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Why Women Are So: Chapter XIV: The Significance of Femininity

Why Women Are So
Chapter XIV: The Significance of Femininity
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table of contents
  1. Title Page
  2. The Hypothesis
  3. Section I: The Domestic Traditions
    1. Chapter I: The Conventions of Girlhood
    2. Chapter II: The Great Adventure
    3. Chapter III: The Career of Motherhood
    4. Chapter IV: Domesticity as a Vocation
  4. Section II: The Effect Upon Women
    1. Chapter V: The Feminine Temperament
    2. Chapter VI: Beauty and Weakness
    3. Chapter VII: The Pursuit of Dress
    4. Chapter VIII: Clothes and Character
    5. Chapter IX: The Virtues of Subservience
  5. Section III: Some Exceptions
    1. Chapter X: The Elect Among Women
    2. Chapter XI: The Phantom of the Learned Lady
    3. Chapter XII: Women Insurgents
    4. Chapter XIII: Literary Amateurs
  6. Section IV: From Femininity to Womanhood
    1. Chapter XIV: The Significance of Femininity
    2. Chapter XV: Family Perplexities
    3. Chapter XVI: The Larger Life and Citizenship

Section IV: From Femininity to Womanhood

Chapter XIV: The Significance of Femininity

"I consider it presumptuous in any one to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot be, by natural constitution. They have always hitherto been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a state that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised, and no one can safely pronounce, that if woman's nature were left to choose its direction as freely as men's, and if no artificial bent were attempted to be given to it except that required by the conditions of human society, and given to both sexes alike, there would be any material difference, or, perhaps, any difference at all, in the character and capacities which would unfold themselves."

—John Stuart Mill.

"We are probably in about the same position and stage with reference to the questions of sex as were the men of the eighteenth century with reference to the question of evolution."

—Lester F. Ward.

In discussing the difference between men and women, the words "male" and "female" are perfectly definite, but in the related terms "masculine" and "feminine" there is included a large number of physical, mental, and social characteristics which are variable and unstable, sometimes capable of a precise description, but oftener as accidental and temporary as the fashions of the times. The scientists who have tried to measure women by the physical and mental standards of men quite frankly admit that, beyond the primary sex differences, and a very few permanent secondary qualities, there is a vast debatable area of variation which must engage the attention of future investigators. There is no debate about the significance of a smooth face in women and of a beard in men, nor about the contrasting timbre of their voices, but whether the fact that women have fewer red corpuscles than men signifies that they are a feebler race, or merely less developed than men in our age and time, is an open question.

Whether less sensitiveness to pain and greater sensitiveness to emotions on the part of woman indicates an ineradicable difference of nerve centers, or merely of conventional training; whether she was born unstable and changeable, or made so by the limitations of her life—these and similar disputes have been settled, only to be unsettled soon afterward by equally scientific authority. In such a conspicuous matter as mentality the dogmatisms of research with regard to the inferior brain capacity and intellectual products of women, were scarcely uttered before they became untenable by reason of the achievements of women themselves—at first of a few brilliant exceptions only, and shortly afterwards, of an increasing number as education and opportunity were extended to them. As a current journal humorously puts it: women have lived to do everything that it was said they could not do, except grow whiskers.

It is only a short time—as progress goes—since men as far-seeing as Darwin and Huxley held that the "intuitive" or "womanly" quality of mind, the quick perception, and rapid imitation characteristic of women, put them in the same category with bygone civilizations and the lower races. But from the time that Buckle showed that the most important discoveries of modern time have resulted from the deductive method, that is, from the feminine habit of mind, there has been an increasing tendency to believe that imagination and intuition were effecting quite as much progress as the logical understanding. Certainly there is a consensus of opinion among modern psychologists and sociologists in placing higher value upon the very mental quality which was not long ago held to establish finally woman's inferiority.

The ground of the disputes over the qualities and capacity of women has come to lie quite outside the primary sex-functions, or even the secondary sex characters, which were evolved apparently to insure reproduction. Indeed, the characteristics in dispute range from the significance of the larger thyroid gland in the human female to the effect of voting on her loyalty to domestic duty—from the investigation of her senses to the causes of divorce. In short, it is no longer a question of what women could or could not do if they had an equal chance, but of what is likely to be the effect of their trying to do, under a handicap, whatever they have the courage to attempt. In our present stage, the conclusions as to the permanence or significance of any feminine peculiarity at which any observer will arrive are in accordance usually with his habitual anti- or pro- feminine bias. In this respect, the discussion resembles the attempt to determine species and sub-species in natural history. In any large number of specimens there are always some on the border-line; whether these will be named as new species or relegated to a lower place as sub-species or varieties, depends almost wholly on the personal idiosyncrasy of the naturalist.

