MENDELISM AND WOMANHOOD
We are accustomed to think of Mendelism as simply a theory of heredity, by which term we should properly understand the relation between living generations. Now Mendelism is certainly this, but I believe that it is vastly more. Already the claim has been made, though not, perhaps, in adequate measure, by the Mendelians, and I am convinced that their title to it will be upheld. Mendelism has already effected a really epoch-making advance in our knowledge of heredity—the relations between parents and offspring; but we shall learn ere long that it has yet more to teach us regarding the very constitution of living beings. As modern chemistry can analyse a highly complex molecule into its constituent elementary atoms, so the Mendelians promise ere long to enable us to effect an organic analysis of living creatures. For many decades past theory has perceived that, in the germ-cells whence we and the higher animals and plants are developed, there must exist—somewhere intermediate between the chemical molecule and the vital unit, the cell itself—units which Herbert Spencer, the first and greatest of their students, called physiological or constitutional units. Since his day they have been re-discovered—or rather re-named—by a host of students, including Haeckel, Weismann, and many of scarcely less distinction. The Mendelian "factors," as I maintain must be clear to any student of the idea, are Spencer's physiological units. Of course neither Spencer nor any one else, until the re-discovery of Mendel's work, had any notion at all of the remarkable fashion in which these units are treated in the process whereby germ-cells are prepared for their great destiny. The rule, as we now know, is that one germ-cell contains any given unit, while another does not. The process of cell-division, whereby the germ-cells or gametes[5] are made, is called gameto-genesis. Somewhere in its course there occurs the capital fact discovered by Mendel and called by him segregation. A cell divides into two—which are the final gametes. One of these will definitely contain the Mendelian factor, and the other will be as definitely without it. Definite consequences follow in the constitution of the offspring; and such is the Mendelian contribution to heredity. But we must see that these inquiries cannot be far pursued without telling us vastly more than we ever knew before of not only the relation between individuals of successive generations, but the very structure of the individuals themselves. It is by the study of heredity that we shall learn to understand the individual. For instance, experimental breeding of the fowl reveals the existence of the brooding instinct as a definite unit, which enters, or does not enter, into the composition of the individual, and which is quite distinct from the capacity to produce eggs. Here is a definite distinction suggested, for the case of the fowl, between two really distinct things which, for several years past, I have called respectively physical and psychical motherhood. The analysis will doubtless go far further, but already the facts of experiment help us to realize the composition of the individual mother—for instance, the number of possible variants, and the non-necessity of a connection between the capacity to produce children and the parental instinct upon which the care of them depends, and without which entire and perfect motherhood cannot be.
The Mendelians are teaching us, too, that their "factors," the units of which we are made, are often intertangled or mutually repellent. If such-and-such goes into the germ-cell, so must something else; or if the one, then never the other. There may thus be naturally determined conditions of entire womanhood; just as one may be externally a woman, yet lack certain of the fractional constituents which are necessary for the perfect being. Complete womanhood, like genius—rarer though not more valuable—depends upon the co-existence of many factors, some of which may be coupled and segregated together in gameto-genesis, while others may be quite independent, only chance determining the throw of them. And the question of incompatibility or mutual repulsion of factors is of the gravest concern; as, for instance, if it were the case—and the illustration is perhaps none too far-fetched—that the factor for the brooding instinct and the factor for intellect can scarcely be allotted together to a single cell.
This question of compatibilities is illustrated very strikingly by the case of the worker-bee. There is as yet no purely Mendelian interpretation of this case, Mendel's own laborious work upon heredity in bees having been entirely lost, and practically nothing having been done since. Yet, as will be evident, the main argument of Geddes and Thomson leads us to a similar interpretation of this case in terms of compatibility.
