The purpose of the complex differentiations which handicap the adolescent girl is obvious. The curving bones, the expanding pelvis, the rounded contours, the inhibited muscles, the languors and recurring disabilities, are designed to restrict activity, physical and mental.
Physicists tell us that the Conservation of Motion and the Conservation of Energy are one and the same thing. This must be true, as well, of Vital Energy. The conservation of Vital Activity subtends the Conservation of Vital resources. The new developments are by no means incidental merely to the new processes; they are an integral part of The Plan. In half-closing the doors on avenues of active output, Nature conserves the Woman-powers for more intrinsic use. Every brain and body-cell is raised thereby to higher levels both of constitution and of function.
As stored mechanical energy becomes transformed into the higher form of electrical energy, so the power stored in Woman's anabolic cells is raised to higher evolutionary forms. Thus she becomes fitted to be mother of the Child—the blossom of the Race. Her part in the child will contain the inherence of these new higher evolutionary values, as the father's part in it will contain the inherence of the concrete powers he has developed. And while her body spontaneously raises all its issues in order to fit her to be a Mother, so it develops powers and functions adapting her to serve as soft environment, physical and attributal, for the rearing of her child.
All this complex differentiation and evolution are designed, as well, to adapt woman for the love-passion, and to draw and bind her mate to her. And Nature has so cunningly interwoven the two plans and the two developments that, for the most part, those physical traits and emotional attributes which best qualify for motherhood most potently attract and closely attach the woman's mate to her.
Woman is "une malade," because, throughout the more than thirty years of her potential maternity, she suffers periodically those which, biologically speaking, are minor childbirths; each entailing a cycle of complex physiological processes, with more or less considerable constitutional and nervous stress, debility and incapacitation. Nature exacts from her this recurring toll to Life and to the Race, not only to preserve in her, in healthful and efficient function, the power and mechanism of actual child-bearing, but (only second in importance) perpetually to recruit her emotional womanhood and wifehood.
When girls in course of developing the maternal function, with all its attendant psychical implications, are strained by athletics, by over-culture or industrial exhaustion, the vital resources are so diverted from the evolution of this function as to cause incapacitation in them, partial or complete, for wifehood, and for the bearing of sound and fine offspring. Sterilisation, absolute or partial, is induced; with dwarfed structure, blighted emotions and warped instincts. Even in women who have developed normally, disease or atrophy of reproductive organs may follow constitutional strain or undue effort.
Toll to Life, in genesis of potential lives, is exacted likewise from the male. It is a reflex in him of the vital maternal function, inherent in his Woman-side. And this perpetual Life-tax upon his energies so reduces these as to temper his physical and nervous activities and his bent for individuation, and thus inhibits him from squandering his whole potential of Life-power in volitional output. Thus is preserved in him that normal proportion between Individuation and Perpetuation which Herbert Spencer describes as existing in inverse ratio to one another.
Thus also is preserved in him the normal mental balance between the Male and the Female departments of his dual brain. Men muscularly or intellectually overactive become lopsided and ineffective; restless and wasteful of their forces, chill and sterile of temperament; having lost that fine fructifying calm wherein creative potential is engendered for concrete achievement; having lost also that equipoise of faculty whereon mental and moral stability depend.
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