In some aspects the woman-questions are analogous to race questions. We know tolerably well what degree of civilization the darker races have attained in their native habitats; but there is very little accurate, unbiased information as to the degree and conditions of the progress which any of these races has made in other climates, and under the stimulus of new environments. Only two decades ago it was confidently predicted on scientific grounds that the Hawaiian race would shortly die out; but their increasing birthrate and decreasing death-rate may now portend a chance of survival. Nor has the last word been said concerning their ultimate contribution to civilization, since the Hawaiian-Chinese half-breed youth have lately surpassed all others in the local schools.

An even more striking instance of premature condemnation of an apparently static race is afforded by the Chinese. It is scarcely half a century since China was an unknown country, and the Chinese—to our complacent view—a weird, incredible, uncivilized people; yet in that time China has risen to be one of the greater powers, and is, moreover, on the verge of developing suddenly, out of her village democracies, a modern constitutional government or republic. The guesses as to the Chinese capacity for progress have been favorable or unfavorable according to the critic's degree of instinctive race prejudice, and his equipment of hearsay or first-hand information. Surely, if in so short a time the "Heathen Chinee" can rise to be a progressive human being in our estimation, it is not impossible that women may become social entities, whose acquired "femininity" may be modifying faster than the carefully digested ideas of scientific observers.

After a round century of discussion and investigation, the real crux of the woman question is still whether some of the so-called secondary and all of the tertiary sex characters are inherent and relatively permanent, or whether they are merely temporary variations due to environmental and social causes. Granting that maleness and femaleness are fundamental and, in the higher orders of life, unchangeable after birth, are the peculiarities comprised in what is called "femininity" and "masculinity" equally fixed? For a good many hundred years it has been assumed that they were unalterable, but the discoveries in biology and the rise of democratic theory have together undermined this as well. as many other dogmas.

One of the most surprising results of this change in thinking about women is, that while the number of qualities denominated "strictly feminine" has been rapidly diminishing, masculinity has remained in the minds of most people, until quite recently, a fixed congeries of characteristics. Yet one has only to catalogue the men of his acquaintance to realize that manliness is scarcely a more definite conception than womanliness. Professor Sargent of Harvard University is quoted as having said recently that the modern youth is rapidly approaching effeminacy and the modern girl masculinity, in their physical type. Professor Gayley of the University of California about the same time characterized the male college student as follows:

"Busy to no purpose, imitative, aimless; boastful but unreliant; inquisitive, but quickly losing interest; fitful, inconsequential, platitudinous, forgetful; noisy, sudden, ineffectual."

Curiously enough, the adjectives—with, perhaps, the exception of "boastful"

—are precisely the ones applied to women. Professor Woodworth, the entomologist of the University of California, goes much farther in his views of the possible changes in sex-function. He suggests that we may be approaching a new social adjustment like that of the ant-colony, where, in certain members of both sexes, the reproductive function will be subordinated to other forms of efficiency. Altogether, the present views of scientific men are so contradictory and so revolutionary, and the type of domestic womanhood is differentiating so fast and in so many unexpected directions, that no one can safely commit himself to any dogmatic statement beyond the fact that whatever babies are born in the future will still be born of woman.

To the discussion of feminine possibilities the evolutionary scientists have made, so far, the most important contributions—perhaps because they may know better than other thinkers the stultifying nature of dogmatism and the danger of prophecy. The feminist movement, though begun in a period when it was expected that science would prove that woman had been and eternally must be inferior to man, has ended by showing that most of the things formerly assumed are either not so or, at any rate, questionable. Starting at this point, the Twentieth Century observer must ask: why are women as they are? The thoughtful person who sees what the semi-feudal, almost unreasoning peasant of Eighteenth-Century Europe has become in this country, under the stimulus of wider economic opportunities, and relieved from the pressure of militarism, may properly hesitate to predict what womankind might be with an equal liberation and as strong an impetus.

