Sex and Society Part 1

s.e.x and Society.

by William I. Thomas.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

These studies have been published in various journals at different times. They are reprinted together because there is some demand for them, and they are not easily accessible. In preparing them for publication in the present form, some of them have been expanded and all of them have been revised.

While each study is complete in itself, the general thesis running through all of them is the same--that the differences in bodily habit between men and women, particularly the greater strength, restlessness, and motor apt.i.tude of man, and the more stationary condition of woman, have had an important influence on social forms and activities, and on the character and mind of the two s.e.xes.

"Organic Differences in the s.e.xes" appeared in the _American Journal of Sociology_, III, 31ff., with the t.i.tle, "On a Difference in the Metabolism of the s.e.xes;" "s.e.x and Primitive Social Control," _ibid._, III, 754ff.; "s.e.x and Primitive Industry," _ibid._, IV, 474ff.; "s.e.x and Primitive Morality," _ibid._, IV, 774ff.; "The Psychology of Modesty and Clothing," _ibid._, V, 246ff.; "The Advent.i.tious Character of Woman," _ibid._, XII, 32ff.; "The Mind of Woman and the Lower Races," _ibid._, XII, 435ff.; "The Psychology of Exogamy," in the _Zeitschrift fur Socialwissenschaft_, V, 1ff., with the t.i.tle, "Der Ursprung der Exogamie;" "s.e.x and Social Feeling," in the _Psychological Review_, XI, 61ff., with the t.i.tle, "The s.e.xual Element in Sensibility." Portions of a paper printed in the _Forum_, x.x.xVI, 305ff., with the t.i.tle, "Is the Human Brain Stationary?"

are incorporated in the paper on "The Mind of Woman and the Lower Races," and portions of a paper printed in the _American Journal of Sociology_, IX, 593ff., with the t.i.tle, "The Psychology of Race-Prejudice," are incorporated in the paper on "s.e.x and Social Feeling." I acknowledge the courtesy of the editors of these journals for permission to reprint.

W.I.T.

ORGANIC DIFFERENCES IN THE s.e.xES

A grand difference between plant and animal life lies in the fact that the plant is concerned chiefly with storing energy, and the animal with consuming it. The plant by a very slow process converts lifeless into living matter, expending little energy and living at a profit.

The animal is unable to change lifeless into living matter, but has developed organs of locomotion, ingestion, and digestion which enable it to prey upon the plant world and upon other animal forms; and in contrast with plant life it lives at a loss of energy. Expressed in biological formula, the habit of the plant is predominantly anabolic, that of the animal predominantly katabolic.

Certain biologists, limiting their attention in the main to the lower forms of life, have maintained very plausibly that males are more katabolic than females, and that maleness is the product of influences tending to produce a katabolic habit of body.[1] If this a.s.sumption is correct, maleness and femaleness are merely a repet.i.tion of the contrast existing between the animal and the plant. The katabolic animal form, through its rapid destruction of energy, has been carried developmentally away from the anabolic plant form; and of the two s.e.xes the male has been carried farther than the female from the plant process. The body of morphological, physiological, ethnological, and demographic data which follows becomes coherent, indeed, only on the a.s.sumption that woman stands nearer to the plant process than man, representing the constructive as opposed to the disruptive metabolic tendency.[2]

The researches of Dusing,[3] supplementing the antecedent observations of Ploss,[4] and further supplemented by the ethnological data collected by Westermarck,[5] seem to demonstrate a connection between an abundance of nutrition and females, and between scarcity and males, in relatively higher animal forms and in man. The main facts in support of the theory that such a connection exists are the following: Furriers testify that rich regions yield more furs from females and poor regions more from males. In high alt.i.tudes, where nutrition is scant, the birthrate of boys is high as compared with lower alt.i.tudes in the same locality. Ploss has pointed out, for instance, that in Saxony from 1847 to 1849 the yield of rye fell, and the birth-rate of boys rose with the approach of high alt.i.tudes. More boys are born in the country than in cities, because city diet is richer, especially in meat; Dusing shows that in Prussia the numerical excess of boys is greatest in the country districts, less in the villages, still less in the cities, and least in Berlin.[6] In times of war, famine, and migration more boys are born, and more are born also in poor than in well-to-do families. European statistics show that when food-stuffs are high or scarce the number of marriages diminishes, and in consequence a diminished number of births follows, and a heightened percentage of boys; with the recurrence of prosperity and an increased number of marriages and births, the percentage of female births rises (though it never equals numerically that of the males).[7]

