Book: Woman and Womanhood

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Observe, further, that these wonderful workers, so highly endowed in
terms of brain, are amongst the children of the queen, herself a fool;
and that it was the conditions of nourishment, the conditions of
environment or education, which determined whether the young creatures
should develop into queens or workers, fertile fools or sterile wits. We
have here an absolute demonstration that environment or nurture can
determine the production of these two antithetic and radically opposed
types of femaleness.

Now, amongst the bees, this high degree of specialization works very
well. How old bee-societies are we cannot say. We do know, at any rate,
that bees are invertebrate animals, and therefore of immeasurable
antiquity compared with man. No one can for a moment question the
eminent success of the bee-hive; and that success depends upon the
extreme specialization of the female, so as in effect to create a third
sex. Further, we know that nurture alone accounts for this remarkable
splitting of one sex into two contrasted varieties.

I have little doubt that a process which is, at the very least,
analogous, is possible amongst ourselves; nay more, that such a process
is already afoot. In Japan they have actually been talking of a
deliberate differentiation between workers and breeders; such
differentiation, though indeliberate, is to be seen to-day in all highly
civilized communities. Is it likely to be as good for us as for the
bee-hive? And, granted its value as a social structure, is it, even
then, to be worth while?

No one can answer these questions, though I venture to believe that it
is something to ask them. So far as the last is concerned, we must not
admit the smallest infringement of the supreme principles that every
human being is an end in himself or herself, and that the worth of a
society is to be found in the worth and happiness of the individuals who
compose it.

Can we, as human beings, regard a human society as admirable because it
is successful, stable, numerous?

The question is a fundamental one, for it matters at what we aim. As it
becomes increasingly possible for man to realize his ideals, it becomes
increasingly important that they shall be right ones; and there is a
risk to-day that the growth of knowledge shall be too rapid for wisdom
to keep pace with. We are reaching towards, and will soon attain in very
large and effective measure, nothing less than a _control of life_,
present and to come. It may well be that a remodelling of human society
upon the lines of the bee-hive is feasible. It was his study of bees
that made a Socialist of Professor Forel, certainly one of the greatest
of living thinkers; and his assumption is that in the bee-hive we have
an example largely worthy of imitation. But he would be the first to
admit that, as the ordinary Socialist has yet to learn, the nature of
the society is ultimately determined by the nature of the individuals
composing it. It follows that the bee-society can be completely, or, at
all events substantially, imitated only by remodelling human nature on
the lines of the individual bee. This is very far from impossible; there
is a plethora of human drones already, and we see the emergence of the
sterile female worker. But is such a change--or any change at all of
that kind--to be desired?

_The Terms of Specialization._--It surely cannot be denied that there
may be a grave antagonism between the interests of the society and those
of the individual. It is a question of the terms of specialization or
differentiation. In the study of the individual organism and its history
we discern specialization of the cell as a capital fact. Organic
evolution has largely depended upon what Milne-Edwards called the
"physiological division of labour." In so far as organic evolution has
been progressive, it has entirely coincided with this process of
cell-differentiation. That is the clear lesson which the student of
progress learns from the study of living Nature. Let him hold hard by
this truth, and by it let him judge that other specialization which
human society presents.

For this primary and physiological division of labour has its analogue
in a much later thing, the division of labour in human society, upon
which, indeed, the possibility of what we call human society depends.
And it is plain that the time has come when we must determine the price
that may rightly be paid for this specialization. Assuredly it is not to
be had for nothing. Dr. Minot considers that death, as a biological
fact, is the price paid for cell-differentiation. Now surely the death
of individuality is the price paid for such specialization as that of
the workman who spends his life supervising the machine which effects a
single process in the making of a pin, and has never even seen any
other but that stage in the process of making that one among all the
"number of things" of which the world is full. Here, as in a thousand
other cases, it has cost a man to make an expert.

How far we are entitled to go we shall determine only when we know what
it is that we want to attain.