It might, perhaps, be asserted that the distance between the two extremes of opinion as to sex capacity is now generally in inverse proportion to the amount of exact knowledge of its manifestants. Certainly the sociologists who have taken the most pains to test out their material carefully are the least dogmatic as to what may be expected of women. Mr. Havelock Ellis, after a thorough examination of all the available data on sex characters, reached most inconclusive results, as may be seen from the following paragraphs:

"We have to recognize that our present knowledge of men and women cannot tell us what they might be or what they ought to be, but what they actually are, under the varying conditions of civilization. By showing us that under varying conditions men and women are, within certain limits, indefinitely modifiable, a precise knowledge of the exact facts of the life of men and women forbids us to dogmatize rigidly concerning the respective spheres of men and women. It is a matter which experience alone can demonstrate in detail. . . . The small group of women who wish to prove the absolute inferiority of the male sex, the larger group of men who wish to circumscribe rigidly the sphere of woman, must alike be ruled out of court. . . .

"The facts are far too complex to enable us to rush hastily to a conclusion as to their significance. The facts, moreover, are so numerous that even when we have ascertained the precise significance of some one fact, we cannot be sure that it is not contradicted by other facts. And so many of the facts are modified under a changing environment that in the absence of experience we cannot pronounce definitely regarding the behavior of either the male or the female organisms under different conditions. There is but one tribunal whose sentence is final and without appeal. Only Nature can pronounce the legitimacy of social modifications. The sentence may be sterility or death, but no other tribunal, no appeal to common-sense, will serve instead."

The contemporary psychologists, as well, speak in a very different tone from those of a generation past—both less dogmatically and more hopefully as regards what the feminine mind is capable of. Quite recently, in a discussion of co-education, Professor John Dewey wrote:

"Upon no subject has there been so much dogmatic assertion, based upon so little scientific evidence, as upon the male and female types of mind. We know that traits are transmitted from grandfather to grandson through the mother, even the traits most specific in nature. This, with other accessible facts, demonstrates that such differences of mental characteristics as exist are those of arrangement, proportion, and emphasis, rather than of kind and quality. Moreover, it is scientifically demonstrable that the average difference between men and women is much less than the individual difference among either men or women themselves."

As the conclusion of a recent examination into "The Mental Traits of Sex," Helen B. Thompson says:

"The point to be emphasized as the outcome of this study is, that, according to our present light, the psychological differences of sex seem to be largely due, not to difference of average capacity nor to difference in type of mental activity, but to the difference in the social influences brought to bear on the developing individual from early infancy to adult years. The question of the future development of the intellectual life of women is one of social necessities and ideals rather than of the inborn psychological characteristics of sex."

In the examination of female sex characteristics, the working hypothesis of the early Nineteenth Century was that these were nearly all fundamental, and, therefore, unchangeable; but the scientists, in the course of developing the evolutionary theory, have compiled a great array of facts, showing that some of these are much less fixed than others; and that some, once supposed to be immutable, never existed except in abnormal persons. Take, for instance, the conspicuous case of women's respiration, declared by Dr. Hutchinson in the Eighteenth Century to be costal, and, therefore, quite different from the abdominal type of man. For a hundred years this was taught as a physiological fact; and yet, in 1896, Dr. Clelia D. Mosher of Stanford University, and Dr. Fitz of Harvard, overturned simultaneously this "fact" by more accurate data, and the physiologies now state that, normally, women and men breathe alike.

The views of physiologists with regard to so deep-seated a limitation as the menstrual function are rapidly changing. The idea of the "curse upon woman," as developed by religious dogma, and the vulgar superstitions arising from it, have been displaced by the acceptance of menstruation as a perfectly normal function; and the incapacity which has often accompanied it in civilized woman is—according to the latest medical dictum—as remediable by education and correct habits as other functional disorders.

Between the Eighteenth and the Twentieth Centuries, the ground of debate regarding women has been gradually shifting from sex characteristics to the effect of the social environment upon women in producing perversion and limitation of character. Now, in all this series of assumptions, re-examinations of data, discovery of new facts, and making of new hypotheses, only a few women have appeared to give direct testimony. It has been an examination by men of phenomena relating to women as they appear to men to be. In the present state of conventional relations between men and women, men certainly know more about their own sex than about women; and if women are, in truth, the inexplicable and inconsistent creatures that they are commonly represented to be, they must know far more about each other's processes than any man could hope to find out. Only a human being combining all the experiences of man's and woman's life could really accurately describe the life history of either sex. Weiniger, a morbid but keen observer, has pointed out that every man has some feminine, and every woman some masculine, attributes. However true this may be, the differentiation of sex habits and thought is so extreme that each sex has lost in great measure the power to understand the other.

