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stone age that she became the pristine plastic artist. This is true, however, that every form, decoration, and function of pottery were invented by women...In the struggle for exist- ence and exaltation which takes place among many occupations, as among individuals and species, militancy no longer demands all man's waking movements. The arts devised by woman are in the ascendency, and the man militant has glorified them by his co-operation. Her very ancient digging- stick is now a plough; her rude carrying-strap over her aching forehead is now the railroad train; her woman's boat, the ocean steamer; her stone hand-mill, the costly roller-mill; her simple scraper for softening hides, the great tanneries and shoe-factories; her distaff and weft-stick, the power-loom; her clay and smooth pebble, the potter's wheel; her sharpened stick and bundle of hairs are all the apparatus of the plastic and pictorial arts...In the early history of art, language, social life, and religion, women were the industrial, elaborative, conservative half of society. All the peaceful arts of to-day were once woman's peculiar province. Along the lines of industrialism she was pioneer, inventor, author, originator."
As a more special detailed example of the primitive sexual division of labour we may take the Central Eskimo as described by Dr. Boas (F. Boas, " The Central Eskimo," Annual Report Bureau of Ethnology, 1884-85, pp. 579, 580). "The principal part of the man's work is to provide for his family by hunting, i.e., for his wife and children and for his relatives who have no provider. He must drive the sledge in travelling, feed the dogs, build the house, and make and keep in order his hunting implements, the boat-cover and seal-floats excepted. The woman has to do the household work, the sewing, and the cooking. She must look after the lamps, make and mend the tent and boat-covers, prepare the skins, and bring up young dogs. It falls to her share to make the inner outfit of the hut, to smooth the platforms, line the snow-house, etc. On Davis Strait the men cut up all kinds of animals which they have caught; on Hudson Bay, however, the women cut up the seals. There the men prepare the deerskins, which is done by the women among the Eastern tribes. Everywhere the women have to do the rowing in the large boats while the man steers. Cripples who are unable to hunt do the same kind of work as women."
When the ethnographic knowledge of primitive races was less advanced than at present it was fre- quently stated that women are a source of weakness among savages, and that therefore their position is so degraded that they are almost in the position of Google INTRODUCTION. 9 slaves. Even at the present time, anthropological writers whose faith in the future leads them to be unjustly scornful of the past, have unintentionally misrepresented and distorted the facts of savage life. A more complete statement of the facts, and the deeper insight which we now possess regarding their interpretation, enable us to assert that while among many races women have been to a greater or less extent in subordination to their more powerful mates, on the whole the wider control which women have had over the means of production, as well as the skill of women in diplomacy, 1 have given them influence and even authority. To these results have con- tributed in many cases no doubt factors of a different order due to certain modes of marriage and filiation which have tended to give greater dignity to women.
M'Lennan, Lubbock, and Letourneau are probably the most prominent anthropologists who have argued, apparently from their knowledge of civilised women, that among savages women are a "source of weakness,,, and in consequence liable to oppression. But, as has often been pointed out by those who possess more than a second-hand acquaintance with savage life, although this is sometimes the case, it is not seldom the very reverse of the truth. Thus Fison and Howitt, who discuss this point, remark, in regard to Australian women: "In times of peace, as a general rule, they are the hardest workers and the most useful members of the community." In times of war, again, "they are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves at all times; and, so far from being an encumbrance on the warrior, they will fight, if need be, as bravely as the men, and with even greater ferocity" (Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kumaiy pp. 133-147, 358). Buckley, who lived for thirty-two years among Australian savages, mentions that when those he lived with were attacked by a numerous hostile party, "they 1 Of the women of many races it may be said, as the Rev. C. Harrison says of the Haidas of the Queen Charlotte Islands, " The women are great diplomats, and generally contrive to have their own way, and it is a great mistake to imagine that they are treated as slaves" {Journal Anthropological Institute, May 1 892, p. 472). Among the Australian Dieyerie, Curr {Australian Races) states that the women act as ambassadors to arrange treaties, and invariably succeed in their missions.
Google 10 MAN AND WOMAN.
raised a war-cry; on hearing this the women threw off their rugs and, each armed with a short club, flew to the assistance of their husbands and brothers" {Life and Adventures of William Buckley ', p. 43). " They who are accustomed to the ways of civilised women only," remarks Mr. Fison, " can hardly believe what savage women are capable of, even when they may well be supposed to be at their weakest. For instance, an Australian tribe on the march scarcely take the trouble to halt for so slight a performance as a childbirth. The newly-born infant is wrapped in skins, the march is resumed, and the mother trudges on with the rest Moreover, as is well known, among many tribes elsewhere it is the father who is put to bed, while the mother goes about her work as if nothing had happened."