If we desire an efficient, durable, numerous society, there are probably
no limits whatever that we need observe in the process of
specialization. Pins are cheaper for the sacrifice of the individual in
their making. In general, the professional must do better than the
amateur; the lover of chamber music knows that a Joachim or Brussels
Quartet is not to be found everywhere. Specialization we must have for
progress, or even for the maintenance of what the past has achieved for
us; but we shall pay the right price only by remembering the principle
that all progress in the world of life has depended on
cell-differentiation. If we prejudice that we are prejudicing progress.

Now nothing can be more evident than that, in some of our
specializations of the individual for the sake of society, we are
_opposing_ that specialization within the individual which, it has been
laid down, we must never sacrifice. And so we reach the basal principle
to which the preceding argument has been guiding us. It is that the
specialization of the individual for the sake of society may rightly
proceed to any point short of reversing or aborting the process of
differentiation within himself. Every individual is an end in himself;
there are no other ends for society; and that society is the best which
best provides for the most complete development and self-expression of
the individuals composing it.

But how, then, is the division of labour necessary for society to be
effected, the reader may ask? The answer is that the human species, like
all others, displays what biologists call variation--men and women
naturally differ within limits so wide that, when we consider the case
of genius, we must call them incalculable, illimitable. The difference
of our faces or our voices is a mere symbol of differences no less
universal but vastly more important. It is these differences, in
reality, that are the cause of the development of human society and of
that division of labour upon which it depends. In providing for the best
development of all these various individuals we at the same time provide
for the division of labour that we need; nor can we in any other fashion
provide so well. Thus we shall attain a society which, if less certainly
stable than that of the bees, is what that is not--progressive, and not
merely static; and a society which is worth while, justified by the
lives and minds of the individuals composing it.

We are not, then, to make a factitious differentiation of set purpose in
the interests of society and to the detriment of individuals. We are not
to take a being in whom Nature has differentiated a thousand parts, and,
in effect, reduce him, in the interests of others, to one or two
constituents and powers, thus nullifying the evolutionary course. But we
shall frame a society such as the past never witnessed, and we shall
achieve a rate of progress equally without parallel, by consistently
regarding society as existing for the individual, and not the individual
for society, and by thus realizing to the full his characteristic powers
_for himself and for society_.

In so far as all this is true it is true of woman. It has long been
asserted that woman is less variable than man; but the certainty of that
statement has lately lost its edge. It is probably untrue. There is no
real reason to suppose that woman is less complex or less variable than
man. She has the same title as he has to those conditions in which her
particular characters, whatever they be, shall find their most complete
and fruitful development. There is no more a single ideal type of woman
than there is a single ideal type of man. It takes all sorts even to
make a sex. It has been in the past, and always must be, a piece of
gross presumption on man's part to say to woman, "Thus shalt thou be,
and no other." Whom Nature has made different, man has no business to
make or even to desire similar. The world wants all the powers of all
the individuals of either sex. On the other hand, no good can come of
the attempt to distort the development of those powers or to seek
conformity to any type. Much of the evil of the past has arisen from the
limitation of woman to practically one profession. Even should it be
incomparably the best, in general, it is by no means necessarily the
best, or even good at all, for every individual. Men are to be heard
saying, "A woman ought to be a wife and mother." It is, perhaps, the
main argument of this book that, for most women, this is the sphere in
which their characteristic potencies will find best and most useful
expression both for self and others; but that is very different from
saying that every woman ought to be a mother, or that no woman ought to
be a surgeon. We may prefer the maternal to the surgical type, and there
may be good reason for our preference; but the surgeon may be very
useful, and, useful or not, the question is not one of ought. Thoughtful
people should know better than to make this constant confusion between
what ought to be and what is. Let us hold to our ideals, let us by all
means have our scale of values; but the first question in such a case as
this is as to what _is_. In point of fact all women are not of the same
type; and our expression of what ought to be is none other than the
passing of a censure upon Nature for her deeds. We may know better than
she, or, as has happened, we may know worse.




