot decide. Professor Bateson has clearly shown that we should be able duly to estimate environment only when Mendelian analysis has gone much further, and has instructed us in detail as to the nature of the material upon which environment is to act.

For instance, there is the well-established fact that women who have undergone "higher education" show a low marriage-rate, and produce very few children. However considered, the fact is of great importance. But the right interpretation of it is not certain. There are women of a type approaching the masculine, who are evidently so by nature. Is it these women, already predestined for something other than distinctive womanhood, that offer themselves for "higher education"? In other words, is there a selective process at work, the results of which in choosing a certain type of woman we attribute to the education undergone? If we answer this question wrongly, and act upon our erroneous interpretation, we should certainly do grave injury to individuals and society.

Thus, we might roundly condemn the higher education of women in toto, and hold up the "domestic woman" as the sole type to which every woman can and must be made to conform. Or, on the other hand, we may argue that it is well to provide suitable opportunities of self-development for those women whose nature practically unfits them for the ordinary career of a woman.

I do not think that any one who has had opportunities of first-hand observation will question the presence in university and college class-rooms of girls of the anomalous type. Each generation produces a certain number of such. Probably no education will alter their nature in any radical or effective way. On every ground, personal and social, we must be right in providing for them, as for their brothers, all the opportunities they may desire. But I am convinced that their relative number is not large.

The great majority of those girls who are nowadays subjected to what we call "higher education" are of the normal type; and this is none the less true because the proportion of the anomalous is doubtless higher here than in the feminine community at large. The ordinary observation of those teachers who year by year see young girls at the beginning of their higher education will certainly confirm the statement that by far the greater number of them are of the ordinary feminine type. If this be so, the necessary inference is that education has a potent influence, and that it must be held accountable for the observed facts of later years, whether those facts please or displease us.

The human being is the most adaptable - that is to say, educable - of all living creatures. This is true of women as well as men. The response of girls to ideas, ideals, suggestion, the spirit of the group, is an unquestioned thing. Further, there are basal facts of physiology, ultimately dependent on the law of the conservation of energy, and the circumstance that you cannot eat your cake and have it, which work hand-in-hand, on their own effective plane, with the psychological influences already referred to. All physiology and psychology lead us to expect those results of "higher education" upon its subjects or victims which, in fact, we find, and which, in the main, are indeed its results and not dependent upon the exceptional natures of those subjected to it. The more general higher education becomes, and the less selection is exercised upon the candidates for it, the more evident, I believe, will it appear that woman responds in high degree to the total circumstances of her life; and that if we do not like the fruits of our labor it is we indeed that are to blame.

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