Mendelism and Womanhood : Part 2

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

(Page 7 of 23)

But he would be the first to admit that, as the ordinary Socialist has yet to learn, the nature of the society is ultimately determined by the nature of the individuals composing it. It follows that the bee-society can be completely, or, at all events substantially, imitated only by remodeling human nature on the lines of the individual bee. This is very far from impossible; there is a plethora of human drones already, and we see the emergence of the sterile female worker. But is such a change - or any change at all of that kind - to be desired?

The Terms of Specialization. - It surely cannot be denied that there may be a grave antagonism between the interests of the society and those of the individual. It is a question of the terms of specialization or differentiation. In the study of the individual organism and its history we discern specialization of the cell as a capital fact. Organic evolution has largely depended upon what Milne-Edwards called the "physiological division of labor." In so far as organic evolution has been progressive, it has entirely coincided with this process of cell-differentiation. That is the clear lesson which the student of progress learns from the study of living Nature. Let him hold hard by this truth, and by it let him judge that other specialization which human society presents.

For this primary and physiological division of labor has its analogue in a much later thing, the division of labor in human society, upon which, indeed, the possibility of what we call human society depends. And it is plain that the time has come when we must determine the price that may rightly be paid for this specialization. Assuredly it is not to be had for nothing. Dr. Minot considers that death, as a biological fact, is the price paid for cell-differentiation. Now surely the death of individuality is the price paid for such specialization as that of the workman who spends his life supervising the machine which effects a single process in the making of a pin, and has never even seen any other but that stage in the process of making that one among all the "number of things" of which the world is full. Here, as in a thousand other cases, it has cost a man to make an expert.

How far we are entitled to go we should determine only when we know what it is that we want to attain.

If we desire an efficient, durable, numerous society, there are probably no limits whatever that we need observe in the process of specialization. Pins are cheaper for the sacrifice of the individual in their making. In general, the professional must do better than the amateur; the lover of chamber music knows that a Joachim or Brussels Quartet is not to be found everywhere. Specialization we must have for progress, or even for the maintenance of what the past has achieved for us; but we should pay the right price only by remembering the principle that all progress in the world of life has depended on cell-differentiation. If we prejudice that we are prejudicing progress.

Now nothing can be more evident than that, in some of our specializations of the individual for the sake of society, we are opposing that specialization within the individual which, it has been laid down, we must never sacrifice. And so we reach the basal principle to which the preceding argument has been guiding us. It is that the specialization of the individual for the sake of society may rightly proceed to any point short of reversing or aborting the process of differentiation within himself. Every individual is an end in himself; there are no other ends for society; and that society is the best which best provides for the most complete development and self-expression of the individuals composing it.

But how, then, is the division of labor necessary for society to be effected, the reader may ask? The answer is that the human species, like all others, displays what biologists call variation - men and women naturally differ within limits so wide that, when we consider the case of genius, we must call them incalculable, illimitable. The difference of our faces or our voices is a mere symbol of differences no less universal but vastly more important. It is these differences, in reality, that are the cause of the development of human society and of that division of labor upon which it depends. In providing for the best development of all these various individuals we at the same time provide for the division of labor that we need; nor can we in any other fashion provide so well. Therefore we should attain a society which, if less certainly stable than that of the bees, is what that is not - progressive, and not merely static; and a society which is worth while, justified by the lives and minds of the individuals composing it.

We are not, then, to make a factitious differentiation of set purpose in the interests of society and to the detriment of individuals. We are not to take a being in whom Nature has differentiated a thousand parts, and, in effect, reduce him, in the interests of others, to one or two constituents and powers. Therefore nullifying the evolutionary course. But we should frame a society such as the past never witnessed, and we should achieve a rate of progress equally without parallel, by consistently regarding society as existing for the individual, and not the individual for society, and b. Therefore realizing to the full his characteristic powers for himself and for society.

In so far as all this is true it is true of woman. It has long been asserted that woman is less variable than man; but the certainty of that statement has lately lost its edge. It is probably untrue. There is no real reason to suppose that woman is less complex or less variable than man. She has the same title as he has to those conditions in which her particular characters, whatever they be, should find their most complete and fruitful development. There is no more a single ideal type of woman than there is a single ideal type of man. It takes all sorts even to make a sex. It has been in the past, and always must be, a piece of gross presumption on man's part to say to woman, "Therefore should thou be, and no other." Whom Nature has made different, man has no business to make or even to desire similar. The world wants all the powers of all the individuals of either gender. On the other hand, no good can come of the attempt to distort the development of those powers or to seek conformity to any type.

Much of the evil of the past has arisen from the limitation of woman to practically one profession. Even should it be incomparably the best, in general, it is by no means necessarily the best, or even good at all, for every individual. Men are to be heard saying, "A woman ought to be a wife and mother." It is, perhaps, the main argument of this book that, for most women, this is the sphere in which their characteristic potencies will find best and most useful expression both for self and others; but that is very different from saying that every woman ought to be a mother, or that no woman ought to be a surgeon. We may prefer the maternal to the surgical type, and there may be good reason for our preference; but the surgeon may be very useful, and, useful or not, the question is not one of ought. Thoughtful people should know better than to make this constant confusion between what ought to be and what is. Let us hold to our ideals, let us by all means have our scale of values; but the first question in such a case as this is as to what is. In point of fact all women are not of the same type; and our expression of what ought to be is none other than the passing of a censure upon Nature for her deeds. We may know better than she, or, as has happened, we may know worse.

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