Man has been the most highly favoured and successful of all species, and, as Prof. Mason well remarks, " If one half of this species, the maternal half, in addition to many natural weak- nesses, had been from the first the victim of malicious imposi- tion and persecution at the hands of the other and stronger half, humanity would not have survived" (Mason, "Woman's Share in Primitive Culture," American Antiquarian, Jan. 1889). Mr. Horatio Hale, another well-known American anthropologist, in a paper read at the annual meeting of the Royal Society of Canada in 1891 (and reprinted in the Journal Anthropological Institute, May 1892, p. 427), likewise observes, "The common opinion that women among savage tribes in general are treated with harshness, and are regarded as slaves, or at least as inferiors, is, like many common opinions, based on error, originating in too large and indiscriminate deduction from. narrow premises. A wider experience shows that this depressed condition of women really exists, but only in certain regions and under special circumstances...The wife of a Samoan landowner or a Navajo shepherd has no occasion, so far as her position in her family or among her people is concerned, to envy the wife of a German peasant." Mr. Hale goes on to argue that " it is entirely a question of physical comfort, and mainly of the abundance or lack of food," and illustrates this proposition by the difference between the position of the women among the northern sub-arctic Tinneh and among the southern Tinneh (or Navajos) in sunny and fruitful Arizona; among the former tribes " women are slaves: among the others they are queens;" women, he considers, are the comparatively weak members of the community, and are, therefore, the first to suffer under harsh conditions of life.
In a primitive and unstable state of existence, men are chiefly occupied in the absorbing duties of war and the chase. As the position of a tribe and its Google INTRODUCTION. II means of subsistence become more assured, the men are enabled to lay down their weapons and to take up women's implements, and specialise women's industries. Thus, as Professor Mason points out, 1 the primitive woman handed her ulu over to the saddler, teaching him, apparently, how to work in leather; the saddler of ancient Egypt, as depicted on monu- ments, used the ulu, and the saddler of to-day still uses it It may thus have happened that, as we sometimes find still among races which have passed from savagery into the earlier stages of barbarism, and among whom war happens to occupy a small place, various industries are fairly divided between the sexes. Thus, among the Melanesians, a horti- cultural people who show great skill in such work, " the respective share of men and women in garden work is settled by local custom." 2 But an equality of this complete kind rarely seems to have been the rule. Women invented and exercised in common multifarious household occupations and industries. They were unable to specialise their work, and in consequence they could not develop it highly. Men, liberated more or less from the tasks of hunting and fighting, gradually took up the occupations of women, specialised them and developed them in an extra- ordinary degree. Why the division of labour should be a masculine and not a feminine characteristic, whether it is the result of physical and mental organisation, or merely due to social causes, is not quite obvious; probably it is due to both sets of causes. Maternity favours an undifferentiated con- dition of the various avocations that are grouped around it; it is possible that habits of war pro- duced a sense of the advantages of specialised and subordinated work. In any case the fact itself is undoubted, and it has had immense results on civil- isation.
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To speak with assurance regarding the respective status of the sexes in savagery and the early stages of barbarism is not easy. There are not many races in an uncontaminated stage of early barbarism; it is rare to find an observer who is sufficiently intelligent and sympathetic to be able to understand the con- ditions of such races; and it is difficult to estimate the disturbing influence of various conditions which deviate the circumstances of such races from the typical order. When we turn to races in a highly developed state of barbarism, such as we find in mediaeval Europe, the difficulties are of another kind. The materials on which to found a judgment are so ample that it is impossible to generalise in a broad and unmodified manner. We have before us chronicles, romances, fabliaux, contes, acta sanctorum, codes, chronicles, proverbs — altogether a vast amount of original documents — all throwing more or less unintentional light on the respective parts played by men and women in the developed barbarism of mediaeval Europe. One who has only been able to dip here and there into this fascinating mass of literature cannot pretend to speak of any definite and assured result But there are certain points that strike one again and again. The militant element ruled throughout mediaeval Europe, and that meant the predominance of men. Thus if we examine the great French epic cycle as Krabbes has done, 1 we see such a state of society depicted the more veraciously because incidentally and unintentionally. The men were above all fighters, and even the women delighted in fighting; women had utter contempt for the man who was a coward in war, and at times took a sub- ordinate part in war themselves, guarding prisoners for example. The entire absorption of the men in fighting had a marked effect on the passion of love.