More children are born from warm-weather than from cold-weather conceptions,[8] but relatively more boys are born from cold-weather conceptions. Professor Axel Key has shown from statistics of 18,000 Swedish school children that from the end of November and the beginning of December until the end of March or the middle of April, growth in children is feeble. From July-August to November-December their daily increase in weight is three times as great as during the winter months.[9] This is evidence in confirmation of a connection between maleness, slow growth, and either poor nutrition or cold weather, or both. Professor Key's investigations[10] have also confirmed the well-known fact that maturity is reached earlier in girls than in boys and have shown that in respect of growth the ill-nourished girls follow the law of growth of the boys. Growth is a function of nutrition, and p.u.b.erty is a sign that somatic growth is so far finished that the organism produces a surplus of nutrition to be used in reproduction. Organically reproduction is also a function of nutrition, and, as Spencer pointed out, is to be regarded as discontinuous growth. The fact than an anabolic surplus, preparatory to the katabolic process of reproduction, is stored at an earlier period in the female than in the male, and that this period is r.e.t.a.r.ded in the ill-nourished female, is a confirmation of the view that femaleness is an expression of the tendency to store nutriment, and explains also the infantile somatic characters of woman. Finally, the fact that polyandry is found almost exclusively in poor countries, coupled with the fact that ethnologists uniformly report a scarcity of women in those countries, permits us to attribute polyandry to a scarcity of women and scarcity of women to poor food conditions.

This evidence should be considered in connection with the experiments of Yung on tadpoles, of Siebold on wasps, and of Klebs on the modification of male and female organs in plants:

According to Yung, tadpoles pa.s.s through an hermaphroditic stage, in common, according to other authorities, with most animals.... When the tadpoles were left to themselves, the females were rather in the majority. In three lots the proportion of females to males was: 54-46, 61-39, 56-44. The average number of females was thus about fifty-seven in the hundred. In the first brood, by feeding one set with beef, Yung raised the percentage of females from 54 to 78: in the second, with fish, the percentage rose from 61 to 81; while in the third set, when the especially nutritious flesh of frogs was supplied, the percentage rose from 56 to 92. That is to say, in the last case the result of high feeding was that there were 92 females and 8 males.[11]

Similarly, the experiments of Siebold on wasps show that the percentage of females increases from spring to August, and then diminishes. We may conclude without scruple that the production of females from fertilized ova increases with the temperature and food supply, and decreases as these diminish.[12]

Nor are there many facts more significant than the simple and well-known one that within the first eight days of larval life the addition of food will determine the striking and functional differences between worker and queen.[13]

It is certainly no mere chance, but agrees with other well-known facts, that for the generation of the female organ more favorable external circ.u.mstances must prevail, while the male organ may develop under very much more unfavorable conditions.[14]

These facts are not conclusive, but they all point in the same direction, and are probably sufficient to establish a connection between food conditions and the determination of s.e.x. But behind the mere fact that a different att.i.tude toward food determines difference of s.e.x lies the more fundamental--indeed, the real--explanation of the fact, and this chemists and physiologists are not at present able to give us. Researches must be carried farther on the effect of temperature, light, and water on variation, before we may hope to reach a positive conclusion. We can only a.s.sume that the chemical const.i.tution of the organism at a given moment conditions the s.e.x of the offspring, and is itself conditioned by various factors--light, heat, water, electricity, etc.--and that food is one of these variables.[15] It is sufficient for our present purpose that s.e.x is a const.i.tutional matter, indirectly dependent upon food conditions; that the female is the result of a surplus of nutrition; and that the relation reported among the lower forms persists in the human species.

In close connection with the foregoing we have the fact, reported by Maupas,[16] that certain Infusorians are capable of reproducing as.e.xually for a number of generations, but that, unless the individuals are s.e.xually fertilized by crossing with unrelated forms of the same species, they finally exhibit all the signs of senile degeneration, ending in death.[17] After s.e.xual conjugation there was an access of vitality, and the as.e.xual reproduction proceeded as before. "The evident result of these long and fatiguing experiments is that among the ciliates the life of the species is decomposed into evolutional cycles, each one having for its point of departure an individual regenerated and rejuvenated by s.e.xual copulation."[18]

The results obtained by Maupas receive striking confirmation in the universal experience of stock-breeders, that, in order to keep a breed in health, it is necessary to cross it occasionally with a distinct but allied variety. It appears, then, that a mixture of blood has a favorable effect on the metabolism of the organism, comparable to that of abundant nutrition, and that innutrition and in-and-in breeding are alike prejudicial.

If this is true, and if heightened nutrition yields an increased proportion of females, we ought to find that breeding-out is favorable to the production of females, and breeding-in to the production of males; and a considerable body of evidence in favor of this a.s.sumption exists.[19]

Observations of above 4,000 cases show that, among horses, the more the parent animals differ in color, the more the female foals outnumber the male. Similarly, in-and-in-bred cattle give an excessively large number of bull calves. Liaisons produce an abnormally large proportion of females;[20] incestuous unions, of males.[21] Among the Jews, who frequently marry cousins, the percentage of male births is very high.

