Bocalosi, an Italian writer of the last century, in his book Delia Fisionomia, seems to have had a glimmering of the truth that emotion depends on physical organisation. Its full and precise statement has had to wait for the delicate investigations initiated during recent years by the great Italian physiologist, Angelo Mosso, of Turin. Mosso has shown, largely by means of various ingenious instruments, such as the plethysmograph and the balance, which he had himself devised, that the whole organism— especially the whole vaso-motor vascular system — responds at every psychic or physical stimulus, at a word or at a touch, and has brought evidence to show how every muscular movement and every intellectual effort produce an entire redis- tribution of blood in the body; so that the heart, the whole circulatory system, and all the viscera and glands form, as it has been said, a kind of sounding-board, against which every change in consciousness, however slight, at once reverberates. (For a charming and popular exposition of many of his results, see Professor Mosso's little book, La Peur.) The slight changes never reach consciousness again, but at a certain threshold of intensity they return to consciousness, and emotion is attained.
So far as I am aware, the first to clearly perceive the psycho- logical significance of the physiological investigations of Mosso and others was Mr. William James, the distinguished professor of Psychology at Harvard. In Mind, No. xxxiv., for April 1884, Professor James, in his usual clear and acute manner, undertook to answer the question, "What is an Emotion?" Pointing out how Bell, Darwin, Bain, and especially Mosso, had prepared the way for the right understanding of emotion, he reached the result that "the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion? And referring to Google 30O MAN AND WOMAN.
the extremely intimate connection which is thus seen to exist between the mental life and the whole corporeal frame, he remarked, " Rapture, love, ambition, indignation, and pride, considered as feelings, are fruits of tb# same soil with the grossest bodily sensations of pleasure and of pain." About two years later, Professor C. Lange, an eminent physician of Copen- hagen, in ignorance of Professor James's paper, published a small book advocating precisely the same theory. (I am only acquainted with Dr. Kurella's German translation, Ueber Gemuthsbewegungen^ Leipzig, 1887.) Even more than Professor James he attached importance to Mosso's investigations, and advocated a vaso-motor theory of emotion, pointing out the importance to the physician of a clear understanding of the nature of emotion. "It is to the vaso-motor system," he con- cluded, " that we owe the whole emotional side of our soul-life, our joys and our sorrows, our happy and our unhappy hours; if the impressions that strike our senses had not the strength to set that system into action, we should wander through life dis- interested and passionless; impressions from the outer world would enrich our experience and increase our knowledge, but they would wake in us neither joy nor anger, and could not move us either to grief or to fear." Professor James, more recently, in his very able work, The Principles of Psychology^ vol. ii., chaps, xxiii.-xxv., has reaffirmed with greater fulness and assurance the physiological doctrine of emotion. It would be premature to affirm that it is universally accepted, but, so far as I am aware, no psychologist of standing, and certainly no physiologist, has offered any serious opposition to it.
The fact that the vaso-motor system — the neuro- muscular ruler of spontaneous organic life — responds more readily to stimulus in women than in men is embodied in the familiar saying that woman's heart is tender. This, as Mosso remarks, is only another way of saying that the nervous mechanism of women's hearts is excited, so causing them to beat more quickly, under the influence of stimuli by which men's hearts in a state of health are unaffected. 1 A proof of the greater excitability of women's hearts is found in the fact, which has been noted by several observers, that there is a distinctly greater increase in the number of pulsations on awaking from sleep in women; the excitement of waking life affects the hearts of women 1 La Peur t p. 84.
THE AFFECTABILITY OF WOMEN. 301 (and also of children) to a greater extent than those of men. 1 Even the complex phenomena of hysteria have been defined by Rosenthal as ultimately resolv- able into a weakness of resistance, congenital or acquired, of the vaso-motor system. And F6r6 quotes with approval the remark of Marshall Hall that hysteria is "very much a disease of emotion; the same organs, the same functions are affected." It is also worthy of note that the special tendency of women to be affected by the disease of the eyes called glaucoma, which is accepted by nearly all authorities, is also referred by Priestley Smith to the greater instability of the vaso-motor system in women, and particularly to the disturbances of circula- tion which emanate from the generative organs. 2 Blushing, which Darwin called the most human of all expressions, is a vaso-motor nerve storm of spontaneous and uncontrollable character. Its much greater frequency in women affords evidence that needs no insistence, of the greater affectability of the vaso-motor system. 3 Allied evidence as to the con- vulsive tendency of the nervous system in women is furnished by the equally obvious facility of tears and laughter.
