University of Virginia Library

TRANSLATORS' FOREWORD

The authors of The Dominant Sex contemplate a refounding (Neubegründung) of the comparative psychology of the sexes. The present volume is the initial contribution to that work; it is intended to demolish the old edifice, and in part to clear the ground for the new construction. Literally translated, the original title runs: "Feminine Peculiarities in the Men's State, and Masculine Peculiarities in the Women's State." The fundamental theory of the book is that what we call "masculine" qualities to-day are merely the qualities of a dominant sex; and that what we call "feminine" qualities are merely the qualities of a subordinate sex. Novel-readers may remember that the theory was foreshadowed forty years ago in Walter Besant's amusing anti-feminist squib, The Revolt of Man. In the present study we have a work as readable as any novel in which knowledge of the psychological and sociological effects of sex dominance is placed upon a scientific basis. Only when full allowance has been made for these effects, will it be possible to ascertain the residue of masculine and feminine character traits which are indisputably congenital. The authors have proved that much of what we lightly class as "masculinity" and "femininity" is not congenital, but is reacquired from generation to generation.

There are two other main lines of contemporary research into the problems of the comparative psychology of the sexes. One of these is by way of direct

biological study. Excision and transplantation experiments with the reproductive glands furnish justification for the traditional belief that there really are such things as essential masculinity and essential femininity. But these same experiments have also confirmed Otto Weininger's brilliant hypothesis in Sex and Character, that what we call "man" and "woman" are only rough-and-ready terms for the preponderance of male and female elements, both of which are present in varying proportions in every individual. Now the Vaertings' study of the effect of the prevailing type of sex domination upon the mind of the observer, shows that the investigator cannot make due allowance for the bias thus engendered in his mind until he has grasped the full import of the principle they have brought to light. Almost all who interpret such experiments as those of Steinach and Voronoff are still unconsciously influenced by the preconceptions derived from the prevalent dominance of men.

The second main line of recent research into the psychology of sex differentiation has been that furnished by psychoanalysis—by the direct study of unconscious mentation in ourselves and our contemporaries, and by the application of psychoanalytical theory in the imaginative reconstruction of prehistoric society (as in Freud's Totem and Taboo, and Kolnai's Psychoanalysis and Sociology). But here, likewise, inferences are vitiated by the "Men's-State complex" of the psychoanalysts, whether these be men or women. From one point of view The Dominant Sex is itself a psychoanalytical study, for it shows how largely our judgments concerning sex differentiation are unconsciously influenced by the affects dependent upon the extant type of sex dominion, and how historians have

tended under the influence of these affects to "censor" the evidence of an antecedent type of society wherein women were the dominant sex. Here also the arguments will have to be reconsidered, the conclusions restated, when we have learned to make allowance for the tyranny which the extant Men's-State ideology, complex, or bias, exercises over all our thinking.

We do not wish to imply that no one before the Vaertings has ever been aware of the existence of the bias to which we refer. There are, for instance, reiterated allusions to it in the writings of women rebels against male dominion, from the days of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication onwards. Havelock Ellis writes to us in a private letter: "The fallacy in sexual comparisons is fairly familiar—the difficulty is to eliminate it. It has been acutely present to my mind for nearly forty years; and I have always attached importance to control observations, when possible, on other species in which there was no reason to suppose one sex dominant." But the Vaertings are the first to attempt the elucidation of the matter in all its bearings, as the outcome of a detailed historical and sociological study.

The evidence for the widespread existence of a feminine dominance, the obverse of the masculine dominance with which we are all familiar, is scattered broadcast throughout the succeeding pages, and throughout those of the numerous works to which the authors refer. There is no need to summarise it in this foreword. Students of sociology are acquainted with Bachofen's theory of matriarchy; and those who cannot read German have access, at any rate, to summary expositions of the theories of the author of Das Mutterrecht. Such original English (or American)

books as Westermarck's Human Marriage and Lewis Morgan's Ancient Society have done much to popularise the conception of matriarchy—and psychoanalytical reconstructions of the patriarchal primitive horde cannot shuffle out of the world the abundant evidence of primitive matriarchy. But the Vaertings, when they write of the dominance of women, mean something different from Bachofen's matriarchy. The long-continued dominance of women in ancient Egyptian society, for instance, was no mere "mother-right"; any more than the dominance of men in Hohenzollern Prussia was a mere expansion of the powers of the "old man" in the patriarchal horde. That is why the translators have seldom used the terms matriarchy and patriarchy; and for this and other reasons they have passed over Bachofen's terms "androcracy" and "gynecocracy" in favour of Anglo-Saxon equivalents with somewhat different implications. We speak of the "Men's State" and the "Women's State," to denote social conditions in which men and women are respectively dominant. For the adjectival forms androcratic and gynecocratic, and for similar locutions, we generally use "Men's-State" and "Women's-State," with a hyphen to indicate that the significance is adjectival. In this matter, no less, we have had the advantage of consultation with Havelock Ellis (through whose instrumentality the Vaertings' book was first brought to our notice). He writes: "The `-cracy' terminology is certainly correct and accepted; but it is ugly, pedantic, and no doubt, to many, obscure. I think you are quite justified in sticking to your own terms."