VII

BEFORE WOMANHOOD


We have seen that the sex of the individual is already determined as
early as any other of his or her characters, though the realization of
the potentialities of that sex may be much modified by nurture, as in
the contrasted cases of the queen bee and the worker bee. Children,
then, are already of one sex or other, and though our business in the
present volume is not childhood of either sex, a few points are worth
noting before we take up the consideration of the individual at the
period when the distinctive characteristics of sex make their effective
appearance.

Despite the abundance of the material and the opportunities for
observation, we are at present without decisive evidence as to the
distinctiveness of sex in any effective way during childhood. Here, as
elsewhere, we have to guard ourselves against the influences of nurture
in the widest sense of the word; as when, to take an extreme case, we
distinguish between the boy and the girl because the hair of the one is
cut and of the other is not. The natural, as distinguished from the
nurtural, distinctions at this period are probably much fewer than is
supposed. It is asserted--to take physical characters first--that the
girl of ten gives out in breathing considerably less carbonic acid than
her brother of the same age, thus foreshadowing the difference between
the sexes which is recognized in later years. If this fact be critically
established it is of very great interest, showing that the sex
distinction effectively makes its presence felt in the most essential
processes of the body. But we should require to be satisfied that the
observations were sufficiently numerous, and were made under absolutely
equal conditions, and with due allowance for difference in body-weight.
They would be the more credible if it were also shown that the number of
the red blood corpuscles were smaller in girls than in boys in parallel
with the difference between the sexes in later years.

Children of both sexes have fewer red blood corpuscles in a given
quantity of blood and a smaller proportion of the red colouring matter,
or haemoglobin, than adults. Women have very definitely fewer red blood
corpuscles than men, and a smaller proportion of haemoglobin, and their
blood is more watery. According to one authority this difference in the
haemoglobin can be observed from the ages of eleven to fifty, but not
before. The specific gravity of the blood is found to be the same in
both sexes before the fifteenth year. Thereafter, that of the boy's
blood rises, and between seventeen and forty-five is definitely higher
than in women of the corresponding age. It thus seems quite clear that,
as we should expect, these differences in the blood, which are
certainly, as Dr. Havelock Ellis says, fundamental, make their
appearance definitely at puberty--a fact which supports the view that
fundamental differences of practical importance between the two sexes
before that age are not to be found. Careful comparative study of the
pulse of children is hitherto somewhat inconclusive, though it is well
known that the pulse is more rapid in women than in men.

On the other hand, it seems clear as regards respiration that as early
as the age of twelve there are definite differences between the sexes.
Several thousands of American school children were examined, and between
the ages of six and nineteen the boys were throughout superior in lung
capacity. The girls had almost reached their maximum capacity at the age
of twelve, and thereafter the difference, till then slight, rapidly
increased.[6] It appears that from eight to fifteen years of age a boy
burns more carbon than a girl, the difference, however, being not great.
But at puberty the boy proceeds to consume very nearly twice as much
carbon per hour as his sister.

Perhaps the matter need not be pursued further. It is sufficient for us
to recognize that puberty is really the critical time, and that in the
consideration of womanhood we may, on the whole, be justified in looking
upon the problem of the girl before that age as almost identical with
her brother's. Yet we must be reasonably cautious, since our knowledge
is small, and there is some by no means negligible evidence of
fundamental physiological differences between the sexes before puberty,
relatively slight though these may be. Therefore, though on the whole
we need make few distinctions between the girl and her brother, and
though we are doubtless wrong in the magnitude of the practical
distinctions which we have often made hitherto, yet we must remember
that these are going to be different beings, and that the main
principles which determine our nurture of womanhood may be recalled when
we are doubtful as to practice in the care of the girl child.

