Let us analyse Miss A.’s case. I assume that she is a healthy normal girl. Her hips are broad, her chest is full, she has been regular in her periods from her fourteenth year. What is going on inside her? All this equipment, in perfect working order and vigorously constituted, has not ceased from signalling to the brain ever more and more insistently for years: “We are not content; we are idle; we are sitting still; we are not functioning; we are aching from sitting still.” The brain misinterprets all this straight away, and transmits it to consciousness as follows: “What a bore life is! When is anything interesting or exciting going to happen? What are all the men in my circle doing? Why don’t they notice me, or fall in love with me?” The messages continue persistent, and they are the same as in the first case, but more emphatic, more urgent. Again the brain transmits them to consciousness as follows: “What a bore home life is! What a self-complacent, heedless creature mother is! What a tedious round this week at home has been! I must go out; I must get away from it! I must leave home! Couldn’t I study something? Anything that gets me out of this tiresome futility! Isn’t there a course of something at the School of Political Economy?” And so on!
In the terms of Life, this means simply: “My present environment is failing to procure my principal adaptations for me. Life bids me seek another environment at once.”
Fidelity to Life in Woman must prevail over every other form of fidelity. In order to be faithful to Life and Life’s purpose, therefore, Miss A. must be unfaithful to her old environment.
But to accuse such a girl of falsehood or dissimulation when she declares that she is interested in Political Economy, and is pursuing the study for its own sake, would be the cruellest injustice. Life is quite unscrupulous in achieving her ends, and if Political Economy can prove a road to them, why not Political Economy? But the woman is no more conscious of the fact that Life is secretly directing her, than the mole is of the reasons why it selects a subterranean life.
Hitherto I have spoken only of the healthy or positive woman. I must, however, refer to the unhealthy woman; because, unless she is rejected immediately, as a standard, we shall be utterly misled in our examination of the true Female attitude.
For the present work, all I shall mean by unhealthy or negative, will be that condition in which the body may be said to be either atonic—that is to say, lacking in tone, in sanguine vigour—or unfit, owing to inadequate, arrested or faulty development, for the performance of its functions.
The fact that Weininger makes no classification of healthy and unhealthy, but confines himself entirely to the two orders of women that are either inclined to be male or inclined to be truly female, vitiates the whole of his argument.
Unless I take into consideration whether a woman is properly equipped not only with the mechanism but also with the tonality of the mechanism for her functions, how can I proceed to postulate that she is either male or female in her physical bias?
We know that the impulse to use an organ normally arises in the organ itself in a state of health, and that the instincts of a creature have only the two sources—racial memory and a correlation of organs—from which they can possibly draw their strength. Suppress the more powerful of these two sources, the organic impulse, and you cannot help reducing, depressing, or even totally eliminating the instinct.
An unhealthy woman, in my sense, therefore, will approach maleness in any case, whether she have male elements in her or not (to recall Weininger); because with the decline in vigour of her reproductive instincts consequent upon the atonic condition of her reproductive organs, the voice of other instincts will make themselves heard, and she will be less of a woman the more her other instincts dare to measure themselves against her reproductive instinct.