That the female is, indeed, a more complex order of organisation than the male, is not to be doubted, since masculine characteristics emerge from it when it lapses from its normal of condition.
Adolescence as it occurs in the boy and in the girl emphasises this conclusion.
To the age of twelve or thereabouts, the normal boy- and girl-child are like enough to one another; smooth-skinned, active, simple creatures. The boy is, normally, larger, sturdier, stronger and rougher than the girl. But, save for the cut of their hair and of their clothes, the two are very similar.
With the transition to manhood and womanhood, respectively, notable differences accrue, however.
From having been a strong, young, active, boy-like creature, now—provided her development be allowed to take the normal course—the girl loses physical activity and strength. A phase of invalidation sets in. Instinctively, she no longer runs and romps. New languors invest her in mind and in body. She is indisposed to brain-work or to much exertion. She lounges and muses. Her mind is clouded with the mists of awakening sensibilities. She suffers from lassitudes.
She becomes a complex of disabilities, indeed; disabilities which in delicate, sickly or over-taxed girls, show in chlorosis, anæmia, hysteria and other ills. Obviously, profound changes, with re-adjustments of her constitutional resources, are taking place in her. And most significant of these is that which shows like an arrest of development, physical and intellectual. Because, normally, she develops but little further along direct lines of intellect and muscle. Yet that she is still developing, and this upon wholly new—subtler, higher and more complex lines, is manifest at the end of this transition-period whence she emerges, a woman.
Her developmental arrest and her disabilities (resulting from an intensification of Recessive processes in her) are seen now to have subserved a phase of higher evolution. Nature suddenly locked the door upon her differentiating and escaping energies, in order that these might be conserved and knit into organisation. The active muscularity she has lost reappears in the new factors of symmetry and delicate modelling of limb; in repose and grace of movement. The straight, slim, boy-like lines of the hoyden girl have evolved into the curves and rounded suppleness and beauties of a woman. The girlish, agile and abrupt movements have passed into a woman's poise and grace. The unformed features of the child have become now delicately modelled; the curveless, emotionless lips have bloomed into the flower-like, rosy fullness of a woman's mouth; passionate and tender. New mystery and brilliance light her eyes. Eyes and brows are charged with potencies; with seriousness, with modesty, serenity, elusiveness. Hair and hands, voice and expression, have become transfigured by the magic of a re-creative impulse which has regenerated her whole being.
So too her brain development, arrested along lines of concrete intellection, is seen to have evolved to higher, subtler forms of mentality; to be instinct with delicacy, sympathy, tact, and with that incalculable mode of supra-conscious cerebration which is intuition. In so far as she is of high, womanly type, she is now warm and emotional, sympathetic, intuitive; consciously pure, yet delicately passionate. From a crude and sexless hoyden, she has evolved into an exquisite complexity; invested all round with higher values, human and psychical.
As in their earliest beginnings, however, so now again the Woman-traits manifest as Unfitnesses. Her new departure has actually undone in her much that had been achieved in physical adaptation.