In fine, then, the Vaertings' theory is that the Men's State tends to produce "manly men," and "womanly women." On the other hand, the Women's State tends

to produce "manly women" and "womanly men." That is to say, the women of the Women's State are "mannish," from the Men's-State outlook; and, from the same outlook, the men of the Women's State are "womanish." In other words, the main content of these terms, ostensibly denoting a biological sex differentiation, is an expression of the attributes referable to the prevailing type of sexual dominance. Under monosexual dominance, the ideology imposed by the nature of the sexuo-social environment modifies all our judgments in such matters. Nay more, that ideology distorts our perceptive faculties, and sophisticates our reasoning, so that history, art, and science, are subtly falsified by the bias of the dominant sex. There are individuals who can escape that bias, even under monosexual dominance. But, in the mass, the ideology of the dominant sex will be prepotent until sex equality is achieved.

Meanwhile, the influence of the Men's State is unceasingly at work. As Evelyn Sharp wrote recently in the Daily Herald (September 5, 1922—article on "Sex Equality") : "The perpetual insistence on the limitation of women's interests has resulted in her artificial specialisation in such interests. But this is a reactionary and not a progressive tendency, and one that hinders the solution of many problems that will only be solved when they are approached, not as women's, but as human questions. It is also a tendency that hinders the emancipation of women. For, after all, woman's emancipation simply means her recognition as a human being."

Evelyn Sharp, it will be seen, like Mary Wollstonecraft, Havelock Ellis, and many another, is a forerunner in respect of a portion of the Vaertings' great

generalisation. But this does not detract from the latter's originality, which consists in the vast scope of their scientific synthesis, in the width of the implications of their theory of the dominant sex. Darwin, Marx, and Freud—all had forerunners.

Marx showed that history could not be made intelligible without the clue afforded by the recognition of the class struggle; he pointed out that historiographers in general were, and could not but be, under the spell of the ideology of the master class. History had to be rewritten—for the most part still has to be rewritten—by persons whose master-class bias has been readjusted. In like manner the Vaertings contend that history is perennially falsified by the prepotent ideology of the dominant sex. Nor is it history alone that has to be rewritten from an equalitarian outlook in sexual matters. The readjustment is quite as essential in respect of the inferences most recently drawn in the fields of sociology and psychology. These two sciences, likewise, must be "refounded" upon a sex-equalitarian basis. Blow follows blow with disconcerting speed, making lovers of a quiet life look back with regret to the times when Bishop Ussher's contemporaries found it easy to believe that Eve was created out of Adam's rib in the year 4004 B.C. But alas, our authors have little difficulty in showing that, quite apart from the excellent Ussher's defects as a chronologer, the rib-story itself has to be dismissed as a Men's-State fable! That was the Yahvist version, and Yahve was a Men's-State god, fashioned after the image of dominant males. The Elohist myth, on the other hand, "male and female created he them," has a comparatively equalitarian flavour, and was the saga of a tribe or tribes where the sexes held equal sway. In respect

of folklore and primitive religion, the theory of the dominant sex throws light into dark corners. It is by the abundant light the new conception brings, that its general validity should be appraised. Let critics beware of condemning it because, here and there in matters of detail, the authors' data can be questioned, or because at times it is even possible to doubt the soundness of their inferences. They have not invariably escaped the pitfalls that beset the pathway of the pioneer. Nevertheless they have, we are confident, gone far, very far, towards justifying their main contention —that they are refounding the comparative psychology of the sexes.

Our sex nature is very variously composed. Neither in society nor in the individual is it stable in its characters. Many societies and many individuals are strongly sexed, but the modern trend towards equal rights for the sexes is unquestionably accompanied by a reduction in the intensity of sex differentiation.

In the psychological sphere, sex differentiation has three main factors: biological, psychological, and sociological.

Biologically or psychologically determined differences in the psychology of the sexes, in sexual behaviour, indubitably exist. Their existence in the human species is indicated by the comparative study of sex psychology in the animal kingdom, and it is confirmed by recent experimental work in transplating the reproductive glands. To-day the influence of sexual hormones upon character is an established fact. But it seems probable that all men have circulating in their blood both "male" and "female" hormones. Apart from actual or experimental inversion, the influence of these in any individual is fluctuating.

Secondly, differences in sexual behaviour are largely due to a psychological determinism, are to a great extent the outcome of suggestions and autosuggestions as to what conduct is appropriate for boys or girls, for men or women. But in large part these suggestions are in turn dependent upon the third factor, the sociological.

The Dominant Sex is a detailed study of the sociological factor of sex differentiation.

London, 1923.