Women endure pain, operations, etc., better than men, and show greater tenacity of life; men are superior in motor perfection, skill, and muscle. In delicacy of sense-perceptions the two sexes are about equal.
Women show in some respects a greater affectability than men, which is encouraged by their slight tendency to anaemia, by the greater development of their vaso-motor system, and by the periodicity of their functions. They are more hypnotic, the lower—that is, the more primitive and fundamental—nerve-centers preponderate and are more excitable; hysteria, ecstasy, and suggestibility, more marked.
Men show a greater tendency to race-variation than women; abnormalities of various kinds, idiots and geniuses, are commoner amongst males. Man represents the radical, or experimental element in the life of the race.
Woman represents the conservative element. She remains nearer to the child, but for that very reason is in some respects more advanced than man, who, as he grows older, is “farther off from heaven than when he was a boy.”
PAGE [51].—Finesse in Woman.
“The method of attaining results by ruses (common among all the weaker lower animals) is so habitual among women that, as Lombroso and Ferrero remark, in women deception is ‘almost physiological.’ * * * But to regard the caution and indirectness of women as due to innate wickedness, would, it need scarcely be said, be utterly irrational. It is inevitable, and results from the constitution of women, acting in the conditions under which they are generally placed. There is at present no country in the world, certainly no civilized country, in which a woman may safely state openly her wishes and desires, and proceed openly to seek their satisfaction.”—H. Ellis, “Man and Woman,” p. 174.
PAGE [56].—(note).—“The Freedom of Woman Must Ultimately Rest on the Communism of Society.”
“The reproduction of the race is a social function, and we are compelled to conclude that it is the duty of the community, as a community, to provide for the child-bearer when in the exercise of her social function she is unable to provide for herself. The woman engaged in producing a new member, who may be a source of incalculable profit or danger to the whole community, cannot fail to be a source of the liveliest solicitude to everyone in the community, and it was a sane and beautiful instinct that found expression of old in the permission accorded to the pregnant woman to enter gardens and orchards, and freely help herself.”—Havelock Ellis, Pamphlet on “Evolution in Sex,” p. 15.
“She held it just that women should be so provided for, because the mothers of the community fulfil in the State as important and necessary a function as the men themselves do.”—Grant Allen, “The Woman Who Did,” p. 73.