Sir B. W. Richardson has an interesting article on " Tears, Psychology of," in the Diet Psych. Med., but I venture to think he unnecessarily complicates the matter by the speculative assumption of a "grief centre." In the same work is an article by Dr. Louis Robinson on " Ticklishness," in which the basis of laughter is found in the phenomena of tickling. It is unnecessary to point out that children are more ticklish than adults, and women than men. Pouting, again, is a characteristically childlike method of automatic response to external stimuli which is rarely seen in its most emphatic 1 Bertin, Art. " Sommeil (Physiologique)," Diet. ency. des Sci. Mid.
8 The physiology and pathology of blushing have been investigated by Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, and Dr. H. Campbell, Flush- ing and Morbid Blushing (1890). Tilt found that flushes occurred in 244 women out of 500.
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form in adults, except sometimes during insanity; in a very slight but still quite perceptible form it is, however, fairly common in women, especially as the unconscious indication of an offended dignity which cannot find expression in words.
Women's faces are more expressive than men's, or, rather, it would be better to say, they are more mobile; that is to say, that there is greater neuro- muscular affectability. If we watch the faces of the men and women in the streets of London, or of any other crowded city, where people think themselves sheltered by numbers from inquisitive observation, it will be seen that while the men more usually have a fixed immobile expression, the women's faces are more usually in actual movement, the mouths twisting and the foreheads wrinkling, seeming to indicate an early stage of physiological distress. It cannot strictly be said that the women's faces are more expressive; for if the men's stereotyped expression may express a mood that is past, the fluctuating and evanescent muscular movements on the women's faces have not yet become co-ordinated into the expression of a definite mood. They are for the most part the play of a neuro-muscular mobility still submerged beneath the level of consciousness. Children's faces are extremely mobile. Dr. Francis Warner, who has examined 60,000 school children, finds that the signs of undue nervous mobility are more common in girls, and that " defective expression " is much more rarely met with in girls. 1 In insanity women's faces usually express in a much higher degree than men's the apparently constant presence of intense emotional conditions. The mobility of women's faces is due to their affectability to stimuli both from within and from without; in the latter form it is closely related to suggestibility, which is indeed but one 1 F. Warner, Report of a Committee as to Average Development and Condition of Brain Function among Children, 1888; Milroy Lectures on Physical and Mental Condition of School Children, Brit. Med. Journal, 1892; also a suggestive article by the same author on " Expression, Facial," in Diet, of Psych. Med.
Google THE AFFECTABILITY OF WOMEN. 303 of the forms of women's affectability. A woman instinctively responds more easily than a man to influences from without, even in spite of herself. A young woman, especially if her nervous control is at all defective, involuntarily changes when an individual of the opposite sex approaches; however indifferent he may be to her personally, she cannot prevent the instinctive response of her vaso-motor and muscular system, and becomes at once shyer and more alive. Again, a man's rigid facial expres- sion does not respond as a woman's does to the faces it encounters. I have noticed the haggard face of a young woman whose child had just died break out momentarily into a pleasant automatic smile in response to the smile of an acquaintance; this could scarcely have happened to a man. A large portion of the "tact" of women has the same basis. This affectability has often been brought as a reproach against women, even by their own sex, but we must remember that to a large extent it is physiological.
The affectability of the involuntary muscular system is shown in ways that are not easily open to inspection, or which are not obvious. The pupil of the eye dilates involuntarily to all sorts of slight stimuli. Not only is it affected by light as well as in association with accommodation and convergence of the visual axes, but the irritation of almost any cutaneous nerve, as by pinching or pricking the neck, arm, or leg, and the stimulation of some of the nerves of special sense, such as by a loud noise, and various emotional conditions, all produce dilatation of the eyes. This result, according to Moeli and others, is much more constant in women and children than in men. The bladder, although its affectability to faint stimuli is not easily demonstrated, is, as Mosso and Pellacani have shown, an even more delicate aesthesiometer than the iris, and is probably the most delicate in the body. Mosso and Pellacani found that Google 304 MAN AND WOMAN.