According to Mr. Jacobs' comprehensive ma.n.u.script collection of Jewish statistics ... the average proportion of male and female Jewish births registered in various countries is 114.5 males to 100 females, whilst the average proportion among the non-Jewish population of the corresponding countries is 105.25 males to 100 females.... His collection includes details of 118 mixed marriages; of these 28 are sterile, and in the remainder there are 145 female children and 122 male--that is, 118.82 females to 100 males.[22]

The testimony is also tolerably full that among _metis_ and among exogamous peoples the female birth-rate is often excessively high.[23]

Viewed with reference to activity, the animal is an advance on the plant, from which it departs by morphological and physiological variations suited to a more energized form of life; and the female may be regarded as the animal norm from which the male departs by further morphological variations. It is now well known that variations are more frequent and marked in males than in females. Among the lower forms, in which activity is more directly determined mechanically by the stimuli of heat, light, and chemical attraction, and where in general the food and light are evenly distributed through the medium in which life exists, and where the limits of variation are consequently small, the const.i.tutional nutritive tendency of the female manifests itself in size. Among many Cephalopoda and Cirripedia, and among certain of the Articulata, the female is larger than the male. Female spiders, bees, wasps, hornets, and b.u.t.terflies are larger than the males, and the difference is noticeable even in the larval stage. So considerable is the difference in size between the male and female coc.o.o.ns of the silk-moth that in France they are separated by a particular mode of weighing.[24] The same superiority of the female is found among fishes and reptiles; and this relation, wherever it occurs, may be a.s.sociated with a habit of life in which food conditions are simple and stimuli mandatory. As we rise in the scale toward backboned and warm-blooded animals, the males become larger in size; and this reversal of relation, like the development of offensive and defensive weapons, is due to the superior variational tendency of the male, resulting in characters which persist in the species wherever they prove of life-saving advantage.[25]

The superior activity and variability of the male among lower forms has been pointed out in great detail by Darwin and confirmed by others.

Throughout the animal kingdom, when the s.e.xes differ in external appearance, it is, with rare exceptions, the male which has been more modified; for, generally, the female retains a closer resemblance to the young of her own species, and to other adult members of the same group. The cause of this seems to lie in the males of almost all animals having stronger pa.s.sions than the females.[26]

Darwin explains the greater variability of the males--as shown in more brilliant colors, ornamental feathers, scent-pouches, the power of music, spurs, larger canines and claws, horns, antlers, tusks, dewlaps, manes, crests, beards, etc.--as due to the operation of s.e.xual selection, meaning by this "the advantage which certain individuals have over others of the same s.e.x and species solely in respect of reproduction,"[27] the female choosing to pair with the more attractive male, or the stronger male prevailing in a contest for the female. Wallace[28] advanced the opposite view, that the female owes her soberness to the fact that only inconspicuous females have in the struggle for existence escaped destruction during the breeding season. There are fatal objections to both these theories; and, taking his cue from Tylor,[29] Wallace himself, in a later work, suggested what is probably the true explanation, namely, that the superior variability of the male is const.i.tutional, and due to general laws of growth and development. "If ornament," he says, "is the natural product and direct outcome of superabundant health and vigor, then no other mode of selection is needed to account for the presence of such ornament."[30] That a tendency to spend energy more rapidly should result in more striking morphological variation is to be expected; or, put otherwise, the fact of a greater variational tendency in the male is the outcome of a const.i.tutional inclination to destructive metabolism. It is a general law in the courtship of the s.e.xes that the male seeks the female. The secondary s.e.xual characters of the male are developed with p.u.b.erty, and in some cases these s.e.xual distinctions come and go with the breeding season. What we know as physiological energy is the result of the dissociation of atoms in the organism; expressions of energy are the accompaniment of the katabolic or breaking-up process, and the brighter color of the male, especially at the breeding season, results from the fact that the waste products of the katabolism are deposited as pigments.

When we compare the s.e.xes of mankind morphologically, we find a greater tendency to variation in man:[31]

All the secondary s.e.xual characters of man are highly variable, even within the limits of the same race; and they differ much in the several races.... Numerous measurements carefully made of the stature, the circ.u.mference of the neck and chest, the length of the backbone and of the arms, in various races ... nearly all show that the males differ much more from one another than do the females. This fact indicates that, as far as these characters are concerned, it is the male which has been chiefly modified, since the several races diverged from their common stock.[32]

Morphologically the development of man is more accentuated than that of woman. Anthropologists, indeed, regard woman as intermediate in development between the child and the man.