Physiological distinctions, we have seen, probably exist during these
early years, but are of less importance than we sometimes have attached
to them, and of no importance at all compared with what is to come.
Psychological distinctions, we may believe, are still more dubious. For
instance, it is generally believed that the parental instinct shows
itself much more markedly in girls than in boys, and the commonly
observed history of the liking for dolls is quoted in this connection.
As this instinct bears so profoundly upon the later life of the
individual, and as we may reasonably suppose the child to be the mother
of the woman as well as the father of the man, the matter is worth
looking at a little further.

But, in the first place, it has been asserted that the doll instinct has
really nothing whatever to do with the parental instinct in either sex.
Psychologists, whom one suspects of being bachelors, tell us that what
we really observe here is the instinct of acquisition: it really does
not matter what we give the child, though it so happens that we very
commonly present it with dolls; it is the lust of possession that we
satisfy, and in point of fact one thing will satisfy it as well as
another.

The evidence against this view is quite overwhelming. We might quote the
universal distribution of dolls in place and in time as revealed by
anthropology. Wherever there is mankind there are dolls, whether in
Mayfair or in Whitechapel, Japan, the South Sea Islands, Ancient Egypt
or Mexico. Further, there is the observed behaviour of the child,
opportunities for which have presumably been denied to the psychologists
whose opinion has been quoted. The only objection to the theory that the
child will be content with the possession of anything else as well as of
a doll is the circumstance that the child is not so content, but asks
for a doll for choice, and will lavish upon any doll, however
diagrammatic, an amount of love and care which no other toy will ever
obtain. Further, if the child has opportunities for playing with a real
baby, it will be perfectly evident, even to the bachelor psychologist,
that the doll was the vicarious substitute for the real thing.

But now, what as to the comparative strength of this instinct in the two
sexes? Here we must not be deceived by the effects of nurture,
environment, or education. Though finding, as we do, that the little boy
enjoys playing with his dolls as his sister does, we refrain from buying
dolls for him, and may indeed, underestimating the importance of human
fatherhood, declare that dolls are beneath the dignity of a boy though
good enough for his sister. He, destined rather for the business of
destroying life, so much more glorious than saving it, must learn to
play with soldiers. In this fashion we at least deprive ourselves of
any opportunity of critically comparing the strength and the history of
the instinct in the two sexes.

There is good reason to suppose that the distinction between the
psychology of the boy and that of the girl in these early years is very
small. If boys are not discouraged they will play with dolls for choice,
just as their sisters do, and may be just as charming with younger
brothers or sisters. Nor is it by any means certain that this misleading
of ourselves is the worst consequence of the common practice. It is
possible that we lose opportunities for the inculcation of ideals which
are of the highest value to the individual and the race. I am reminded
of the true story of a small boy, well brought up, who, being jeered at
in the street by bigger boys because he was carrying a doll, turned upon
his critics with the admirable retort--slightly wanting in charity, let
us hope, but none the less pertinent--"None of you will ever be a good
father."

Thus, on the whole, one is inclined to suppose that the general
resemblance in facial appearance, bodily contour, and interests which we
observe in children of the two sexes, indicates that deeper distinctions
are latent rather than active. This is much more than an academic
question, for if our subject in the present volume were the care of
childhood, it is plain that we should have to base upon our answer to
this question our treatment of boy and girl respectively. Probably we
are on the whole correct in instituting no deep distinction of any kind
in the nurture, either physical or mental, of children during their
early years. Nor can there be any doubt, at least so far, as to the
rightness of educating them together, and allowing them to compete, in
so far as we allow competition at all, freely both in work and in games.

