V
Male traits being paramount on the plane of concrete function, although they exist (normally) in Recessive form in the female, it is from the male inherence of her active right side and its allied brain-half that she derives her concrete powers alike of body and of brain.
It is obvious, therefore, that when abnormally stimulated by undue exercise, such male-traits may develop into abnormal dominance.
The left arm of woman is essentially the woman-member. In its half-passive action of supporting her infant for hours together, it is stronger for this maternal ministration than is the more active and doughty right arm of the male. Her left hand is more delicate of form, gentler and more soothing of motion than her right hand is. It is the hand she caresses with. While for direct, strong action—masculine action, that is—the paternal right half of her is dominant, as in the male. And although in our present-day stages of Evolution, the Recessive Woman-traits have emerged as definite characteristics, emancipating themselves from subjection by the Dominant male-traits, it must be remembered that their impulse and their powers are yet but rudimentary. Woman is still more male than she is female; her methods being more masculine still than they are womanly. And this in the degree of her cruder racial stock, or of the harder conditions (natural or artificial) of the environment in which she finds herself, demanding more of masculine proclivity in her—of physical activity and mental assertiveness—than of her intrinsic Woman-qualities of emotion and ministry.
Civilisation, foreshadowing evolutionary ideals, discountenances, the fighting female. Nevertheless, the cruder female fights still with her male right arm, and the more cultured female, with tongue and tactics.
The intrinsic Woman-qualities, whereof Christianity is the gospel, are yet in their infancy of development; are yet more ideals for which we are shaping and waiting than they are realised and abiding facts.
Even their own babes are not secure from the instinct of blows inherent in the male-muscles of their mothers' right arms, when these are restrained neither by a woman's tenderness nor by a man's chivalry. Girl-babies, save those of the rarer higher types, beat their mothers and nurses only rather less frequently and less fiercely than boy-babies do.
Later in their life-history, that new impulse to the evolution of the Woman-traits which characterises their development to womanhood, normally negatives and further tempers in girls the male instincts of fight and of sport. But many of our modern amazons, brought up like boys, are more male than are their brothers. The male fighting-instinct which moved man to invent a club (destructive) has become so tempered by the increasingly potent Woman-traits in him that, save when angry or at war, he is content to turn his club into a golf-stick, a cricket bat, or tennis racquet; his sword into a plough-share. Whereas, on the contrary, the Woman-traits which moved woman to invent the needle (constructive) are becoming so over-ridden by the male in her that modern woman, artificially masculinised, abhors the needle, and is almost as much dominated as the other sex is by the male instinct for a weapon in the hand.