The outlines of the adult female cranium are intermediate between those of the child and the adult man; they are softer, more graceful and delicate, and the apophyses and ridges for the attachment of muscles are less p.r.o.nounced,... the forehead is ... more perpendicular, to such a degree that in a group of skulls those of the two s.e.xes have been mistaken for different types; the superciliary ridges and the glabella are less developed, often not at all; the crown is higher and more horizontal; the brain weight and cranial capacity are less; the mastoid apophyses, the inion, the styloid apophyses, and the condyles of the occipital are of less volume, the zygomatic and alveolar arches are more regular.[33]

Wagner decided that the brain of a woman, taken as a whole, is uniformly in a more or less embryonic condition. Huschke says that woman is always a growing child, and that her brain departs from the infantile type no more than the other portions of her body.[34]

Weisbach[35] pointed out that the limits of variation in the skull of man are greater than in that of woman.

Several observers have recorded the opinion that women of dolichocephalic races are more brachycephalic, and women of brachycephalic races more dolichocephalic, than the men of the same races. If this is true, it is a remarkable confirmation of the conservative tendency of woman. "I have thought for several years that woman was, in a general way, less dolichocephalic in dolichocephalic races, and less brachycephalic in brachycephalic races, and that she had a tendency to approach the typical median form of humanity."[36]

The skin of woman is without exception of a lighter shade than that of man, even among the dark races. This cannot be due to less exposure, since the women and men are equally exposed among the uncivilized races, but is due to the same causes as the more brilliant plumage of male birds.

The form of woman is rounder and less variable than that of man, and art has been able to produce a more nearly ideal figure of woman than of man; at the same time, the bones of woman weigh less with reference to body weight than the bones of man, and both these facts indicate less variation and more const.i.tutional pa.s.sivity in woman. The trunk of woman is slightly longer than that of man,[37] and her abdomen is relatively more prominent, and is so represented in art. In these respects she resembles the child and the lower races, i.e., the less developed forms.[38] Ranke states that the typical adult male form is characterized by a relatively shorter trunk, relatively longer arms, legs, hands, and feet, and relatively to the long upper arms and thighs by still longer forearms and lower legs, and relatively to the whole upper extremity by a still longer lower extremity; while the typical female form approaches the infantile condition in having a relatively longer trunk, shorter arms, legs, hands, and feet; relatively to short upper arms still shorter forearms, and relatively to short thighs still shorter lower legs, and relatively to the whole short upper extremity[39] a still shorter lower extremity--a very striking evidence of the inept.i.tude of woman for the expenditure of physiological energy through motor action.[40]

The strength of woman, on the other hand, her capacity for motion, and her muscular mechanical apt.i.tude are far inferior to that of man.

Tests of strength made on 2,300 students of Yale University[41] and on 1,600 women of Oberlin College[42] show the mean relation of the strength of the s.e.xes, expressed in kilograms:

Back Legs Right Forearm Men 153.0 186.0 56.0 Women 54.0 76.5 21.4

The average weight of the men was 63.1 kilograms, and of the women 51 kilograms; and, making deduction for this, the strength of the men is still not less than twice as great as that of the women. The anthropometric committee reported to the British a.s.sociation in 1883 that women are little more than half as strong as men.

The first field day of the Va.s.sar College Athletic a.s.sociation was held November 9, 1895, and a comparison of the records of some of the events with those of similar events at Yale University in the corresponding year gives us a basis of comparison:[43]

Yale Va.s.sar 100-yard dash 10-2/5 sec. 15 sec.

Running broad jump 23 ft. 11 ft. 5 in.

Running high jump 5 ft. 9 in. 4 ft.

220-yard dash 22-3/5 sec. 36 sec.

Miss Thompson, whose results were obtained in a psychological laboratory, concludes that in reactions where strength is involved men are clearly superior to women, and this is the only respect in which she finds a marked difference:

Motor ability in most of its forms is better in men than in women. In strength, rapidity of movement, and rate of fatigue they have a very decided advantage. These three forms of superiority are probably all expressions of one and the same fact--the greater muscular strength of men. Men are very slightly superior to women in precision of movement. This fact is probably also connected with their superior muscular force.

In the formation of a new co-ordination women are superior.

The superiority of men in muscular strength is so well known that it is a universally accepted fact. There has been more or less dispute as to which s.e.x displayed greater manual dexterity. According to the present results, that depends on what is meant by manual dexterity. If it means the ability to make very delicate and minutely controlled movements, then it is slightly better in men. If it means ability to co-ordinate movements rapidly to unforeseen stimuli it is clearly better in women.[44]

We have no other than a utilitarian basis for judging some variations advantageous and others disadvantageous. We can estimate them only with reference to activity and the service or disservice to the individual and society implied in them, and a given variation must receive very different valuations at different historical periods in the development of the race. Departures from the normal are simply nature's way of "trying conclusions." The variations which have proved of life-saving advantage have in the course of time become typical, while the individuals in which unfavorable variations, or defects, have occurred have not survived in the struggle for existence.

Morphologically men are the more unstable element of society, and this instability expresses itself in the two extremes of genius and idiocy.