contraction of the bladder follows directly on the slightest stimulation of any sensory nerve, and also that all the varying conditions of the organism which raise the blood-pressure and excite the respiratory centres produce an immediate and measurable effect upon the bladder. These investigators found by experiments upon several young women, that when a plethysmograph was brought into connection with the bladder, even a slight touch with the finger on the back of the subject's hand produced a notable con- traction of the bladder, and whenever the subject spoke, was spoken to, or made the slightest mental exertion, there was a similar contraction. 1 These reactions are much more delicate than those of the blood-vessels, and cannot be paralleled by any other part of the organism. The bladder, as Born puts it, is the mirror of the soul; it would be equally correct to say that to some extent the soul is the mirror of the bladder. The fainter vesical contractions cannot be said to play a recognisable part in emotion, but when they attain a somewhat higher degree of intensity they play a well-recognised part; " a nervous bladder," as Goodell puts it, " is one of the earliest symptoms of a nervous brain." Contraction of the bladder plays a part in the constitution of various emotional states of fear, anxiety, and suspense. In its extreme spasmodic form, as incontinence of urine, it is very common in children, and by no means uncommon in young women, quite apart from pregnancy or the results of pregnancy, though rare in men. 2 No doubt other organs, if we could examine them 1 These experiments are briefly summarised in Art. " Urinary Bladder," by H. Ellis,'/)*/, of Psych. Med.
2 Stevenson, " Enuresis," Lancet^ loth January 1891. It may be objected that this phenomenon is simply due to the shorter and broader urethra of women. Maurice Hache, however, one of the chief authorities on the bladder, states that the force required to produce expulsion is almost equal during life in men and women, though after death there is much less resistance in women's bladders. (Hache, Art. " Vessie," Diet. ency. des Sci. Mid.)
Google THE AFFECTABILITY OF WOMEN. 305 with equal precision, would furnish similar evidence to that furnished by the heart, the iris, and the bladder. The comparatively larger size of the abdominal and some other organs in women, and the comparatively greater r^nge of their physiological action, furnish a visceral basis for the greater neuro- muscular affectability of women.
Fright is an emotion in which the phenomena I have been speaking of play a conspicuous part, and fright is an emotion which is seen in women far more than men. Among the lower social ranks more especially it is noteworthy how the women will start and call out in the presence of any unexpected phenomenon, although men of the same class are quite unmoved. Some Prussian statistics of suicide among school children show that while "fear of punishment" caused 19 per cent of the suicides among the boys, it was responsible for 49 per cent among the girls. This characteristic has probably been fostered by both men and women, since it leads to displays of strength and protection on the part of the man towards the woman which are equally grati- fying to both parties. Fright is a frequent origin of nervous disease in children and in women, but rarely in men. In the causation of epilepsy, according to Gowers, it is equally effective in each sex during childhood; at puberty it is most effective in girls; after twenty it is seldom traceable in men, but is still a relatively frequent cause in women. Chorea, again, or St Vitus's dance, is a disease which is frequently caused by fright (in 27 per cent cases, according to the Collective Investigation Committee of the British Medical Association), and which simulates the de- fective muscular control and inco-ordination of fright; it is sometimes caused by imitation, and is altogether a disorder to which females are predisposed. On the whole, about three females are affected for one male; the preponderance of girls, as we should expect, is least marked in childhood; after sixteen, when the 20 Google 306 MAN AND WOMAN.
disease falls markedly in frequency, it is rarely seen in boys, and between the ages of twenty and thirty it is practically confined to women. It may be added that all nervous diseases are in women largely due to emotional causes. Hammond is inclined to think that moral and emotional insanity without marked intellectual aberration is more common in girls than in boys. 1 Pitres found that emotion is influential in causing nervous disease in 54 women out of 69, but in only 8 men out of 31. 2 It is due to their suggest- ibility that women are more liable than men to be affected by communicated insanity, or folie d deux? It is the same suggestibility that causes women to be less subject to nostalgia, or home-sickness, than men, and more adaptable to changes of habit and new impressions. 4 In a similar manner, as is frequently seen, the wife of the "self-made man" is often much better able than her husband to adapt herself to the manners and customs of the new circles in which she moves.
Irascibility — "irritability" in the more homely sense of the word — is a form of affectability which has in all ages, and perhaps quite legitimately, been attributed to women. 5 As Terence said — i Mulieres sunt fermfc, ut pueri, levi sententia; Fortasse unum aliquod verbum hanc inter eas iram conciverit."
In its most extreme form this tendency shows itself in reckless and uncontrollable outbursts of purpose- less destruction. This may best be studied, although not exclusively, in the prison and the lunatic asylum. In prisons spasmodic " breakings out " of wild destructive violence are in England usually regarded as peculiar to the woman's side. 6 8 Hack Tuke, Art. " Communicated Insanity," Diet. Psych. Med, 4 Widal, Art. " Nostalgie," Diet. ency. des Sci. Mid.
5 See, for example, Lombroso and Ferrero, La Donna Delinquente^ 6 See, for example, II. Ellis, The Criminal, pp. 142-152.
