Sex ratio

“ Politicians, publicists, and ecclesiastics all refuse to acknowledge the obvious fact that the increasing economic independence of women is alone responsible for this phenomenon.
Notwithstanding the fact that during the last twenty-five years marked progress is observed in the social and economic conditions of women, still the sexual position of the great mass of women has steadily declined. The fact that so far as her sex relations are concerned civilized woman occupies a lower position than that occupied by the female animal has already been noted in these pages. ”

“ With the exception of Europe, where, on an average, there are 1,024 women to every 1,000 men, the reverse is the case everywhere else. If it is further considered that in the foreign divisions of the earth, and even there where actual enumeration was had, information upon the female sex is particularly defective—a fact that must be presumed with regard to all the countries of Mohammedan population, where the figures for the female population are probably below the reality—it stands pat that, apart from a few European nations, the female sex nowhere tangibly exceeds the male. ”

“ Yet so inordinate is the sex-distinction of the human race that the whole field of human progress has been considered a masculine prerogative. What could more absolutely prove the excessive sex-distinction of the human race? That this difference should surge over all its natural boundaries and blazon itself across every act of life, so that every step of the human creature is marked 53“male” or “female,”—surely, this is enough to show our over-sexed condition. ”

“ A man does not object to being called “masculine,” nor a woman to being called “feminine.” Yet whatever is masculine or feminine is sexual. To be distinguished by femininity is to be distinguished by sex. To be over-feminine is to be over-sexed. To manifest in excess any of the distinctions of sex, primary or secondary, is to be over-sexed. Our hypothetical peacock, with his too large and splendid tail, would be over-sexed, and no offence to his moral character!
The primary sex-distinctions in our race as in others consist merely in the essential organs and functions of reproduction. ”

“ Such development would constitute excessive sex-distinction, and this is precisely the condition of the human race. Our distinctions of sex are carried to such a degree as to be disadvantageous to our progress as individuals and as a race. The sexes in our species are differentiated not only enough to perform their primal functions; not only enough to manifest all sufficient secondary sexual characteristics and fulfil their use in giving rise to sufficient sex-attraction; but so much as seriously to interfere with the processes of self-preservation on the one hand ”

“ From the fact that there is no equality of functions between the sexes one should not, however, infer that either sex is inherently superior or inferior to the other, or that they are unequal in their rights. ”

“ But, secondly, those women and men who assert the doctrine of the identity of the sexes are led to err, not because it can really be hidden from the most casual observer that there is a profound distinction between the sexes, apart from the case of the defeminized woman—but because, by a surprising fallacy, they confuse the doctrine of sex-equality with that of sex-identity; or, rather, they believe that only by demonstrating the doctrine that the sexes are substantially identical, can they make good their plea that the sexes should be regarded as equal. ”

“ One of the most striking features in our progress from barbarism to civilization is the proper adjustment of the work for men and women. One test of a civilization is the difference of this work. This is a question not merely of division of labor, but of differentiation with regard to sex. It not only takes into account structural differences and physiological disadvantages, but it recognizes the finer and higher use of woman in society.
The attainable, not to say the ideal, society requires an increase rather than a decrease of the differences between the sexes. ”

“ For, in her position of economic dependence in the sex-relation, sex-distinction is with her not only a means of attracting a mate, as with all creatures, but a means of getting her livelihood, as is the case with no other creature under heaven. Because of the economic dependence of the human female on her 39mate, she is modified to sex to an excessive degree. ”

“ And we are therefore assured that the endeavor of women to perform these masculine economic functions marks a decadent civilization, and is greatly to be deprecated. There would be some reason in this objection if the common racial activities of humanity, into which 159women are now so eagerly entering, were masculine functions. But they are not. There is no more sublimated expression of our morbid ideas of sex-distinction than in this complacent claiming of all human life-processes as sex-functions of the male. ”

“ He is a human creature as well as a male creature, and not aggressively masculine till it is time to be. Childhood is not the period for these marked manifestations of sex. That we exhibit them, that we admire and encourage them, shows our over-sexed condition.
58 IV. Having seen the disproportionate degree of sex-distinction in humanity and its greater manifestation in the female than in the male, and having seen also the unique position of the human female as an economic dependant on the male of her species, it is not difficult to establish a relation between these two facts. ”

“ The more absolutely woman is segregated to sex-functions only, cut off from all economic use and made wholly dependent on the sex-relation as means of livelihood, the more pathological does her motherhood become. The over-development of sex caused by her economic dependence on the male reacts unfavorably upon her essential duties. She is too female for perfect motherhood! Her excessive specialization in the secondary sexual characteristics is a detrimental element in heredity. Small, weak, soft, ill-proportioned women do not tend to produce large, strong, sturdy, well-made men or women. ”

“ Accordingly, recourse has been had to statistics, and an attempt has been made to reach, from the figures which they furnish, some certainty respecting which sex was the more numerous, and what should be concluded to be the cause of the greater prevalence of the one sex or the other. ”