In the discussion now going on—of what women have been, should be, and should not be there is a missing factor. Not many men and, perhaps, only a very clear—thinking woman, can analyze and visualize the lives of women as they are on the inside. While a few notably sympathetic scientists, like Professor Ward and Professor Thomas, have brought out the effect of restriction and environment upon women, the full weight of social tradition in over-developing some of the superficial feminine qualities, and suppressing other deep-seated ones, has not been measured. Take, for instance, the assumption that most women think superficially and with less logic than men, which is probably a fact. Ward says they reach conclusions by intuition, a sort of short-cut method evolved by the emergencies of their lives. Yet any woman knows from her childhood that men prefer to do her thinking for her, and will disapprove of her if she sets up an opinion against theirs. In primitive ages not only was thinking unnecessary for a woman beyond the narrow range of her traditional duties, but it was an actual impropriety. Now only a genius, a reformer, or a mad person does what will be disapproved of. Until the last half-century, marriage was the only career open to women—a thinking woman was not attractive to men—therefore the astute young woman either stopped reasoning as far as possible when she came to years of discretion, or concealed her mental operations. Many a woman who attains her ends by coquetry and hysteria is, like the parrot who couldn't talk, keeping up a "devil of a thinkin'" all the while; and will confide to another woman, who is in the secret, a keen analysis of the issue involved.

At the same time a sort of compensatory habitude has been acquired in her extraordinary capacity for emotion. Many a man yields to unreasonable demands on the part of some woman because he is afraid she will cry or fly into a tantrum. Women, not being so illogical as they often seem, have concluded reasonably enough to use the easiest method of getting what they want. Indeed, throughout the ages there has been as high a premium on tears and temper in one sex, as on fighting and profanity in the other. On the other hand, although men are as a rule more self-controlled than women—mothers rarely find marked differences in this respect between little boys and girls, when held to identical standards of self-restraint.

In short, tradition and convention have operated with much more force upon women than upon men; and, until the Nineteenth Century in America, the opportunity for self-expression on the part of women has been much less. So long as a man was law-abiding and self-supporting, he might be as eccentric as he chose in minor social matters without incurring any disastrous social penalty; but non-conformity to social conventions on the part of women has always carried with it a disproportionate disgrace.

The loosening up of all conventions and dogmas, social and religious, in the Twentieth Century, is releasing an extraordinary variety of human nature; but the predominant type of womanhood still remains that of the middle Nineteenth Century, produced by a purely domestic life and the now fast-vanishing standard of what is properly feminine. Men are a sex and something more. If they were judged historically, merely by their achievements in paternity, and if their opportunities in life had been limited for an incalculable time to the field of domesticity, they also might show the marks of a confined and stunted existence. This explains, from a woman's standpoint, why women have been until recently The Sex, and so little more. For women are pretty much the product of what they were taught they should be, modified by the opportunity they have had to be otherwise.

Quite recently there have been a few serious books by men in which women are examined from the research standpoint: in which they are compared with men, biologically, psychologically, ethnologically. But, however useful as contributions to the natural history of the human female, they tend almost inevitably to overemphasize the sex characters and to revert to them as the obvious explanation of feminine character and conduct. It is plain that the study of women by men alone is as one-sided and incomplete as the studies of animals by the laboratory zoologist, when uncorrected by the field collector and the observer of their habits in the open. It may certainly be taken for granted that to men the processes of womenkind seem more complex and less consistent than their own; and there is, in fact, a whole area of thought and feeling in women of which not even husbands catch more than a glimpse now and then, and which has been described only indirectly, and often morbidly, in the "problem" fiction, which men as a class avoid reading.

Having assumed that women are inexplicable, most men approach such subjects as woman's education, or her economic status or suffrage, in a confused state of mind, which is a mixture of tradition and instinctive prejudice, modified in each particular case, by the few female types they happen to know most intimately. The most just-minded, even, find it difficult to reason impartially about any woman question as they would about other purely economic or sociological problems, because it is most closely allied to race questions, and, therefore, involves the more sensitive human relations; perhaps, also, in some cases, because they find a personal application which is unwelcome.

Again, although men may recognize among themselves a thousand shadings in masculine efficiency and morality, they put the women whom they respect and admire in one class, and those whom they use or "have no use for" in another; and, without reasoning at all, are apt to set down those whose deference fatters them as "womanly," and those who do not always agree with them as "strong-minded." This men continue to do in spite of the obvious fact that there have been evolved in the last century many differentiations from the original domestic and compulsorily chaste type,—types whose desires and functions both in the home and in society are correspondingly varied.

