11. Biological Considerations
So far as I can make out by experiments on laboratory animals and
by such discreet vivisections as are possible under our laws, there is
no biological necessity for the superior acumen and circumspection
of women. That is to say, it does not lie in any anatomical or
physiological advantage. The essential feminine machine is no
better than the essential masculine machine; both are monuments to
the maladroitness of a much over-praised Creator. Women, it
would seem, actually have smaller brains than men, though perhaps
not in proportion to weight. Their nervous responses, if anything,
are a bit duller than those of men; their muscular coordinations are
surely no prompter. One finds quite as many obvious botches
among them; they have as many bodily blemishes; they are infested
by the same microscopic parasites; their senses are as obtuse; their
ears stand out as absurdly. Even assuming that their special malaises
are wholly offset by the effects of alcoholism in the male, they
suffer patently from the same adenoids, gastritis, cholelithiasis,
nephritis, tuberculosis,
carcinoma, arthritis and so on--in short,
from the same disturbances of colloidal equilibrium that produce
religion, delusions of grandeur, democracy, pyaemia, night sweats,
the yearning to save humanity, and all other such distempers in men.
They have, at bottom, the same weaknesses and appetites. They
react in substantially the same way to all chemical and mechanical
agents. A dose of hydrocyanic acid, administered per ora to the
most sagacious woman imaginable, affects her just as swiftly and
just as deleteriously as it affects a tragedian, a crossing-sweeper, or
an ambassador to the Court of St. James. And once a bottle of
Cte Rtie or Scharlachberger is in her, even the least emotional
woman shows the same complex of sentimentalities that a man
shows, and is as maudlin and idiotic as he is.
Nay; the superior acumen and self-possession of women is not
inherent in any peculiarity of their constitutions, and above all, not
in any advantage of a purely physical character. Its springs are
rather to be sought in a physical disadvantage--that is, in the
mechanical inferiority of their frames, their relative lack of tractive
capacity, their deficiency as brute engines. That deficiency, as every
one knows, is partly a
direct heritage from those females of
the Pongo pygmaeus who were their probable fore-runners in the
world; the same thing is to be observed in the females of almost all
other species of mammals. But it is also partly due to the effects of
use under civilization, and, above all, to what evolutionists call
sexual selection. In other words, women were already measurably
weaker than men at the dawn of human history, and that relative
weakness has been progressively augmented in the interval by the
conditions of human life. For one thing, the process of bringing
forth young has become so much more exhausting as refinement has
replaced savage sturdiness and callousness, and the care of them in
infancy has become so much more onerous as the growth of cultural
complexity has made education more intricate, that the two
functions now lay vastly heavier burdens upon the strength and
attention of a woman than they lay upon the strength and attention
of any other female. And for another thing, the consequent
disability and need of physical protection, by feeding and inflaming
the already large vanity of man, have caused him to attach a concept
of attractiveness to feminine weakness, so
that he has come to
esteem his woman, not in proportion as she is self-sufficient as a
social animal but in proportion as she is dependent. In this vicious
circle of influences women have been caught, and as a result their
chief physical character today is their fragility. A woman cannot lift
as much as a man. She cannot walk as far. She cannot exert as
much mechanical energy in any other way. Even her alleged
superior endurance, as Havelock Ellis has demonstrated in "Man
and Woman," is almost wholly mythical; she cannot, in point of
fact, stand nearly so much hardship as aman can stand, and so the
law, usually an ass, exhibits an unaccustomed accuracy of
observation in its assumption that, whenever husband and wife are
exposed alike to fatal suffering, say in a shipwreck, the wife dies
first.
So far we have been among platitudes. There is less of overt
platitude in the doctrine that it is precisely this physical frailty that
has given women their peculiar nimbleness and effectiveness on the
intellectual side. Nevertheless, it is equally true. What they have
done is what every healthy and elastic organism does in like case;
they have sought compensation for
their impotence in one field
by employing their resources in another field to the utmost, and out
of that constant and maximum use has come a marked enlargement
of those resources. On the one hand the sum of them present in a
given woman has been enormously increased by natural selection,
so that every woman, so to speak, inherits a certain extra-masculine
mental dexterity as a mere function of her femaleness. And on the
other hand every woman, over and above this almost unescapable
legacy from her actual grandmothers, also inherits admission to that
traditional wisdom which constitutes the esoteric philosophy of
woman as a whole. The virgin at adolescence is thus in the position
of an unusually fortunate apprentice, for she is not only naturally
gifted but also apprenticed to extraordinarily competent masters.
While a boy at the same period is learning from his elders little more
than a few empty technical tricks, a few paltry vices and a few
degrading enthusiasms, his sister is under instruction in all those
higher exercises of the wits that her special deficiencies make
necessary to her security, and in particular in all those exercises
which aim at
overcoming the physical, and hence social and
economic superiority of man by attacks upon his inferior capacity
for clear reasoning, uncorrupted by illusion and sentimentality.