The worker-bee is an individual of a most remarkable and admirable kind, from whom mankind have yet a thousand truths to learn. She is distinguished primarily by the rare and high development of her nervous apparatus. In terms of brain and mind, using these words in a general sense, the worker-bee is almost the paragon of animals. The ancients supposed that the queen-bee was indeed the queen and ruler of the hive. Here, they thought, was the organizing genius, the forethought, the exquisite skill in little things and great, upon which the welfare of the hive and the future of the race depend. But, in point of fact, the queen-bee is a fool. Her brain and mind are of the humblest order. She never organizes anything, and does not rule even herself, but does what she is told. She is entirely specialized for motherhood; but the thinking, and the determination of the conditions of her motherhood, are in the hands of other females, also highly specialized, and certainly the least selfish of living things—yet themselves sterile, incapable of motherhood.
Observe, further, that these wonderful workers, so highly endowed in terms of brain, are amongst the children of the queen, herself a fool; and that it was the conditions of nourishment, the conditions of environment or education, which determined whether the young creatures should develop into queens or workers, fertile fools or sterile wits. We have here an absolute demonstration that environment or nurture can determine the production of these two antithetic and radically opposed types of femaleness.
Now, amongst the bees, this high degree of specialization works very well. How old bee-societies are we cannot say. We do know, at any rate, that bees are invertebrate animals, and therefore of immeasurable antiquity compared with man. No one can for a moment question the eminent success of the bee-hive; and that success depends upon the extreme specialization of the female, so as in effect to create a third sex. Further, we know that nurture alone accounts for this remarkable splitting of one sex into two contrasted varieties.
I have little doubt that a process which is, at the very least, analogous, is possible amongst ourselves; nay more, that such a process is already afoot. In Japan they have actually been talking of a deliberate differentiation between workers and breeders; such differentiation, though indeliberate, is to be seen to-day in all highly civilized communities. Is it likely to be as good for us as for the bee-hive? And, granted its value as a social structure, is it, even then, to be worth while?
No one can answer these questions, though I venture to believe that it is something to ask them. So far as the last is concerned, we must not admit the smallest infringement of the supreme principles that every human being is an end in himself or herself, and that the worth of a society is to be found in the worth and happiness of the individuals who compose it.
Can we, as human beings, regard a human society as admirable because it is successful, stable, numerous?
The question is a fundamental one, for it matters at what we aim. As it becomes increasingly possible for man to realize his ideals, it becomes increasingly important that they shall be right ones; and there is a risk to-day that the growth of knowledge shall be too rapid for wisdom to keep pace with. We are reaching towards, and will soon attain in very large and effective measure, nothing less than a control of life, present and to come. It may well be that a remodelling of human society upon the lines of the bee-hive is feasible. It was his study of bees that made a Socialist of Professor Forel, certainly one of the greatest of living thinkers; and his assumption is that in the bee-hive we have an example largely worthy of imitation. But he would be the first to admit that, as the ordinary Socialist has yet to learn, the nature of the society is ultimately determined by the nature of the individuals composing it. It follows that the bee-society can be completely, or, at all events substantially, imitated only by remodelling human nature on the lines of the individual bee. This is very far from impossible; there is a plethora of human drones already, and we see the emergence of the sterile female worker. But is such a change—or any change at all of that kind—to be desired?
The Terms of Specialization.—It surely cannot be denied that there may be a grave antagonism between the interests of the society and those of the individual. It is a question of the terms of specialization or differentiation. In the study of the individual organism and its history we discern specialization of the cell as a capital fact. Organic evolution has largely depended upon what Milne-Edwards called the "physiological division of labour." In so far as organic evolution has been progressive, it has entirely coincided with this process of cell-differentiation. That is the clear lesson which the student of progress learns from the study of living Nature. Let him hold hard by this truth, and by it let him judge that other specialization which human society presents.
For this primary and physiological division of labour has its analogue in a much later thing, the division of labour in human society, upon which, indeed, the possibility of what we call human society depends. And it is plain that the time has come when we must determine the price that may rightly be paid for this specialization. Assuredly it is not to be had for nothing. Dr. Minot considers that death, as a biological fact, is the price paid for cell-differentiation. Now surely the death of individuality is the price paid for such specialization as that of the workman who spends his life supervising the machine which effects a single process in the making of a pin, and has never even seen any other but that stage in the process of making that one among all the "number of things" of which the world is full. Here, as in a thousand other cases, it has cost a man to make an expert.
