Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/807

 SEX IN PRIMITIVE MORALITY 7S7

guards of the group as a whole, and not of the men only. The person and presence of woman in society have stimulated and modified male behavior and male moral standards, and she has been a faithful follower, even a stickler for the prevalent moral standards (the very tenacity of her adhesion is often a sign that she is an imitator) ; but up to date the nature of her activities, the nature, in short, of the strains she has been put to, has not enabled her to set up independently standards of behavior either like or unlike those developed through the peculiar male activi- ties. There is, indeed, a point of difference in the application of standards of morality to men and to women. Morality as applied to man has a larger element of the contractual, representing the adjustment of his activities to those of society at large, or more particularly to the activities of the male members of society ; while the morality which we think of in connection with woman shows less of the contractual and more of the personal, repre- senting her adjustment to men, more particularly the adjustment of her person to men. This represents the case as it has been historically, at least, and as it is at present for the most part, but I do not wish to imply that this difference is altogether inherent in the male and female disposition ; it is, in fact, partly a matter of habit and attention. It is now beginning to be true that the energies of women may find expression in forms of activity appropriate to their nature, and this will doubtless, in the long run, favor constructive, as over against destructive, modes of social interaction. The doctrines of the Sermon on the Mount and non-resistance, and the practices of asceticism and chivalry, in so far as they represent the sympathetic and passive side of the association, show something of the female quality ; but we may be sure that a society which has developed a system of approvals and checks based on the fact of strains will not be adequately regulated by any system of approvals and checks based on a non-strain theory, unless human nature is modified more deeply than anthropology gives us grounds to believe pos- sible.

W. I. Thomas. The University of Chicago.