THE DETERMINATION OF SEX
We must regard life as essentially female, since there is no choice but to look upon living forms which have no sex as female, and since we know that in many of the lower forms of life there is possible what is called parthenogenesis or virgin-birth. It has, indeed, been ingeniously argued by a distinguished American writer, Professor Lester Ward,[4] that the male sex is to be looked upon as an afterthought, an ancillary contrivance, devised primarily for the advantages of having a second sex—whatever those advantages may exactly be; and secondarily, one would add, becoming useful in adding fatherhood to motherhood upon the psychical plane of post-natal care and education as well.
But whatever was the historical or evolutionary origin of sex, we may here be excused for attaching more importance—for it is of great practical consequence—to the origin or determination of sex in the individual. At what stage and under what influences did the child that is born a girl become female? To what extent can we control the determination of sex? Why are the numbers of the sexes approximately so equal? What determines the curious disproportions observed in many families, which may be composed only of girls or only of boys; and, as is asserted, also observed after wars and epidemics or during sieges, when an abnormally high proportion of boys is said to be born? These are some of the deeply interesting questions which men have always attempted to answer—with the beginnings of substantial success during the present century at last.
In general it is true that, the more we learn of the characters and histories of living beings, the more importance we attach to nature or birth and the less to nurture or environment, vastly important though the latter be. Thus to the student of heredity nothing could well seem more improbable, at any rate amongst the higher animals, than that characters so profound as those of sex should be determined by nurture. He simply cannot but believe that the sex of the individual is as inborn as his backbone, and as incapable of being created by varying conditions of nurture. The causation of sex is therefore really a problem in heredity; and we may most confidently assert, in the first place, that the sex of every human being is already determined at the moment of conception when, indeed, the new individual is created: determined then by the nature and constitution of the living cells—or of one of them—which combine to form the new being. Subsequent attempts to affect the sex, as by means of the mother's diet and the like, are palpably hopeless from the outset and always will be. This is by no means to say that conditions affecting the mother—as, for instance, the semi-starvation of a prolonged siege—may not affect the construction of the germ-cells which she houses, and which are constantly being formed within her from the mother germ-cells, as they are called. But any given final germ-cell, such as will combine with another from an individual of the opposite sex to form a new being, is already determined, once for all, to be of one sex or the other. We naturally ask, then, how the two parents are concerned in this matter; and the first remarkable answer returned by the Mendelian workers during the last three or four years is that it is the mother who determines the sex of her children in the case of all the higher animals. Her contribution to the new being is called the ovum, and it is believed that ova are of two kinds, or, we are quite right in saying, of two sexes.
Those who are now working at these problems experimentally, actually seeing what happens in given cases, and whom we may for convenience call Mendelians after the master who gave them their method and their key, have latterly obtained results the main tenour of which must be stated here, as they indicate the lines of a portion of the succeeding argument. The task was to attack experimentally the determination of sex—a fascinating problem for which so many solutions that failed to hold water have been found, but hitherto no others. In finding the answer to it, as they appear certainly to have done so far as the higher animals are concerned, the Mendelians are also beginning to ascertain, as we shall see, certain basal facts as to the composition or constitution of the individual; and to us, who wish to know exactly what a woman is, and what she is as distinguished from a man, this discovery is of the most vital importance. The experimental facts are not yet numerous, and if they were not consonant with facts of other orders, it would be rash to proceed; but it will be evident, in the sequel, that common experience is well in accord with the experimental evidence.
It appears that, amongst at any rate the higher animals, the sex of offspring is determined by the nature of the mother's contribution. The cell derived from the father is always male—as goes without saying, we might add, if we knew little of the subject. But the ovum, the cell derived from the mother, may carry either femaleness or maleness. When an ovum bearing maleness meets the invariably maleness-bearing sperm, the resultant individual is a male, of course, and he is male all through. But when an ovum bearing femaleness meets a sperm, the resulting individual is female, femaleness being a Mendelian "dominant" to maleness; if both be present, femaleness appears. The female, however, is not female all through as the male is male all through. So far as sex is concerned, he is made of maleness plus maleness; but she is made of femaleness plus maleness. In Mendelian language the male is homozygous, so-called "pure" as regards this character. But the female is heterozygous, "impure" in the sense that her femaleness depends upon the dominance of the factor for femaleness over the factor for maleness, which also is present in her. In the Mendelian terminology, she is an instance of impure dominance. The observed practical equality in the numbers of the two sexes is in exact accord with this interpretation of the facts, this proportion being the expected and observed one in many other cases which doubtless depend upon parallel conditions of the reproductive cells.