Chronologically, the Nineteenth Century covers the lives of three distinct types of women: the Colonial, born after the Revolution, but strictly adhering to the traditions of pure maternity and of domestic manufacture; the mid-century type, born before the Civil War, and in process of transition from a producing to a semi-ornamental class; and the later, transitional varieties, who, though inheriting earlier traditions, were unconsciously forced to break away from them by industrial and social changes which they did not comprehend.

The grandmothers of the middle-aged woman of today of American stock belonged to the first or left-over Colonial type; their mothers to the mid-century transitional generation; while they themselves are of many differentiating classes—some still purely domestic and clinging to the handicrafts of home production; others nominally domestic, but largely ornamental; still others struggling for a foothold in an economic world for which they have had no adequate preparation; and, finally, a few, better educated or more fortunate in their opportunities, who have successfully reached a degree of distinction under physical and conventional handicaps far greater than those usually suffered by their masculine models. All of these and many other variants were maternal in greater or less measure as temperament and fate determined. To the earlier type, marriage, maternity, and domesticity were inevitable and inseparable. The confusion of thinking in which both men and women now find themselves arises in part from the fact that many women in our day are seen to be maternal without being in the least domesticated; while a smaller number are essentially domestic without being in the least maternal; and a third group, both domestic in taste and maternal in instinct, are, nevertheless, making a place in the industrial world.

The fear which many intelligent men display at any proposal to alter the sphere of women comes, in some measure, from paucity of ideas. They have not studied the feminist movement, and they see the difficulty of readjusting the current ideas of family duty and marriage relations to admit women to larger liberty. They find it easier, therefore, to continue to assume that, men having made the world largely as it is, they should know what is best for women, and that no reconsideration is necessary.

Furthermore, the conditions of modern social life overstimulate the sexuality of men, and any change in the lives of women which might result in the limitation of their sex function is resented. Modern women, on the other hand, resent equally the pervasive belief that their sex functions represent their only really useful contribution to society. Half a century ago Thomas Wentworth Higginson voiced the views of a few whose number has now become legion:

"Every creature, male or female, finds in its sexual relations a subordinate part of its existence. The need of food, the need of exercise, the joy of living, these come first and absorb the bulk of its life whether the individual be male or female. . . . Two riders pass . . . my window; one rides a horse, the other a mare. The animals were, perhaps, foaled in the same stable, of the same progenitors. They have been reared alike, fed alike, trained alike, ridden alike,; they need the same exercise, the same grooming; nine tenths of their existence are the same, and only the other tenth is different. Their whole organization is marked by the distinction of sex; but, though the marking is ineffaceable, the distinction is not the first or most important fact. . . . This is not denying the distinctions of sex, but only asserting that they are not so inclusive and all-absorbing as is supposed. It is easy to name other grounds of difference which entirely ignore those of sex, striking directly across them, and rendering a different classification necessary. It is thus with distinctions of race or color, for instance. An Indian man and woman are at many points more like one another than is either to a white person of the same sex. A black-haired man or woman, or a fair-haired man or woman, are to be classed together in these physiological aspects. So of differences of genius: a man and woman of musical temperament and training have more in common than has either with a person who is of the same sex, but who cannot tell one note from the other. . . . Nature is too rich, too full, too varied, to be content with a single basis of classification; she has a hundred systems of grouping, according to age, sex, temperament, training, and so on; and we get but a narrow view of life when we limit our theories to one set of distinctions."

The over-emphasis of sex functions, and the domestic and family traditions which grew out of it, found expression chiefly in the Nineteenth Century in America. The lives of hundreds of women of the great, typical, middle, comfortable classes, both living and dead, have been studied, and are here interpreted as showing how coercive the belated conventions of feminine duty and behavior have been. They serve to explain the inconsistencies, the futility, the narrowness of the great mass of such women at the present time. To women who are struggling in the meshes of their own mixed temperaments, and the fast-changing conventions of the feminine world, here is encouragement as well as revelation. When men are able to free themselves from their traditional opinions about women, and to give as dispassionate thought to the efficiency of women as to other social problems; and when women as a class acquire the same belief in their own abilities as men now possess, the "woman question" will solve itself; for it will have become merely a phase of general progress, in which both sexes necessarily rise together.

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