Google THE AFFECTABILITY OF WOMEN. 307 The greater obstreperousness of the female patients in lunatic asylums is well recognised; as Dr. Clouston remarks, "there is ten times as much noise in the female wards as there is in the male wards;" 1 and, as the same authority also points out, in the insanity of puberty a destructive tendency in the female seems to take the place of pugnacity in the male. 2 Dr. Nacke of Hubertusburg, dealing with women who were at once both criminal and insane, found that among 53 individuals as many as 41, or 77.3 per cent, showed increased irritability; 33, or 62.2 per cent, were violent and liable to attack the attendant or the doctor, more especially at the menstrual epoch; most of these, although not all, were destructive, and in their wrath would destroy furniture, bed-clothes, their own garments, and especially window panes; of the latter several destroyed about forty per annum each; the ground of these outbursts is said to lie in the extreme irritability and unbounded egotism of the women. The " breaking out," or Zuchthauskncdl^ in its most sudden, violent, apparently unmotived,and almost epileptic form, was found to occur by Nacke in 12 cases, or about 23 per cent 8 The reason women love dancing is very probably because it enables them to give harmonious and legitimate emotional expression to this neuro-muscular irritability which might other- wise escape in more explosive forms. Music, in a slighter degree, satisfies the same craving, for in a muffled but harmonious manner it exercises the whole of the emotional keyboard.
In a thoughtful and interesting paper on "The Sexes in Lunacy" (St. Bartholomews Hospital Reports, vol. xxiv., 1888), Dr. T. Claye Shaw, the experienced superintendent of the London County Asylum at Ban stead, discusses many of the points we are concerned with here. His paper is so full of 1 Journal of Mental Science, April 1893, p. 314.
2 Clouston, Art. " Developmental Insanities," Diet, Psych. Med.
8 Nacke, " Verbrechen und Wahnsinn beim Weibe," Zeitschrift fiir Psychiatrie, etc., Bd. 49, 1892.
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instruction regarding the affectability of women generally — which in insanity is seen in its most unrestrained form — that I venture to quote from it at some length, more especially as it is published in a somewhat inaccessible manner. After remark- ing that women are less willing to work in asylums than men, and that they " give infinitely more trouble than men and cause much more anxiety" (although, at the same time, it must be remembered, insanity is much less serious in woman, as they far more frequently recover than men), he continues: "The number of women in an asylum who require extra supervision and consequent deprivation of liberty far exceeds that of the men. It is only epilepsy and drink that reduce men to the same condition as women...Destructiveness is a very dangerous and troublesome symptom, and it must be said that it prevails to a far greater extent among women than among men. A look at the airing-grounds of an asylum is as good a test of this statement as can be got On the male side the damage done is comparatively trifling, but on the female side the gardener is driven to despair, for broken trees, torn-up flowers, and trodden-down plants proclaim the presence in its exaggerated and insane form of the spirit that animated the occupiers...In the matter of clothes, too, the female patients are more destructive than the men...I have been up to now speaking more of aimless destruction, but when we come to purposed destruction the women have much the more unfavour- able account. Impulsiveness shows itself in glass-smashing or crockery-breaking, probably because these are the readiest ways in which they can vent their superabundant energy; and though men will at times do this, they never approach the other sex in their attempts in this direction. It would seem as if brain-action in women is quicker than in men, and that their proverbial rapidity in forming a conclusion is partly due to their natural excitability or proneness for discharge, and partly also to the natural education of life." Taking governesses, for ex- ample, Dr. Shaw finds that those who had themselves received only an ordinary "ladies' school" education, with the merely superficial emotional training which is usual, are troublesome, destructive, uncontrollable patients; those who had been trained ab initio to be high-class governesses, in a thorough-going methodical way (like many German governesses), though origin- ally they may have been of ardent temperament, are able to some extent to control their emotional effervescence even when insane. "From my experience the Germans and the Scotch form the quietest and most reasonable patients; the Irish are, as a rule, very noisy and excitable; but for downright vindictive- ness and unreasoning awkwardness I have never met the equals of the women who come from the parishes of the East of London...To many people the most striking difference Google THE AFFECTABILITY OF WOMEN. ' 309 between the sexes in asylums is in the language, and here the women hold the palm for volubility, abuse, and foul-mouthed- ness. There is no difference in this respect between the barefaced virago from the lowest parts of the town and the fashionable woman from the best quarter...Certain it is that noise, filthy conduct, and sexual depravity, both by speech and act, are much more common on the female than on the male side of an asylum. I no more expect to find quiet and unobtrusive mania among women than I should hope to see Niagara without hearing the roar of it...In all forms of acute