How far we are entitled to go we shall determine only when we know what it is that we want to attain.
If we desire an efficient, durable, numerous society, there are probably no limits whatever that we need observe in the process of specialization. Pins are cheaper for the sacrifice of the individual in their making. In general, the professional must do better than the amateur; the lover of chamber music knows that a Joachim or Brussels Quartet is not to be found everywhere. Specialization we must have for progress, or even for the maintenance of what the past has achieved for us; but we shall pay the right price only by remembering the principle that all progress in the world of life has depended on cell-differentiation. If we prejudice that we are prejudicing progress.
Now nothing can be more evident than that, in some of our specializations of the individual for the sake of society, we are opposing that specialization within the individual which, it has been laid down, we must never sacrifice. And so we reach the basal principle to which the preceding argument has been guiding us. It is that the specialization of the individual for the sake of society may rightly proceed to any point short of reversing or aborting the process of differentiation within himself. Every individual is an end in himself; there are no other ends for society; and that society is the best which best provides for the most complete development and self-expression of the individuals composing it.
But how, then, is the division of labour necessary for society to be effected, the reader may ask? The answer is that the human species, like all others, displays what biologists call variation—men and women naturally differ within limits so wide that, when we consider the case of genius, we must call them incalculable, illimitable. The difference of our faces or our voices is a mere symbol of differences no less universal but vastly more important. It is these differences, in reality, that are the cause of the development of human society and of that division of labour upon which it depends. In providing for the best development of all these various individuals we at the same time provide for the division of labour that we need; nor can we in any other fashion provide so well. Thus we shall attain a society which, if less certainly stable than that of the bees, is what that is not—progressive, and not merely static; and a society which is worth while, justified by the lives and minds of the individuals composing it.
We are not, then, to make a factitious differentiation of set purpose in the interests of society and to the detriment of individuals. We are not to take a being in whom Nature has differentiated a thousand parts, and, in effect, reduce him, in the interests of others, to one or two constituents and powers, thus nullifying the evolutionary course. But we shall frame a society such as the past never witnessed, and we shall achieve a rate of progress equally without parallel, by consistently regarding society as existing for the individual, and not the individual for society, and by thus realizing to the full his characteristic powers for himself and for society.
In so far as all this is true it is true of woman. It has long been asserted that woman is less variable than man; but the certainty of that statement has lately lost its edge. It is probably untrue. There is no real reason to suppose that woman is less complex or less variable than man. She has the same title as he has to those conditions in which her particular characters, whatever they be, shall find their most complete and fruitful development. There is no more a single ideal type of woman than there is a single ideal type of man. It takes all sorts even to make a sex. It has been in the past, and always must be, a piece of gross presumption on man's part to say to woman, "Thus shalt thou be, and no other." Whom Nature has made different, man has no business to make or even to desire similar. The world wants all the powers of all the individuals of either sex. On the other hand, no good can come of the attempt to distort the development of those powers or to seek conformity to any type. Much of the evil of the past has arisen from the limitation of woman to practically one profession. Even should it be incomparably the best, in general, it is by no means necessarily the best, or even good at all, for every individual. Men are to be heard saying, "A woman ought to be a wife and mother." It is, perhaps, the main argument of this book that, for most women, this is the sphere in which their characteristic potencies will find best and most useful expression both for self and others; but that is very different from saying that every woman ought to be a mother, or that no woman ought to be a surgeon. We may prefer the maternal to the surgical type, and there may be good reason for our preference; but the surgeon may be very useful, and, useful or not, the question is not one of ought. Thoughtful people should know better than to make this constant confusion between what ought to be and what is. Let us hold to our ideals, let us by all means have our scale of values; but the first question in such a case as this is as to what is. In point of fact all women are not of the same type; and our expression of what ought to be is none other than the passing of a censure upon Nature for her deeds. We may know better than she, or, as has happened, we may know worse.