Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/233

Rh are more alike physically and mentally than men, so their work is more alike. In domestic life, which still includes the mass of representative women, each one either does her own housework, or has it done by female servants whose labor is equally unspecialized. No man now in civilized communities makes his own clothes, yet this is not uncommon among women, and in primitive communities they may even spin and weave the material. Not only is their work and manner of work more primitive, but also their tools. In the German cities on market day, for instance, may be seen numbers of men and women bringing their produce from the country, the men using carts or wagons propelled by themselves or their horses, but the women bearing their burdens in baskets upon their backs in quite the primitive fashion.

Before attempting any summary of our results I must call attention to some recent biological researches which may throw new light on the natural relation of the sexes. It has been shown by Geddes and Thomson, Fouillée and others, that in many of the lower and simpler orders of animals the female is larger than the male. This is true, with exceptions, throughout the animal world as high as the amphibians, and is in close logical connection with certain other important differences between the sexes. These, observed also best among the lower orders, are as follows: The male is active, restless, agile. The female is passive and quiescent. She has lower temperature, greater longevity, and a larger fund of vitality; her birth is the accompaniment of conditions of better nourishment. The male is katabolic, representing the expenditure of energy, individualism, variation, and progress. The female is anabolic, representing economy and the building up, conserving, and reproductive functions. She is nearer to and more representative of the race. These, it is said, are natural sexual differences seen at the very threshold of life in the contrast between the male and female cells, and so far as these same differences appear in man and woman they can not and need not be accounted for by any theories of natural or sexual selection nor by artificial social conditions. Those peculiarities of modern woman which are contrary to the natural constitution of the female, such as her smaller size and her alleged retarded development, are rather the qualities in need of explanation. It has been suggested that the greater size and strength of the male among the higher vertebrates may be explained as the indirect result, in part, of his combats with rivals, and, in part, of his greater activity in protecting and supporting himself and his mate when the maternal duties of the latter incapacitate her for these actions, and furthermore that the retarded development of woman is due to artificial and unnatural restrictions arising