Surely there is great enlightenment here: for the discovery of the factors determining sex is a very small affair compared with the suggestive inference as to the constitution of womanhood. Let us compare man and woman on the basis of this assumption.
In the man there is nothing but maleness. This is not to deny that he may possess the protective instinct and the tender emotion which is its correlate, even though these were undoubtedly feminine in origin. But it is to deny that any injury to, or arrested development of, the male can reveal in him characters distinctively female. He may fail to become a man and may remain a boy; or, having been a man, he may perhaps return, under certain conditions, to a more youthful state; but he will never, can never, display anything distinctive of the woman.
Not such, however, must be the woman's case. If anything should interfere with the development and dominance of the femaleness factor in her, there is not another "dose" of femaleness, so to speak, to fall back upon; but a dose of maleness. We may be right in thus seeking to explain certain familiar phenomena, observed in women under various conditions—as, for instance, the growth of hair upon the face in elderly women, the assumption of a masculine voice and aspect, and so forth. Such facts are frequently to be observed after the climacteric or "change of life," which probably denotes the termination of the dominance of the femaleness factor. They are also to be observed as a consequence of operations much more commonly and irresponsibly performed a few years ago than now, which abruptly deprived the organism of the internal secretion through which, as we may surmise, the femaleness factor in the germ makes its presence effective.
If these propositions are valid, they are certainly important. Our attitude towards them will depend upon our estimates of the worth of distinctive womanhood. We may regard it as a loss to society that what might have been a woman should become only a sort of man of rather less than average efficiency. Or we may hail with delight the possibility that, after all, we may be able, by judicious education, to make men of our daughters. But, whatever our estimates, certainly it is of great interest to inquire how far and in what directions education may affect the development of what was given in the germ. We cannot yet answer this question. In a thousand matters it is all-important to know in what degree education can control nature, but until we know what the nature of the individual is we cannot decide. Professor Bateson has clearly shown that we shall be able duly to estimate environment only when Mendelian analysis has gone much further, and has instructed us in detail as to the nature of the material upon which environment is to act.
For instance, there is the well-established fact that women who have undergone "higher education" show a low marriage-rate, and produce very few children. However considered, the fact is of great importance. But the right interpretation of it is not certain. There are women of a type approaching the masculine, who are evidently so by nature. Is it these women, already predestined for something other than distinctive womanhood, that offer themselves for "higher education"? In other words, is there a selective process at work, the results of which in choosing a certain type of woman we attribute to the education undergone? If we answer this question wrongly, and act upon our erroneous interpretation, we shall certainly do grave injury to individuals and society.
Thus, we might roundly condemn the higher education of women in toto, and hold up the "domestic woman" as the sole type to which every woman can and must be made to conform. Or, on the other hand, we may argue that it is well to provide suitable opportunities of self-development for those women whose nature practically unfits them for the ordinary career of a woman.
I do not think that any one who has had opportunities of first-hand observation will question the presence in university and college class-rooms of girls of the anomalous type. Each generation produces a certain number of such. Probably no education will alter their nature in any radical or effective way. On every ground, personal and social, we must be right in providing for them, as for their brothers, all the opportunities they may desire. But I am convinced that their relative number is not large.
The great majority of those girls who are nowadays subjected to what we call "higher education" are of the normal type; and this is none the less true because the proportion of the anomalous is doubtless higher here than in the feminine community at large. The ordinary observation of those teachers who year by year see young girls at the beginning of their higher education will certainly confirm the statement that by far the greater number of them are of the ordinary feminine type. If this be so, the necessary inference is that education has a potent influence, and that it must be held accountable for the observed facts of later years, whether those facts please or displease us.
The human being is the most adaptable—that is to say, educable—of all living creatures. This is true of women as well as men. The response of girls to ideas, ideals, suggestion, the spirit of the group, is an unquestioned thing. Further, there are basal facts of physiology, ultimately dependent on the law of the conservation of energy, and the circumstance that you cannot eat your cake and have it, which work hand-in-hand, on their own effective plane, with the psychological influences already referred to. All physiology and psychology lead us to expect those results of "higher education" upon its subjects or victims which, in fact, we find, and which, in the main, are indeed its results and not dependent upon the exceptional natures of those subjected to it. The more general higher education becomes, and the less selection is exercised upon the candidates for it, the more evident, I believe, will it appear that woman responds in high degree to the total circumstances of her life; and that if we do not like the fruits of our labour it is we indeed that are to blame.