The physical basis of personality / by V.H. Mottram.

  • Vernon Mottram
Date:
[1944]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The physical basis of personality / by V.H. Mottram. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    may seem obsessed by clothes and few men are. It seems natural that women should concern themselvçs with their adornment. The male who does so is an object of contempt. But in matri archal tribes we are told that the young men behave exactly like the women in our society and that the women heads of tribes complain bitterly of the frivolity of the young men. Perhaps the differences in chafacters between men and women descried by amateur ethnologists and psychologists are the result of circumstance and not of physical differences. (ii) Generalisation on insufficient basis is a besetting sin of the human race which may some day be overcome by a truly scientific education. Meanwhile we may tentatively accept the generalisations of those who meet large numbers of both sexes in a professional way—such as priests, doctors and psychologists. A few such generalisations are here collected: {a) A priest. In every man there is something of a pig and in every woman something of a cat. (b) A physician. A woman is moré self-centred than a man. She is the most important thing in her life. Next comes her eldest son and then perhaps her husband. (c) A psychologist. It is peculiarly distasteful to a man to have to work on problems of human relationship . . . for the woman the task is not so difficult. She meets her greatest inertia when the need is to become conscious . . . of accurate definition—not when dealing with relations. 1 We may add to these generalisations one from a novelist and two from an Oxford don. H. G. Wells writes that Men are slower and stupider; women quicker and sillier; C. S. Lewis, that women are more talkative when tired and men more silent; and that unselfishness to a woman means work for other people, but to a man not giving other people trouble. Speaking as a life-long feminist, as a married man of twenty years' standing and as a teacher in a women's college, the author gives it as his belief that there certainly is a marked difference between the personalities of men on the one hand and women on the other. Women have a distinct aptitude for detail and long-range planning; the male is bored with detail and prefers broad outlines; women, as is natural, are interested in homes, men in causes; there is little sodality among women and much among men. 1 M. Esther Harding, The Way of All Women, p. 301, Longmans Green & Co.