However this may be, there comes at an age which varies somewhat in
different races and individuals, a period critical to both sexes, in
which the factors of sex differentiation, hitherto more or less latent,
begin conspicuously to assert themselves. Here, plainly, is the dawn of
womanhood, and here, in our consideration of woman the individual, we
must make a start. If we recall the tentative Mendelian analysis already
referred to, we may suppose that the "factor" for womanhood begins to
assert itself, at any rate in effective degree, at this period of
puberty, when a girl becomes a woman; and that its most effective reign
is over at the much later crisis which we call the change of life or
climacteric. In other words, though sex is determined from the first,
and though certain of its distinctive characters remain to the end, we
may say that our study of womanhood is practically concerned with the
years between twelve or thirteen, and forty-five or fifty. Before this
period, as we have suggested, the distinction between the sexes is of no
practical importance so far as _regimen_ and education are concerned.
After this period also it is probable that the difference between the
two sexes is diminished, and would be still more evidently diminished
were it not for the effects which different experience has permanently
wrought in the memory. We begin our practical study, then, of woman the
individual, with the young girl at the age of puberty; and we must
concern ourselves first with the care of her body.




VIII

THE PHYSICAL TRAINING OF GIRLS


We shall certainly not reach right conclusions about the physical
training of girls unless we rightly understand what physical training
does and does not effect, and what we desire it should effect. This
applies to all education--that our aim be defined, that we shall know
"what it is we are after," and it applies pre-eminently to the
education, both physical and mental, of girls.

Now it will be granted, in the first place, that by physical
training--whether in the form of gymnastics or games or what not--we
desire to produce a healthier and more perfectly developed body. Some
will add a stronger body, but as this term has two meanings constantly
confused, it really contains the crux of the question. Stronger may mean
stronger in the sense of resistance to disease or fatigue or strain of
any kind, or it may mean stronger in the sense of the capacity to
perform feats of strength. It being commonly assumed that vitality and
muscularity are identical, this distinction is, on that assumption,
merely academic and trivial. But as muscularity and vitality are not
identical, and have indeed very little to do with each other, and as
muscularity may even in certain conditions prejudice vitality, the
distinction is not academic but all-important. I freely assert that it
is substantially ignored by those who concern themselves with physical
training, whether of boys or girls or recruits, all the world over.

Though a woman is naturally less muscular than a man, her vitality is
higher. This seems to be a general truth of all female organisms. The
evidence is of many orders. Thus, to begin with, women live longer, on
the average, than men do. In the light of our modern knowledge of
alcohol, however, we cannot regard this fact by itself as conclusive,
since the average age attained by men is undoubtedly considerably
lowered by alcohol, and of course to a much greater extent than obtains
in the case of women. But women recover better from poisoning, such as
occurs in infectious disease, and they are far more tolerant of loss of
blood, as indeed they have to be. The same applies to loss of sleep or
food, and to injurious influences generally. These indisputable proofs
of superior vitality co-exist with much inferior muscularity, and are
conclusive on the point. If men would make observations among themselves
and think for a moment, they would soon perceive how foolish they are in
crediting the assumptions of the strong men who so successfully persuade
the public that the great thing is for a man to have big muscles. Men,
muscular by nature, and still more so by nurture, are often in point of
fact really weak compared with much less muscular men who, though they
cannot put forth so much mechanical energy at a given moment, can yet
endure fifty times the fatigue or stress or poisoning of any order.
From the point of view of any sound physiology there is no comparison at
all between the absurd strong man and the slight Marathon runner of
small muscles but splendid vitality. If we are to test vitality in
muscular terms at all--that in itself being a quite indefensible
assumption--we must do so in terms of endurance, and not in terms of
horse power or ass power, at any given moment.

If, then, vitality be our aim in physical training, and not muscularity
as such, nor in any degree except in so far as it serves vitality, it is
plain that we shall to some extent reconsider our methods.

Pre-eminently will this apply to the girl. Just because she is now
becoming a woman, her vital energies are in no small degree pledged for
special purposes of the highest importance, from which we cannot
possibly divert them if we desire that she shall indeed become a woman.
Thus, though muscular exercise of any kind is certainly not to be
condemned, we must be cautious; for, in the first place, muscular
exercise is no end in itself; in the second, the production of big
muscles by exercise is no end in itself; and in the third place, all
muscular exercise is expenditure of energy in those outward directions
which are not characteristic of womanhood, and which must always be
subordinated to those interests that are.

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