Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

CHAPTER VI

MENDELISM AND WOMANHOOD

We are accustomed to think of Mendelism as simply a theory of heredity, by which term we should properly understand the relation between living generations. Now Mendelism is certainly this, but I believe that it is vastly more. Already the claim has been made, though not, perhaps, in adequate measure, by the Mendelians, and I am convinced that their title to it will be upheld. Mendelism has already effected a really epoch-making advance in our knowledge of heredity—the relations between parents and offspring; but we shall learn ere long that it has yet more to teach us regarding the very constitution of living beings. As modern chemistry can analyse a highly complex molecule into its constituent elementary atoms, so the Mendelians promise ere long to enable us to effect an organic analysis of living creatures. For many decades past theory has perceived that, in the germ-cells whence we and the higher animals and plants are developed, there must exist—somewhere intermediate between the chemical molecule and the vital unit, the cell itself—units which Herbert Spencer, the first and greatest of their students, called physiological or constitutional units. Since his day they have been re-discovered—or rather re-named—by a host of students, including Haeckel, Weismann, and many of scarcely less distinction. The Mendelian "factors," as I maintain must be clear to any student of the idea, are Spencer's physiological units. Of course neither Spencer nor any one else, until the re-discovery of Mendel's work, had any notion at all of the remarkable fashion in which these units are treated in the process whereby germ-cells are prepared for their great destiny. The rule, as we now know, is that one germ-cell contains any given unit, while another does not. The process of cell-division, whereby the germ-cells or gametes[5] are made, is called gameto-genesis. Somewhere in its course there occurs the capital fact discovered by Mendel and called by him segregation. A cell divides into two—which are the final gametes. One of these will definitely contain the Mendelian factor, and the other will be as definitely without it. Definite consequences follow in the constitution of the offspring; and such is the Mendelian contribution to heredity. But we must see that these inquiries cannot be far pursued without telling us vastly more than we ever knew before of not only the relation between individuals of successive generations, but the very structure of the individuals themselves. It is by the study of heredity that we shall learn to understand the individual. For instance, experimental breeding of the fowl reveals the existence of the brooding instinct as a definite unit, which enters, or does not enter, into the composition of the individual, and which is quite distinct from the capacity to produce eggs. Here is a definite distinction suggested, for the case of the fowl, between two really distinct things which, for several years past, I have called respectively physical and psychical motherhood. The analysis will doubtless go far further, but already the facts of experiment help us to realize the composition of the individual mother—for instance, the number of possible variants, and the non-necessity of a connection between the capacity to produce children and the parental instinct upon which the care of them depends, and without which entire and perfect motherhood cannot be.

The Mendelians are teaching us, too, that their "factors," the units of which we are made, are often intertangled or mutually repellent. If such-and-such goes into the germ-cell, so must something else; or if the one, then never the other. There may thus be naturally determined conditions of entire womanhood; just as one may be externally a woman, yet lack certain of the fractional constituents which are necessary for the perfect being. Complete womanhood, like genius—rarer though not more valuable—depends upon the co-existence of many factors, some of which may be coupled and segregated together in gameto-genesis, while others may be quite independent, only chance determining the throw of them. And the question of incompatibility or mutual repulsion of factors is of the gravest concern; as, for instance, if it were the case—and the illustration is perhaps none too far-fetched—that the factor for the brooding instinct and the factor for intellect can scarcely be allotted together to a single cell.

This question of compatibilities is illustrated very strikingly by the case of the worker-bee. There is as yet no purely Mendelian interpretation of this case, Mendel's own laborious work upon heredity in bees having been entirely lost, and practically nothing having been done since. Yet, as will be evident, the main argument of Geddes and Thomson leads us to a similar interpretation of this case in terms of compatibility.

The worker-bee is an individual of a most remarkable and admirable kind, from whom mankind have yet a thousand truths to learn. She is distinguished primarily by the rare and high development of her nervous apparatus. In terms of brain and mind, using these words in a general sense, the worker-bee is almost the paragon of animals. The ancients supposed that the queen-bee was indeed the queen and ruler of the hive. Here, they thought, was the organizing genius, the forethought, the exquisite skill in little things and great, upon which the welfare of the hive and the future of the race depend. But, in point of fact, the queen-bee is a fool. Her brain and mind are of the humblest order. She never organizes anything, and does not rule even herself, but does what she is told. She is entirely specialized for motherhood; but the thinking, and the determination of the conditions of her motherhood, are in the hands of other females, also highly specialized, and certainly the least selfish of living things—yet themselves sterile, incapable of motherhood.

Observe, further, that these wonderful workers, so highly endowed in terms of brain, are amongst the children of the queen, herself a fool; and that it was the conditions of nourishment, the conditions of environment or education, which determined whether the young creatures should develop into queens or workers, fertile fools or sterile wits. We have here an absolute demonstration that environment or nurture can determine the production of these two antithetic and radically opposed types of femaleness.

Now, amongst the bees, this high degree of specialization works very well. How old bee-societies are we cannot say. We do know, at any rate, that bees are invertebrate animals, and therefore of immeasurable antiquity compared with man. No one can for a moment question the eminent success of the bee-hive; and that success depends upon the extreme specialization of the female, so as in effect to create a third sex. Further, we know that nurture alone accounts for this remarkable splitting of one sex into two contrasted varieties.

I have little doubt that a process which is, at the very least, analogous, is possible amongst ourselves; nay more, that such a process is already afoot. In Japan they have actually been talking of a deliberate differentiation between workers and breeders; such differentiation, though indeliberate, is to be seen to-day in all highly civilized communities. Is it likely to be as good for us as for the bee-hive? And, granted its value as a social structure, is it, even then, to be worth while?