Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/472

456 of her social equality, which she had wrung from man during the period of classic civilization. Of all things, mediæval woman alone did not retrograde. I believe the modern woman to he the natural outgrowth of the woman of chivalry.

And here let me apply to this question the laws of heredity and sexual selection. These laws touch the human family with as much force as the lower forms of animal life. The fact that man is marked by intellectual power in no way exempts him from the operation of the fundamental laws of biology. Objections which, at the first glance, may appear to be well taken against applying these laws to explain the existing relation of women to the other sex, become of small moment when we consider that, in his sexual relations, man approximates to nearly the level of the lower animals. M. Quetelet, who has made this a special study, remarks as follows: "It is curious to see man, proudly entitling himself King of Nature, and fancying himself controlling all things by his free-will, yet submitting, unknown to himself, more rigorously than any other being in creation, to the laws he is under subjection to." Mr. Buckle, in the introduction to his "History of Civilization," carries the argument of Quetelet to even a greater extent. I think this will satisfy any possible objection to the propriety of applying these laws to the exposition of my subject.

Whatever may be woman's fitness in the future to become man's peer in the professions and skilled labor, there is this fact against her in the present: she is laboring under the accumulated inherited tendency of countless generations. That which had its origin in common with sister animals in physical and moral subjection to the male, has, in spite of the operation of that intellectual force which we see operating so potently at the present day to cast off this subjugation, continued in full force. I can explain this in no other way except as the result of heredity. This position of woman is as clearly a sexual trait as in lower animals. Darwin says that, "as peculiarities often appear in one sex, and become hereditarily attached to that sex, the same fact probably occurs under nature, and, if so, natural selection will be able to modify one sex in its functional relation to the other sex." Dr. Maudsley, in speaking of one relation of woman to man, says:" Through generations her character has been formed with that chief aim (marriage); it has been made feeble by long habits of dependence; by the circumstances of her position, the sexual life has been undesignedly developed at the expense of the intellectual." Mr. Herbert Spencer insists upon this. "Certain powers which mankind have gained in the course of civilization cannot, I think, be accounted for, without admitting the inheritance of acquired modifications."