The choice of a mate.

  • Ludovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario), 1882-1971.
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details

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

Credit: The choice of a mate. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    should we not take the female leg, and condemn the male straight leg accordingly ? A woman’s functions demand a broader pelvis than man’s. But is suitability to function to be a ground for a charge of aesthetic defect ? Is the cart-horse ugly because the race-horse is beautiful ? Woman’s legs start from a broader base than man’s, but another specific feature in her, which adds to the breadth of her hips and to the obliquity of her legs, is the peculiar construction of the head of her thigh-bone. As is well known, a lateral neck projects from the top end of the human thigh-bone, and this has a globular head, or condyle, which fits into a socket in the pelvis. Now, in the male, this neck is said by many to be at an obtuse angle to the shaft, but in the female to be almost at a right angle. 1 This would naturally accentuate the effects described. But whether this is so or not, a woman normally has a broader pelvic area than a man, and her legs descend in a way that gives them a knock-kneed appearance. To call this ugly and to try to modify it in the direction of male standards, is, I humbly suggest, Hellenic and modern stupidity. 1 2 “ We will have her with good hippes, I mean, For she will bear good sons, to mine intent.” 3 Thus spoke the rhyming chronicler, Hardyng, of the Bishop of Hereford’s mission to Flanders to choose a wife for Edward III, and thus every man would speak whose taste has not been tainted by the morbid tradition of Hellenism, or by feminist doctrine. What we chiefly need to-day, therefore, is an ¿esthetic cult freed from unconscious Hellenic bias, and sufficiently enlightened not 1 Langer disputes this (op. cit., p. 229), and says the angle of the neck of the femur has nothing to do with sex. Stratz suggests that an approach to the right angle at this point may occur in either sex owing to the weight of the body bearing on rachitic bones (D.S.W.K., p. 315). 2 As a proof of the benighted application of masculine standards to girls, I quote the following case. A perfectly normally formed girl of my acquaintance was made, on the advice of her gymnastic master, to stand for a certain time every day with a dumbbell between her knees, with the object of trying to push them out, the ignorant fellow having assured her parents that, as she could not stand with her heels together without her knees overlapping, she was knock-kneed, a “ defect ” he tried to correct by the method described. As, in view of the monstrous nature of this fact, the reader may conceivably question its authenticity, the girl in question, now an adult, has promised me to confirm the story personally if asked to do so. 3 Chaucer and His England, by G. G. Coulton (London, 1921, p. 183).