“ This excessive modification she transmits to her children; and so is steadily implanted in the human constitution the morbid tendency to excess in this relation, which has acted so universally upon us in all ages, in spite of our best efforts to restrain it. It is not the normal sex-tendency, common to all creatures, but an abnormal sex-tendency, produced and maintained by the abnormal economic relation which makes one sex get its living from the other by the exercise of sex-functions. This is the immediate effect upon individuals of the peculiar sexuo-economic relation which obtains among us. ”

“ We lay on our backs on the sand and he continued his discourse.
"The practical abolition of sex has with us been a very gradual process extending over centuries. It began with that great social upheaval of which I have already told you. To declare the complete equality of men was to declare the complete equality of the sexes. It ended about one hundred and fifty years ago when the words "men" and "women" ceased to be used by first-class beings, and no distinction of sex was admitted. ”

“ He wanted the crowd to feel ridiculous. That object achieved, he proposed to turn his visitors to the right-about and send them home. He had been through this experience before, and felt comparatively sure of his ground.
Provided, that is, that one thing did not occur. There were women present.
Now women are exempt from the law of averages; the sex snaps its fingers at computations based upon laboriously compiled statistics. If the women—or more likely a woman—gave the men a lead, anything might happen. ”

“ My reply is that only in exceptional cases have women enjoyed the same opportunities as men. Yet these cases are sufficiently numerous to warrant the conclusion that nature affords no insuperable obstacle to sex-equality in brain; and that inferiority in the typical woman must be regarded as the result of her dependent economic condition, created by the artificial restrictions of man. ”

“ Has woman the same rights in the state which man has? This question may appear ridiculous to many. For if the only ground of all legal rights is reason and freedom, how can a distinction exist between two sexes which possess both the same reason and the same freedom?
Nevertheless, it seems that, so long as men have lived, this has been differently held, and the female sex seems not to have been placed on a par with the male sex in the exercise of its rights. Such a universal sentiment must have a ground, to discover which was never a more urgent problem than in our days. ”

“ As we have seen the primitive society, militancy favors a greater differentiation of sex status and of work than industrialism. In the primarily industrial nations, men’s and women’s work often overlap, and although we can recognize a sex division of work, the line constantly shifts to the economic advantage of women. In a militant society, the women of the higher classes are often shown a deference unknown in the lower classes, but this deference is not shown them as a sex alone, but because of their relation to those who stand highest in the state. ”

“ Everywhere he found the anticipation of an excess of girls supported and confirmed. In fact his investigations of the phenomenon led him to formulate and advocate a law that the better nourished and superior parent tends to produce the opposite sex.
In this case the women are in an inferior position, and in consequence worse nourished and practically exhausted. Amongst other neighboring races, where they live peaceably and domestically, the difference between the number of new-born boys and girls is not a very great one, although a small average appears in favor of the girls. ”

“ And I think, furthermore, that there is no country in the world where women are so much considered and cared for and sheltered, in every walk of life, as in America. In England and France,—all over the continent of Europe, in fact,—the other sex are deferential to women only from some presumption of their social standing, or from the fact of acquaintanceship ”

“ If you go in for independence—and do, by all means—don’t begin your sex emancipation with the sex methods of second-rate women. Men are supposed to be direct, straightforward, above the petty wiles to which women have been compelled to resort since man owned them. They are not, but, being the ruling sex, have forced the world to accept them at their own estimate. ”

“ Social selection did develop higher types of men, though sex-selection reversed still insisted on primitive types of women. But the educative influence of these primitive women, acting most exclusively on the most susceptible years of life, has been a serious deterrent to race progress.
Here is the dominant male, largely humanized, yet still measuring life from male standards. He sees women only as a sex. (Note here the criticism of Europeans on American women. "Your women are so sexless!" they say, meaning merely that our women have human qualities as well as feminine.) ”

“ The most curious of all concomitants of the legal subjection of men in England arise, first, that many men are not conscious of the real state of the law, and secondly, that a very loud-voiced minority of women, reinforced by sycophantic males, represent the law as being the apotheosis of unjust sex-privileges on the part of men. ”

“ And yet the actual presence of women at political meetings has not debased them but has raised the other sex. Coarseness has not become diffused through both sexes but has fled from both. To put the whole matter in a short phrase: The association of the sexes in the family circle, in society, and in business, having improved both, there is neither history, reason nor sense to justify the assertion that association in politics will lower the one or demoralize the other. ”

“ Whatever else stops, the woman must go on reproducing, as she did in the Siluria of Pteraspis; sex is a vital condition, and race only a local one. If the laws of inertia are to be sought anywhere with certainty, it is in the feminine mind. The American always ostentatiously ignored sex, and American history mentioned hardly the name of a woman, while English history handled them as timidly as though they were a new and undescribed species; but if the problem of inertia summed up the difficulties of the race question, it involved that of sex far more deeply, and to Americans vitally. ”

“ We only claim that the root of the relation of the sexes in America is today the economic basis of buyers and sellers of a commodity and that this basis of sex, sold as a commodity, affects every phase of our social life, and all of our social institutions, and that we fail to recognize these economic roots because of the leaves upon the social tree. ”

“ But omitting those activities for which women are, during large parts of their lives, physically incapacitated, or into which they cannot enter in considerable numbers without fatally diminishing population, we cannot define the division of labor between the sexes, further than by saying that, before civilization begins, the stronger sex forces the weaker to do all the drudgery ”