1 Theodor Krabbes, Die Frau im alifranzoesischen Karls-epos, 1884. (Stengel's Series of Ausgaben und Abhandtungen aus dem Gebiete der romanischen Phihlogie, ) Google INTRODUCTION. 1 3 The women in these epic poems are usually the wooers; the men are generally indifferent, rarely actively in love with the women to whom they yield; they merely respond, and often not so warmly as the women desire; the women openly embrace the men who attract them, and only once do we read of a woman who was ashamed to kiss in public, while men are represented as decidedly less sensual than women. But notwithstanding this freedom of initiative, when the woman becomes a wife she is entirely in the power of her husband, who may address her in terms of the greatest contempt The beginnings of industrialism were not destruc- tive of the militant spirit and its predominance. Even in republican industrial towns it was frequently necessary that the workers should also be fighters. In early barbarous societies we see men gradually taking up and specialising the industries originated by women; in the developed barbarism of Europe only a few simple household industries were on the whole left to women. Even in the monasteries, where men and women lived under similar conditions, it cannot be said that the achievements of women in any field rivalled those of men. For women there was the home and, it must be added, the brothel; while a vast stream of women for whom there was no other outlet — a stream including the insane and the hysterical, but certainly many who were neither — fell under suspicion of sorcery and perished as witches. This divergence of the paths of women from the paths of men had two different classes of effects: on the one hand, more marked sexual differ- ences in physical development seem (we cannot speak definitely) to have developed than are usually to be found in savage societies; and on the other hand, the attitudes of men towards women and of women towards men were correspondingly wrought up to pitches of emotional intensity before unknown. When we look into this wonderful mediaeval literature Google 14 MAN AND WOMAN.
we never find men and women in the attitude of comrades and fellow-workers, as we nearly every- where find them in earlier stages of society. We find, instead, men, influenced to some extent doubtless by traditions of Christian asceticism, as well as by the actual facts of mediaeval life, regarding women as the symbols of the sensual element in life, as the force that retards progress and growth, and at the same time — a more Pagan element perhaps coming in together with a tinge of mysticism — we find that women are regarded as the inspirers of men, the spiritual and refining elements of life. Partly, it seemed, women were good to play with, partly good to worship. 1 A large part of the real work of the world was women's to do — although under military as well as monastic conditions men and women were relatively independent of each other — but their work seems to have been regarded as little worth mention; work did not fit in with the mediaeval theory of women.
An important origin of the element of mystery which women have aroused in men and even in themselves lies in the periodic menstrual function. This function, unlike any normal physio- logical function in men, has been an everlasting source of marvel and of profound repugnance among all primitive races. They have been singularly unanimous on this point, and even seem to show a certain amount of unanimity in their explanations. As has been shown by Ploss and Max Bartels, the snake (or occasionally some allied reptile, such as the crocodile or lizard) has been connected with this function or with its mythical origin; in New Guinea, in Guiana, in Portugal, in Germany, traces may be found of this connection, often seeming to indicate that a snake, whether from love or a hostile purpose, had bitten 1 The comic literature of mediaeval times— farces, fabliaux, contes, etc. — is impregnated with the feeling of suspicion and horror as regards women. The opposite and complementary tendency to glorify women may be found not only in the love-poetry of the epoch, but also in a large but now forgotten group of prose-literature. Thomas, in his Essaisur It caractere, les mcsurs, et V esprit des Femmes, gives an account of some portions of this literature. A contemporary picture of the fascination and duplicity of the mediaeval woman, drawn with a psychologic subtlety altogether modern, is embodied in Petit Jekan de Saintri.
Google INTRODUCTION. 1 5 the sexual organs of woman and so caused the phenomenon. I would add that in the Hebrew story of the Garden of Eden we trace a similar primitive connection between woman and the snake. This is still obscure, but there is no obscurity whatever with regard to the universal attitude of savage and barbarous races towards the menstrual function. Everywhere during the continuance of the flow the woman is regarded as more or less unclean. When this attitude is more clearly marked she must refrain from all household duties, especially from the prepara- tion of food, and to approach her is often an offence. For the time she is in exactly the same position as the mediaeval leper. She must wear a special garment (as in some parts of India), or call aloud to warn all who approach her that she is unclean (as in Surinam), or dwell apart either in a hut alone or in a house reserved as a common dwelling for women in the same condition (as in the Caucasus, Japan, the Caroline Islands, among the Hottentots, the North American Indians, and many other races). We are familiar through the Old Testament with the elaborate code of barbarous ritual which grew up among the Jews, while, according to some of the ancient Hindoo sacred writings, the menstruating woman was taught to regard herself as a pariah; by an early Council of the Western Church a woman was for- bidden to enter a church during her period; and among the Christians of modern Greece she is not allowed to kiss the images in church, or to partake of the communion. (The ethnography of this subject is dealt with in detail by Ploss and Max Bartels, Das Weiby 3rd edition, 1891, vol. i. pp. 263-285.) As we approach the higher levels of barbarism the custom of making a marked social difference in the treatment of women at this period gradu- ally disappears, but the feeling itself by no means disappears. Instead of being regarded as a being who at periodic intervals be- comes the victim of a spell of impurity, the conception of impurity becomes amalgamated with the conception of woman. It was thus that a large number of the early Christian writers regarded woman; she is, as Tertullian puts it, janua diaboli; and this is the attitude which still persisted in mediaeval days, though it should be added that ascetics impartially extended the idea of impurity to men also. At the same time the belief in the periodically recurring specific impurity of women has by no means died out even to-day. Among a very large section of women of the middle and lower classes in England and other countries it is firmly believed that the touch of a menstruating woman will contaminate food; only a few years since, in the course of a correspondence on this subject in the British Medical Journal (1878), even medical men were found to state from personal observation that they had no doubt what- ever on this point Thus one doctor, who expressed surprise that any doubt could be thrown on the point, wrote, after Google 1 6 MAN AND WOMAN.
