In all ways, the natural languors and disabilities of the girl's adolescent phase are vigorously combated. The unfortunate young developing creature is exhorted, spurred—compelled by rigid rule, indeed (whatsoever her physiological disabilities), to take her part in strenuous exertions; hard drill, cricket, hockey, football; with the aim of developing masculine muscles where feminine muscles should be. At the same time, her brain is forced, crammed and exploited by perpetual mental tasks; by competitive examinations, or by some or another strain of specialism, intellectual or industrial. The result is that she is forcibly precluded from evolving to those higher, subtler modes of body and of mind, which are the essence, the charm and the inspiration of the sex; and the model of the Race to be.
Our school-girls and work-girls, in whose already impoverished, or degenerate, bodies this battle for their resources between Nature and Culture (or Industrialism) is waged—the one to make them normal, the other to make them abnormal—are all more or less in states of disease; are chlorotic, anæmic, neurotic, dyspeptic, hysterical; or suffer from ailments special to their sex. While some are sturdy and florid and buxom (prematurely middle-aged), more are neurasthenic and attenuated, ill-nourished, spectacled, breastless, hipless, pale or pimply; are restless, emotionless, joyless, cynical, discontented. In but few are found the thrill and joy, the pulse and spring and natural enthusiasms of healthy, happy young creatures in the dawn and grace of maidenhood. Such as are charming and pretty possess these natural woman-characteristics only too often in fragile and weed-like form. The constitutional degeneracy of some shows in precocious sex-development—all precocity being degeneracy, development too rapid and exhaustive, and entailing therefore flimsy and unstable tissue-cells, faulty functioning and premature decline.
A proportion, one is thankful to say, are normal and healthful and charming, endowed with the attributes and graces, personal and mental, for which Nature is shaping in the sex. Others are, biologically speaking, mere lamentable "spoiled copies"; amazons of the hockey, football, tennis or hunting-fields, only just distinguishable in general characteristics from the male, and lacking more or less wholly in womanly psychology and aptitude, and in all the fairer and nobler attributes of their sex. Still others, although handsome and finely female of physique, are "splendidly null" in respect of the emotions, and of the other subtler and psychical developments of natural womanhood.
The Greeks, with their intuitive apprehension, pourtrayed both Athene, goddess of Intellect, and Artemis, goddess of Sports, as sexless, passionless, unwedded and childless; scorners of men, devoid of all womanly impulse and sentiment. (Strangely enough, as though anticipating the argument of this book, Athene is described as having sprung, in full life, from her father's brain. While Scripture tells of Eve derived from Adam's side.)
In The New System of Gynæcology, the latest and most authoritative treatise by eminent specialists in women's diseases, the following passage occurs, under heading, "Derangement of the Sex-Characteristics":
"It is our belief that the more truly feminine a woman is, psychically and physically, in instinct and in performance, so much the more complete and normal will be the functions of her mind and body. We have already alluded to inverted instincts. And in the perversion of functions and characteristics (physical phenomena) we may observe all grades from almost complete masculinity in appearance, with the disappearance of the feminine functions, to the lesser degrees of disordered function and characteristics."
II
Nature is so complex, yet so subtly consistent in her workings, that the neuter-state shows in the faces of many of our women as the typical look of the mule—cross between horse and ass, a creature incapable of reproduction. In the eyes of young women of strenuous pursuits—academic, industrial, or athletic, this characteristic sterile glint, part boldness, part antagonism, is common.
The normal condition of woman is attended by the normal expression of woman. The womanly biology entails the womanly psychology. And modesty is one of the natural female secondary Sex-characteristics, attendant upon healthy structural development and function. The hard, bold glance—the "mule"-look—of some masculine girls and women by no means necessarily implies conscious immodesty. It is mainly biological and subconscious; sign of an attribute missing, as result of deterioration of the function in which the attribute is normally rooted.