Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/275

 PSYCHOLOGY OF MODESTi AND CLOTHING 26 1

reinforced the already great suggestive power of the sexual characters.

In speaking of the relation of sex to morality,' I have already shown that the morality of man is peculiarly a morality of prowess and contract, while woman's morality is to a greater degree a morality of bodily habits, both because child-bearing which is a large factor in determining sexual morality, is more closely connected with her person, and in consequence also of male jealousy. Physiologically and socially reproduction is more identified with the person of woman than of man, and it has come about that her sexual behavior has been more closely looked after, not only by men, but by women — for it would not be dif- ficult to show that women have been always, as they are still, peculiarly watchful of one another in this respect. This twofold scrutiny of men and women, her own greater sexual responsibil- ity, her greater physiological affectability, and the fact that in the process of wooing she has had to encounter the advances of the sexually more active and sometimes unwelcome male, are responsible for woman's characteristic sensitiveness on the score of her bodily habits.

I fail to find in this study any confirmation of the disgust origin of modesty. We saw a minimum expression of modesty in the courtship of animals, where the modesty of the female was a form of fear on the organic side, but the accompanying movements of avoidance were, at the same time, a powerful attraction to the male. And we have in this, as in all expres- sions of fear — shame, guilt, timidity, bashfulness — an affective bodily state growing out of the strain thrown upon the attention in the effort of the organism to accommodate itself to its envi- ronment. The essential nature of the reaction is already fixed in types of animal life where the operation of disgust is out of the question, and in relations which imply no attention to the conduct of others. If any separation between the bodily self and the environment is to be made at all, it is putting the cart before the horse to make out that modesty is derived from our repugnance at the conduct of others, more immediately than

■ " Sex in Primitive Morality," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. IV, p. 787.