quoting cases of spoiled hams, etc., presumed to be due to this cause, which had come under his own personal observation: — "For two thousand years the Italians have had this idea of menstruating women. We English hold to it, the Americans have it, also the Australians. Now I should like to know the country where the evidence of any such observation is unknown." Women of every class preserve this belief, and still regard the periodic function — although it is frequently a factor of the very first importance in their personal and social life — as almost too shameful to be alluded to.
The effect on women of the militant mediaeval organisation and its correlated conditions was pe- culiar, and may still be felt Openly they tried to live up to the angelic ideals of men; secretly they played with men; unostentatiously they worked, either honestly in their homes, or by intrigue in public affairs. In the great centres of European life, during mediaeval and later times, these conflicting ideals have produced very complex and attractive feminine personalities, often much more delightful and even more wholesome than the influences which moulded them would lead us to expect, but usually more or less profoundly tinged by the unavoidable duplicity of conflicting ideals.
Many of these sexual characteristics have doubtless persisted to modern times, but the conditions which gave rise to them have in large measure changed. The eighteenth century in Europe, and more espe- cially in England and France, was marked by a wide-spread resolve to reason clearly concerning the nature and causes of things, so far as possible cast- ing off prejudice, and it could not fail to touch the questions that concerned the status of women; such problems were no longer left to work themselves out in unobserved silence, At the same time an economic revolution was taking place which tended to with- draw women from their homes and men from their previously more independent and intermittent labour. A new industrial regime was emerging by which work became organised in large centres, and the intro- Google INTRODUCTION. 17 duct ion of machinery enabled men and women to work side by side at the same or closely allied occu- pations. This is still going on to-day. It is also being recognised as reasonable that both sexes should study side by side at the school and the college, and where not side by side, still in closely similar fashion, while the recreations of each sex are to some extent becoming common to both. Such conditions have tended to remove artificial sexual differences, and have largely obliterated the coarser signs of superiority which may before have been possessed by one sex over another. The process of transition is still in rapid progress. It began in the lower and more mechanical fields of labour; it is proceeding to the higher and more specialised forms. Women have entered, or are about to enter, the various learned professions, and are tending to acquire the same rights of citizenship as men.
As such social changes tend more and more to abolish artificial sexual differences, thus acting in- versely to the well-marked tendency observed in passing from the lower to the higher races, we are brought face to face with the consideration of those differences which are not artificial, and which no equalisation of social conditions can entirely remove, the natural characters and predispositions which will always inevitably influence the sexual allotment of human activities. So long as women are unlike in the primary sexual characters and in reproductive function they can never be absolutely alike even in the highest psychic processes. What is the nature, so far as we can venture to tell it to-day, of these fundamental secondary sexual characters?
Google i8 CHAPTER II.
HOW TO APPROACH THE PROBLEM.
THE DEFINITION OF SECONDARY SEXUAL CHARACTERS — TERTIARY SEXUAL CHARACTERS — STANDARDS OF COM- PARISON — THE INFANTILE AND THE SENILE — THE HUMAN CHARACTERISTICS OF INFANT APES — THE POSITION OF THE LOWER HUMAN RACES — FALLACIES DUE TO INCOMPLETE DATA AND TO BIAS — INCOM- PLETENESS OF OUR KNOWLEDGE.