insanity the sexual element is more prominently shown in women than in men — a fact not to be wondered at, considering the important part the physiology of the reproductive organs plays in the life of the woman, causing her whole life to be instinctively blended with ideas more or less traceable to the rearing of offspring." The comparative frequency with which, as we have seen (pp. 272-273), sexual excitement occurs in women under the influence of anaesthetics is another proof of the pre- dominant sexuality of women. Dr. Shaw points out finally now the natural impulsiveness and affectability of women are in- creased by her training in life: — " Women in acute states of insanity are abusive, indiscriminately violent, impulsive, obscene, and wayward out of all proportion to what men are, because they are fulfilling the condition that has been allowed to them in ordinary circumstances. Men have received their abuse with levity, and they think that they will still do so. When in their sane rage they have broken the furniture or used foul language and have been only laughed at, is it not natural that they should think that the same immunity from punishment will attend them in other circumstances? When they have pouted and sulked until their wish has been gratified, is it not natural that they should do the same when through disease placed among strangers? Women have been treated in the same way as animals— they have been petted or cuffed according to the fancy of the moment; and because men have found it easier to let them talk than to argue with or contradict them, they (women) fancy that their surest way of success is by keeping themselves constantly en evidence, by never taking * yes* or 'no* for an answer, and, in short, by never ceasing to worry until they have gained their ends." But all the same, even when insane, women have charm for those whose duty it is to care for them, and Dr. Shaw concludes by saying that in insanity, as well as in ordinary life, " das ewig-weibliche zieht uns hinan."
In this connection mention may be made of the extravagant exaltation of obscenity and cruelty, far surpassing that of men, to which women have been carried in times of popular epidemics of passion and excitement; this has been pointed out by Diderot, Despine, and others (see, for instance, Lombroso ana Google 310 MAN AND WOMAN.
Ferrero, La Donna Delinquente^ p. 76), and Zola has given an artist's picture of it in Germinal. There is physiological ground for the saying that every woman carries a slumbering* petroleuse in her bosom. Lombroso has pointed out that while women generally take a very small part in revolutions, they take a large part in revolts.
The evidence I have brought together in this chapter will help to make clear the statement made in the chapter on " The Senses," that a quick response of the vaso-motor and muscular organism to stimuli, from within or from without, has no connection what- ever with delicacy and precision of response in the sense-organs. It remains to point out that the results here reached are in harmony with those we have reached when considering other groups of phenomena.
In considering " Motion " I referred to the interest- ing experiments of Riccardi, showing how women, in making muscular exertion with the dynamometer, tend to reach their maximum power at the first effort, while men more often only attain their maximum effort at the second or third effort The fact thus clearly brought out has a distinct bearing on the affectability of women. As Fere expresses it, women exhibit a congenital exhaustibility, and, as among children, savages, and nervous subjects, their motions and their emotions are characterised by a brevity and violence which approach to reflex action. 1 To some extent affectability is simply a tendency to fatigue. Mr. Galton once carried on an interesting investiga- tion among teachers as to the signs of fatigue. Sum- marising the results of answers received from 116 teachers, he finds that nervous fatigue is chiefly revealed by involuntary muscular twitchings of the face, fingers, etc., grimace, frowning, compression of lips, tendency to nervous laughter, and general muscular unsteadiness. There are also vaso-motor symptoms, pallors, flushings, and various alterations 1 F&£, Pathologic des Emotions > 1892, pp. 398, 480. Dr. Mary Jacobi makes a similar statement, Question of Rest ', etc., p. 204.
Google THE AFFECTABILITY OF WOMEN. 3II in the colour of the face and ears; also depression and hyperesthesia of the senses. These are all mani- festations of " irritability," which in its common mental form the teachers acknowledge to be "perhaps the commonest sign of incipient mental fatigue." 1 Lack of "staying power" is the popular way of expressing the neuro-muscular exhausti- bility of women, and, as we have previously seen (P- l %3)> this is everywhere found to characterise the work of female clerks in the Post-office, etc.; under ordinary circumstances the women are equal to the men, but they cannot work under pressure. There is another characteristic of women in regard to work about which I am more doubtful: it is some- times said that women are more easily distracted from their work; thus Mr. Valentine, of Valentine & Son, photographers, of Dundee, recently remarked, in addressing his workpeople, that "a man could talk and work at the same time, but when a girl talked she stopped work." 2 I am not prepared to accept this as a general statement (though among sluggish persons with defective nervous energy it may often be observed), but if there is any element of truth in it, we must connect it with this congenital exhausti- bility of women.