THE DOMINANT SEX.*

I SupposE most of us as boys and girls have been intrigued and puzzled by those passages, to be discovered not uncom- monly in the most varied types of literature, which refer to the mysterious properties of Woman. Woman—with a big "W "—so often seemed to appear to writers as a being almost Wholly different from Man. She was strange, incalculable, fickle, intuitive, unplumbed ; she has (indubitably I) a "woman's heart." . . . On the other hand, the women we

knew as mothers, sisters, aunts, nurses and the rest appeared tons as perfectly natural phenomena, and indeed in many ways more comprehensible than our fathers and their masculine acquaintance.

Later on, as we grew up, the ma/es among us began to see the force of the remarks which had so perplexed us earlier ;

and yet some of us may have wondered whether the girls as they grew to wdmen did not find a precisely similar incon- sequence and incomprehensibility about men, but were restrained from formulating it by reason of the contrary convention already possessing the field.

The problem is indeed an important one ; for, properly understood, it involves the whole status of woman in the community. In order to form a judgment upon it, we require answers on a number of points of fact. First, is there to-day a difference between Woman and Man as finished products, and if so, how great is this difference ? Secondly, granted this difference, how much of it is due to inborn differences between the sexes, how much to the different social and domestic functions of the two sexes, how much to the influence of tradition and education ? And, finally, to what extent is it possible to increase or decrease the hereditary, the social, and the " traditional " difference ? The question is thus partly biological, partly historical and anthropological —sociological if you will.

The anthers of this book have attempted an answer to the problem. Their answer, if I may try to summarize it briefly, is as follows : the biological differences between the sexes in man are negligible, so far as they have an influence upon their social status ; this status is determined over- whelmingly by the ideas prevalent at the time, which in their turn help to determine much of the difference in social function between the sexes.

They document their thesis from history and anthropology.

According to them, there have been, in the most various races and stages of culture, communities in which Woman has been regarded as the dominant sex, in council and adminis- tration. Once this occurs, all the rest of the commonly received attributes of the two sexes are reversed—men are regarded as by nature coy and fond of finery, women as strong and full of initiative ; and social customs and institutions fall into line with this "reversed tradition," women being the suitors, feminine nobles and princes keeping male harems, boy babies being regarded as a misfortune, and so forth. They adduce ancient Egypt and ancient Sparta, some tribes of

North American Indians (when shall we prefer convenience to purism, and call them Amerinds as do the American ethno- logists ?), some African negroes.

But, they hasten to add, out-and-out dominance of either sex is bad. Poor social status, unequal rights in marriage and divorce, economic dependence or inferiority, and, up to a certain point, prostitution—these and other evils will be found burdening whichever sex is regarded as the inferior.

We therefore need a new belief and tradition, one of sex- equality, which will automatically bring about equality of social status and function between the sexes, and apparently is to minimize the biological differences as well.

• The Dominant S. By MathIlde and MathLas Vocally. Translated by E. and V, Paul, London : George Allen and Unwin, [1.0e. 6d. net.]

There are obvious criticisms of this standpoint. In the first place, while it is true that some decades ago a con- siderable vogue Was enjoyed by the theory that a matriarchal stage had been passed through by all or most civilizations, that belief has been more and more undermined by subsequent anthropological research. Matriarchy, or as our author calls it " the woman's state," was probably a sporadic phenomenon. Then a good deal of their evidence appears rather like special pleading. I think that scholars will need a good many more facts before they are convinced that women were truly dominant in ancient Egypt and Sparta and in the riegro tribes that are mentioned.

Finally, their biological judgment is profoundly at fruit. Do they, I wonder, realize that from the moment of fertilization onwards, man and woman differ in every cell of their body in regard to the number of their chromosomes—those bodies which, for all the word's unfamiliarity, have been shown by the last decade's work to be the bearers of heredity, the determiners of our characters and qualities ? Furthermore, they grossly over-estimate the ease of biological change. Of course the hereditary constitution can alter, and alter in regard to sex-difference as well as to any other character : we find degenerate females in moths, degenerate males in crustacea and worms ; biologically neither sex is necessarily inferior or superior, and all grades of sexual difference from the barest minimum upwards are possible. But any con- siderable alteration of the hereditary constitution is an affair of millennia, not of decades.

The physical differences between the sexes in man (quite apart from those that are part of the primary sex difference) are, though not great, yet distinct enough. Size, bodily pro- portions, amount of bone and of hair, voice, shape of extremi- ties—the secondary sexual characters are definite enough. But let us leave these and look at the mental differences. Here recent experiment has achieved interesting results. It has shown that a male mammal after birth may be made not only in many respects physically, but also psychically female by removal of its own reproductive organs and engrafting of those of a female, and vice versa. In other words, the physical brain with which the animal is endowed is sexually neuter, blank ; and in it the secretions of ovaries pick out and bring into action the nerve-paths appropriate to females, those of testes the paths appropriate to males. In man, not only does common observation as well as reasoning from lower forms Indicate that this is the case, but all special investigation goes to show that the sexual feelings, whether normal or neuter or abnormal, are in the great majority of cases inborn.

The differences then are considerable ; so considerable that they can never permit of the simple equivalence of the sexes. On the other hand, the superstructure of intellectual and practical life is potentially the same in both sexes. The recent Board of Education Report of the Committee on the differentiation of the Curriculum for Boys and Girls in Secondary Schools (London, 1923) has established that the intellectual differences between the sexes are very much slighter than popular belief allows. But it is temperament which in the long run decrees what we shall make of our intellects, and in temperament there is and will be—not for centuries but for biological periods—a fundamental average difference between the sexes.

This by way of criticism. On the other side of the account there is no doubt that our authors are right in emphasizing how the current tradition of society may accentuate or minimize or in some points override these differences, and they have given us a book well worth reading on this account alone. It is worth reading too for the extraordinary and entertaining accounts of various ancient or low civilizations, which, with the continual provocation of the main thesis, make it a difficult book to put down once one has started upon it.

I wish the authors would not in a sense defeat their own objects by going the whole hog when, as is so usual in biology the half or three-quarter animal is the real limit. Perhaps in a second edition they will mellow their views and turn their interesting and suggestive book into one of permanent value.

JULIAN Rummy.