THE term "secondary sexual character" was first used by Hunter. He applied it to such a structure as, for instance, the comb of the cock, but, so far as I have been able to find, he does not anywhere define precisely what he means by the term. Darwin, also, who wrote one of his most important books, The Descent of Man> and Selection in Relation to Sex, chiefly on this subject, refrains from defining very precisely what is to be included under the term "secondary sexual characters," only remarking that they graduate into the primary sexual organs, and that "unless indeed we confine the term ' primary * to the repro- ductive glands, it is scarcely possible to decide which ought to be called primary and which secondary." 1 When we are dealing with Man it is perhaps most convenient to set aside as primary the sexual glands in each sex, and the organs for emission and reception in immediate connection with these glands. That is 1 Descent of Man % chap. viii.
HOW TO APPROACH THE PROBLEM. 19 to say, the primary sexual organs are those that may fairly be regarded as essential to reproduction. The breast, which is not necessary to reproduction, but is an auxiliary of the first importance in the propaga- tion of the race, may be counted as the chief of the secondary sexual characters; or else (with Darwin) as occupying a borderland between the primary and secondary characters.
The difficulty lies not so much in determining the boundary between primary and secondary sexual characters as in limiting the extension of the latter characters. Perhaps the most marked human secondary sexual characters are the difference in the massing and arrangement of the hair, so that while the man's is largely concentrated on his face the woman's is chiefly massed on her head, and the difference in the larynx and voice by which a further degree of development forms a part of male evolution at puberty, while in woman there is comparatively little development These are typical secondary sexual characters, and we may perhaps define a human secondary sexual character as one which, by more highly differentiating the sexes, helps to make them more attractive to each other, and so to promote the union of the sperm-cell with the ovum-cell. Other things being equal, a man is more attracted to a woman with luxuriant hair on her head than to one whose hair is sparse; other things being equal, a woman is more attracted to a man with deep vibrant voice than to a man with a shrill feminine voice. The sexes are not greatly attracted by any purely aesthetic qualities; it is the womanly qualities of the woman which are attractive to the man, the manly qualities of the man which are attractive to the woman. 1 The secondary sexual characters, as thus understood, are 1 As Chateaubriand somewhere remarks: "On sait qu' instinctivement la nature porte la femme a preferer l'homme fort et vigoureux a Tetre ch£tif et defeat, et j'ai lu que si on pr^sente a une jeune fille un Adonis ou un Hercule, elle rougira, mais choisira Hercule."
Google 20 MAN AND WOMAN, those which indirectly favour reproduction and which might conceivably be developed by sexual selection as understood by Darwin, whether or not they actually are so developed *. There are, however, other sexual differences which do not so easily fall into this group. These differences are less obvious; many of them are relative, or only perceptible when we take averages into consideration; but they are very numerous. Thus we have, for in- stance, the much greater shallowness, proportionately, of the female skull; we have the greater size and activity of the thyroid gland in women and the smaller average proportion of red blood corpuscles; and we have a different average relationship of the parts of the brain to each other. These differences are probably related indirectly to primary and secondary sexual differences; they are not of great importance from the zoological point of view, but they are of considerable interest from the anthropological point of view, very often of interest from the patho- logical point of view, and occasionally of great interest from the social point of view. They cannot be easily put into the same group as the secondary sexual characters as usually understood; and perhaps it would be convenient if we were to agree to distinguish them as tertiary sexual characters.
It would be desirable to have a fairly definite classification of sexual characters into groups, but there is no distinct natural division between the groups which tend to merge into each other. Professor Charles Stewart defines secondary sexual characters as comprising those features by which we are enabled to distinguish the male from the female quite irre- spective of the essential organs of reproduction, and which are not concerned either in the nourishment or in the reproduction of the young. This seems to me to give an inconveniently large extension to the primary group, while it allows no place for what I have called the tertiary sexual characters. Ultimately, if we take a sufficiently broad outlook, all sexual characters, as Weis- mann points out, are really secondary (in the sense in which I Have defined such characters): "Just as the differentiation of cells into male and female reproductive elements is secondary," Google HOW TO APPROACH THE PROBLEM. 21 he remarks, " so is that of male and female individuals All the numerous differences in form and function which characterise sex among the higher animals, all the so-called 'secondary sexual characters/ affecting even the highest mental qualities of mankind, are nothing but adaptations to bring about the union of the hereditary tendencies of two individuals." (A. Weismann*, "Remarks on Certain Problems of the Day," 1890, in Essays upon Heredity y vol. ii. p. 91.)
It is with secondary sexual characters, or with secondary and tertiary sexual characters, as I have defined them, and more especially the latter, that we have here to deal. In order to estimate the signi- ficance of each character as it comes before us we must have certain standards against which to measure it What are our standards of comparison for sexual characters in a man or in a woman?