Feminism / by Correa Moylan Walsh.

  • Correa Moylan Walsh
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Feminism / by Correa Moylan Walsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    more capacious brains. Female sexual selection of males may enhance this tendency—and so far Darwin was right. Also natural selection of sober-vested females, who escape capture by their enemies through less conspicuousness, enhances this differ- ence from the other side, in the case of birds, while greater retire- ment has the same effect in women,—and so far Wallace also was right. But neither Darwin nor Wallace went deep enough. There must be something to start the tendencies, which selection of either kind can only increase. This fundamental something seems to be the difference emphasised by Geddes and Thomson, itself the explanation of the primary or most distinctive sex- difference, but itself unexplainable.*® It is, then, futile to say that the differences which exist between men and women have been imposed upon women by the way men have treated them. MiZill, it is well known, went so far as to assert that “ what is now called the nature of women is an emi- nently artificial thing —the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others”’; and he denied that “any one knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes” so long as their present relation to one another lasts, although it did not prevent him from confidently maintaining that they are equal.®* Mill was not the first to say this,°* and he has had many 61 Cf. Elizabeth Blackwell: ‘‘ The healthy limitation of sexual secretion in man sets free a vast store of nervous force for employment in intellectual pursuits,’ The Hu- man Element in Sex, 29. 62 W. I. Thomas in his Sex and Society follows Geddes and Thomson in distinguish- ing men and women as more katabolic and anabolic respectively, and emphasises that animals in general are more katabolic and plants more anabolic, wherefore “‘ woman stands nearer to the plant process than man,’’ 4; and as the animal is more variable than the plant, so the male than the female, 13. He summarises as follows: ‘“‘ Man consumes energy more rapidly; woman is more conservative of it. The structural variability of man is mainly toward motion; woman’s variational tendency is not to- ward motion, but toward reproduction. Man is fitted for feats of strength and bursts of energy; woman has more stability and endurance. While woman remains nearer to the infantile type, man approaches more to the senile. The extreme variational ten- dency of man expresses itself in a larger percentage of genius, insanity, and idiocy; woman remains more nearly normal,” 51. The distinction between the tendency to- ward motion in man and toward stationariness in woman he treats as fundamentally important, deriving from it their respective life-habits and economic pursuits, 55-6, 67-8, 87, 92-3, 134-40, 149, 160, 196, 228, 291-2, 293-4. aye 63 The Subjection of Women, 38-9, also 104-5, 125, cf. 98-9. For a good criticism of Mill on this point see J. S. Stuart Glennie’s The Proposed Subjection of Man, in The Fortnightly Review, April, 1889, pp. 571-2. 64 Thus Hippel had said that so long as women have only privileges and not rights, they will never fulfil their true vocation; but give them their rights, and we shall see what they are and can be, Ueber die biirgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber, Werke, vi. 42, cf. 151-2, 167, 186, 224, 226, 241-2. So also Condorcet had thought more experi- mentation was needed before one could pronounce upon the natural inequality of the sexes, Fragment sur l’Atlantide, Giuvres, 1804, viii. 562-9. And Wendell Phillips had claimed it would take twenty centuries of the new experiment before it could be proved that ‘‘there is some distinctive peculiarity in the intellects of the sexes,” Shall Women have the Right to Vote? 12. Only just before, Emily Davies had written: ‘“ Until artificial appliances are removed, we cannot know anything certainly about the native distinctions,’ The Higher Education of Women, London, 1866, p. 167; and Gail Hamilton (in a slightly different application): ‘‘ Certainly we shall never know what woman’s natural sphere is, till she hae an absolutely unrestricted power of choice,” Woman’s Wrongs, 85, cf. 162.
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