The Truth About Woman

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

Let us now, as the first path of our inquiry, turn our attention to that biological point of view which is indispensable and fundamental if we are to understand those primary emotions, impulses and differences of the sexes, of deep organic origin, which were rooted long ago in the lowest forms of life, and hence were passed on to man from his pre-human ancestors. No apology is needed for this inquiry; for in these uncounted ancestral forces, dating back to the remote beginnings of life, we shall find hints, at least, of many things which lead up to and explain those problems which must be solved, before we can determine the true position of woman in the complex sexual relations of our social life. We cannot deny our lineage. The force which drove life onwards from the start drives it still to-day. The reproductive impulse is the chief motor of humanity; our seed is eternal. And the point of view that I wish to make clear is that the sex-impulses, which are, as few will deny, the base of the present unrest among women, have an inconceivably long history, and thus spring up within us with a tremendous organic momentum. To deny this force is futile, to suppress it impossible; all that can be done is to so regulate its expression that it may serve life instead of waste it. Implanted in every normal life is an instinctive desire to function in two ways: to grow and to reproduce, from the simple cell to the highest type of life, including man and woman, these two desires are essential and imperative. The irresistible Force of Life has been inherited by us from millions of ancestral lovers. Only when furnished with a re-interpretative clue to the origin of sex and its functioning can we come to realise its strength and its beauty, far stronger, far subtler, than we suspected before. It is the shirking of these life-facts that has resulted so often in error.

And let no one resent or think useless such an analogy between animal love-matings and our own. In tracing the evolution of our love-passions from the sexual relations of other mammals, and back to those of their ancestors, and to the humbler, though scarcely less beautiful, ancestors of these, we shall discover what must be considered as essential and should be lasting, and what is false in the conditions and character of the sexes to-day; and thereby we shall gain at once warning in what directions to pause, and new hope to send us forward. We shall learn that there are factors in our sex-impulses that require to be lived down as out-of-date and no longer beneficial to the social needs of life. But encouragement will come as, looking backwards, we learn how the mighty dynamic of sex-love has evolved in fineness, without losing its intensity, how it is tending to become more mutual, more beautiful, more lasting. And this gives us new hope to press forward on that path which woman even now is travelling, wherein she will be free from the risk of clinging to conditions of the past, which for so long have dragged her evolution in the mire.

The same force that pushed life into existence tends to increase and perpetuate it. For when the great Force of Life has once started, the same movements which constitute that life continue, and give rise to nutrition, the first of the great faculties, or powers, of life. Then, after this growth has been carried to a certain point, the organism from the superabundance of nutrition is furnished with a surplus growing energy, by means of which it reproduces itself, whence arises the second of the great life faculties. We thus have the two essential forces of life—the preservative force and the reproductive force, arising alike from nutrition. Food to assure life and growth for the individual; reproduction, an extension of the same process, to ensure the continuance of the species. We thus see the truth of Haeckel's definition that "reproduction is a nutrition and growth of the organism beyond its individual mass," or in biological formula, "a discontinuous growth."[8]

It is well to grasp at once this first conception of reproduction as simply an extension of nutrition, if we are to free our minds from misconception. It is a common belief that the original purpose of sex is to ensure reproduction, whereas fundamentally it is not necessary to propagation at all. It is perfectly true, of course, that in the majority of animals, and also in many plants, an individual life begins in the union of two minute elements, the mother egg-cell and the sperm father-cell. But this is not the earliest stage, and below these higher forms we find a great world of life reproducing without this sex-process by simple separation and growth. In these unicellular organisms reproduction is known as asexual, because there are no special germ-cells, nor is there anything corresponding to fertilisation. The most common forms are (1) by division into two; (2) by budding, a modified form of division; (3) by sporulation, a division into many units.[9]

It is worth while to wait to learn something of this first stage in the development of life, for in this way we shall gain a clue as to the origin of sex and the real purpose it fulfils in the service of reproduction. In the very simplest forms of unicellular organisms propagation is effected at what is known as "the limit of growth"; when the cell has attained as much volume as its surface can adequately supply with food, a simple division of the cell takes place into two halves or daughter cells, each exactly like the other, which then become independent and themselves repeat the same rupture process. But in some slightly more complex cases differences occur between the two cells into which the organism divides, as in the slipper animacule, where one-half goes off with the mouth, while the other has none. In a short time, however, the mouthless half forms a mouth, and each half grows into a replica of the original. We have here one of the earliest examples of differentiation. That injured multicellular organisms should be able by regrowth to repair their loss in an analogous phenomenon; thus an earth-worm cut by a spade does not necessarily suffer loss, but the head part grows a tail and the decapitated portion produces a head; sponges, which do not normally propagate by division, may be cut in pieces and bedded out successfully; the arms of a star-fish, torn asunder by a fisherman, will almost always result in several perfect star-fish. Similarly among plants a cut-off portion may readily give rise to new plants—a potato-tuber is one of hundreds of instances. This ability to effect complete repair is one of the powers that life has lost; it persists as high in the scale as reptiles, and a lizard is able to regrow an amputated leg.

