Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/478

 intellectually, the two sexes must move side by side to future evolution. At present, woman must unlearn part of her innate education, and acquire some of that of man; otherwise she cannot equal him in value of skilled labor. Woman must be content to grow up, to evolve, generation by generation, to a position from which she can compete with man in the fields of labor. I believe this condition of things not only can be realized, but in the course of generations will be reached. When we reflect that the present impaired value, in a labor point of view, of educated women is but the result of civilizing forces and the increment of inherited traits, and that women in lower or savage life fairly equal men in the value of their muscular development, we have every reason for this belief. The reader must bear in mind that I am treating of the sex as a unit. Individual exceptions, which always have occurred, and, however prolonged the existing relation of the sexes may be, probably will ever occur, do not apply as negative facts to my argument. The laws of sexual selection, of population, and of heredity, will oppose the advance of women, other than in this exceptional way. But there exists in society a force which is tending to the parallel evolution of the sexes. This force lies in the large excess of females in the adult population of many countries. Stern necessity will force—if this condition of affairs continues in the future—a large percentage of this excess to compete with man in the professions and skilled labor. Many of these trained women will marry and have children, and thus form nuclei, divergent lines from which will extend into posterity, ever adding increment upon increment to the forces which tend to parallelism in the evolution of the sexes.

The purely sexual anatomical differences I shall say nothing about; but the functional resultants of these anatomical conditions, both mentally and physically, must be studied with reference to their effect upon woman's chances of success. If we examine carefully the mental action of women, we perceive in it an undercurrent of sex. As there are organs which characterize sex, so also is there a sexual cerebration. We know from experience that this unconscious dominance of sex in cerebration in no way interferes with high culture, and the exercise of the best qualities of mind. It is a normal condition of mental action in women, but its existence implies conditions which may at any moment render mental action abnormal. Take the emotions, for instance, the undue exercise of which are so liable to assume morbid proportions, as in hysteria. Here sex, when it asserts itself unduly, obtrudes inharmoniously into what otherwise would be healthy mental action. It is in this class of mental actions, termed the emotions, that the mind of woman forms part of the sexual cycle. Some of these actions are so elementary that they are called instincts. The maternal affection, and also love, partakes of this instinctive character. The exercise of the sympathies is more general and active in women than in men. This is one of the features which give such beauty to