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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    Darwin held that in every female male characters, and in every male female characters, exist in a latent state, because of the in- heritance through each sex of characters of the other sex.* But these opposite characters often come to the surface, and appear, or exist in fact. It seems even to be true that always in the male appear some feminine attributes, and in the female some mascu- line ones. Indeed, it has been maintained, by Weininger, that the absolute male and the absolute female do not occur separately, but there are only intermediate stages between them.> The mixture is not only of the opposite primary sex-organs, as occasionally happens in hermaphrodites, but usually of the primary, more or less fully developed, of the one sex, with some of the secondary of the other. There may be all shades running between the ex- tremes. Yet most individuals are predominantly of the one sex or the other, with few noticeable characteristics of the opposite sex. A small percentage, however, contain enough of the opposite sex. to draw attention. Thus there have been women who ap- proach in resemblance to men, and have generally abandoned women’s function; and there have been men who approach in resemblance to women, and have generally slighted men’s work. ““Urnings,” or “ Uranians,” these have been fancifully named by an early Austrian investigator;® and by others they have been variously called the “third sex,’’” the “intermediate sex,” *® and the “alternate sex.” ®° They have not infrequently been described as persons having the body of the one sex and the mind, soul, or brain of the other.2° A peculiarity of persons so endowed is their 4 Animals and Plants under Domestication, ii. 26, 27. 5 Sex and Character, 7. SY iiehs ; Pode 6K. H. Ulrichs, himself one, who, in several publications in the sixties of the last century, under the nom-de-plume of “ Numa Numantius,” gave them this name, after allusions in Plato’s Symposium, 180D—181C, because of his admiration, like Plato’s, for such men. A little before, the Prussian J. L. Casper had written about them, and still earlier the Swiss H. Héssli. Since then many works have appeared on the sub- ject, among which may be singled out Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, pp. 333-461. 7 By E. v. Wolzogen in a novel under this title. He compared them to workers among ants and bees, which workers are, in fact, such beings systematically produced in those species,— and among bees, as Mrs. Gallichan notes (The Truth about Woman, 63), the female ovipositor, instead of laying ova, contains the sting (which is only a mass or mess of rotten eggs). j } 8 By Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming of Age, 120-40. He indulges in a revery about ‘‘a new sex” being possibly on the make, “like the feminine neuters of ants and bees, not adapted for cnidheavne, but with a marvellous and perfect instinct of social service, indispensable for the maintenance of the common life,” 73. But he says nothing about the development of a perfertile queen, or anything of the sort, to make up for their maternal deficiency. F i ‘ 9 By C. G. Leland in a work under this title, London, 1904, in which he advanced the visionary theory that the subliminal self is the alternate sex in us, asserting itself as female in man and as male in woman, p. 38. f ‘ 10 The term “‘ soul” is so used by Carpenter, op. cit., 123, 131 and by Krafft-Ebing, op. cit.. 399. Ulrich is quoted as employing the formula: “ anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa.” Krafft-Ebing ridicules Gley_ and Magnan for speaking of “a female brain” in a man’s body, op. cit., 342-3. He himself maintains it is “only a fem- inine psycho-sexual centre in a masculine brain, and vice versa,” 348n.; an he per- mits Kiernan to speak of “‘a feminily functionating brain” in a male body, and vice
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