It is certainly not the least interest in studying these early forms that one is able to trace the analogy they bear with the higher forms. No rigid line can be drawn between the successive stages of growth. And it should be borne in mind that, simple as is the life-process in these single-celled organisms, many of them are highly differentiated and show great complexity of structure within the narrow limits of their size. Thus among the protozoa, the basis of all animal life, we find very definite and interesting modes of behaviour, such as seeking light and avoiding it, swimming in a spiral, approaching certain substances and retreating from others; the organisms often, indeed, trying one behaviour after another.[10] If we realise this it becomes easier to understand how the higher types of life have developed from these primitive types. Indeed, all the bodies of the most complex animals—including ourselves—originate as simple cells, and in the individual history of each of us divide and multiply just as do the cells which exist independently; only in multicellular organisms each cell must be regarded as an individual, modified to serve a special purpose, one cell differentiated to start a lineage of nerve cells, another a lineage of digestive cells, yet another for the reproduction of the species, and so on, each group of cells taking on its special use, but the power of division remaining with the modified cell. Thus a new life is built up—a child becomes an adult, by multiplication of these differentiated cells, repeating the original single-cell development.

Budding, the second, and perhaps the most usual mode of asexual propagation, may be said to mark a further step in the development of the reproductive process. Here the mother-cell, instead of dividing into two equal parts and at once rupturing, protrudes a small portion of its substance, which is separated by a constriction that grows deeper and deeper until the bulk becomes wholly detached. This small bud then grows until it attains the size of the parent, when it, in turn, repeats the same process. This mode of reproduction is common to the great majority of plants. In animal life it is not confined to single-celled organism, but takes place in certain multicellulars, such as worms, bryozoans, and ascidians; one very interesting example being the sea-worm (myrianida) which buds off a whole chain of individuals.

Nearly allied with budding is the third stage, in which the division is multiple and rapid within the limited space of the mother-cell. This is known as spore formation. The cells become detached, and do not further develop until they have escaped from the parent. They then increase by division and growth to form independent individuals. This spore reproduction is found among certain types of vegetation; it also occurs in the protozoa.

It is probable that these three stages of asexual reproduction are not all the steps actually taken by Nature in the development of the early life-process. There must have been intermediate steps, perhaps many such, but the forms in which they occur either have not persisted, or have not yet been studied.[11] The feature common to all ordinary forms of asexual multiplication is that the reproductive process is independent of sex; what starts the new life is the half, or a liberated portion of the single parent cell. It will be readily seen that by this process the offspring are identical with the parent. Life continues, but it continues unchanged. Thus the power of growth is restricted within extremely narrow limits. Any further development required a new process. With the life-force pushing in all directions every possible process would be tried. We are often met with striking phenomena of adjustments to new conditions, which in some cases, when found to be advantageous to the organism, persist. There is, in fact, abundant evidence that Nature in these early days of life was making experiments. In pursuance of this policy it naturally came about that any process by which the organism gained increased power of growth had the greater likelihood of survival. The number of devices in the way of modification of form and habit to secure advantage is practically infinite; but there was one principle that was eagerly seized upon at a very early stage, and, persisting by this law of advantage, was utilised by all progressive types as an accessory of success. This was the principle of fertilisation, which arose in this way from what would almost seem the chance union of two cells, at first alike, but afterwards more and more highly differentiated, and from whose primordial mating have proceeded by a natural series of ascending steps all the developed forms of sex.

The ways in which this was brought about we have now to see. But even at this point it becomes evident that the true office of sex was not the first need of securing reproduction—that had been done already—rather it was the improving and perfecting of the single-cell process by introducing variation through the commingling of the ancestral hereditary elements of two parents, and, by means of such variations, the production of new and higher forms of life—in fact, progress by the mighty dynamic of sex.[12]