Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/30

 We can select instances at random of the non-conforming woman that are historic; though we shall better understand the wide distribution of the variants when we come to ordinary and private-life examples, and to what they say of themselves. Deborah, Boadicea, Hypatia, Joan of Arc, Elizabeth, of England, Christina of Sweden, Mary Somerville, Angela Postovoitov, Franziska Skanagatta, Anna Maria Schurman, George Sand, George Eliot, give clear traits of the kind sought. The bar, the clinic, the pulpit, the editorial-room, every branch of trade, many of the responsible interests of finance: the university, the gymnasiums, hunting-fields, shooting-boxes, even the army and navy—we have only to look about us to recognize this sort of woman that is only nominally womanly, according to correct prejudices. Let me take pains to remind the reader that I am not laying weight here, any more than in speaking of the divergent and inconsistent male type, on what is essentially a physical departure. The unwomanish woman is often wholly feminine in externals, and conforms to them with more or less care. Nevertheless outward unfeminineness of a woman, when it is marked, has rather more significance in our study than has the externally unmasculine in a man.

Whatever the other shortcomings from the correct standard of masculinity, it is in the emotional currents that a man shows to us often his most striking unconformity. These currents are the chief witnesses toward his male-sexual imperfection. Masculine geology is full of what are called "faults", discordant chemistry, mutinous strata. A man outwardly absolutely normal and regarded as of perfect normality of mind, can be a riddle to himself on account of his mysterious emotional eccentricity. A man conceals this, or anything else, far better than can a woman, because the method is less superficial. Shakespeare's ejaculation, "O, what may man