9. Sumner divided the chief motives of human action into four classes: Hunger, sex passion, vanity, and fear (of ghosts and spirits). Behind each of these motives there is a set of interests. (1) Hunger led primitive man to invent simple weapons and tools, such as arrows and hoes, and then to produce and hoard more complex forms of wealth. A strange peculiarity of wealth is its effect on its creator; it seems to be stronger than its creator. It often bears him down to a slavish, materialistic, and even selfish existence. Labor in the struggle for existence is irksome and painful. Wealth and labor, however, are both commendatory when they are used to increase human welfare. In this statement Sumner overlooked the fact that wealth in order to be commendable must also be produced under constructively social conditions, and that labor in order to be praiseworthy must in its exercise be individually helpful. In other words, Sumner’s test of the use to which wealth and labor are put is incomplete.
Sumner gave a new meaning to the term, slavery. He held that “men of talent are constantly forced to serve the rest. They make the discoveries and inventions, order the battles, write the books, and produce the art.”[XVIII-4] Sumner deplored the tendency to call whatever one does not like by the name of slavery. He felt that marriage slavery, rent slavery, sin slavery are terms which are coined by a too easily disgruntled people.
(2) The sex passion leads to sex mores which cover the relations of men and women to each other before marriage and in marriage, and the obligations of married persons to society. The sex mores determine the nature of marriage and of divorce. Sumner derided sex equality. Man has a more stable nervous system than woman, is more self-absorbed, more egoistic, less tactful. Since man has greater physical strength than woman, woman was educated by circumstances in primitive days to adapt herself to the stronger sex, and to win by developing charms where her lack of comparative strength rendered her helpless. Resignation and endurance thus became acquired traits of women.
Neither renunciation nor license is the proper method of control of the sex passions. Both produce unnecessary agony. License, for example, “stimulates desire without limit, and ends in impotent agony.” Sumner advocated temperance and regulation—a regulation which comes from knowledge and judgment.
Women by necessity must bear an unequal share in the responsibilities of sex and reproduction. Likewise, men must bear an unequal share of the responsibilities of property, war, and politics. For the latter types of duties women are hampered by a delicately adjusted and cumbersome generative system which men do not possess.[XVIII-5]
Formerly women yielded to the will of men. Today, the marital state is one of endless discussion, a defeat for one party or the other, with unpleasant effects upon life and character. In ancient times women took pride in the supervision which their husbands exercised over them and valued themselves as hidden treasures.[XVIII-6] This protected position was considered aristocratic. Under polygamy, women looked with pity and disgust upon the man who cannot, or is unwilling to, support more than one wife.
At this point it is interesting to note that W. I. Thomas has distinguished between the sexes on the basis of differences in metabolism—men being katabolic and women anabolic. Man consumes more energy than woman.[XVIII-7] He is better fitted for bursts of energy, while woman possesses more endurance. Man’s structural variability is toward motion; woman’s, toward reproduction. Hence man seems to have been assigned in primitive society to tasks requiring violence and exertion, whereas to women fell the work requiring constant attention.
Civilization thus far has largely profited by the intelligence of man. If to this situation it will develop and add the intelligence of women, it will be supplanted by a higher type of civilization. Under these conditions a large percentage of marriages will represent “the true comradeship of like minds,” instead of being frequently, as now, an arrangement in which woman is treated as a pet.
(3) The motive of vanity is all-powerful. “One likes to be separated from the crowd by what is admired, and dislikes to be distinguished for what is not admired.”[XVIII-8] To satisfy vanity, barbarian mothers “deform their babies toward an adopted type of bodily perfection.” Aristocracies grow up out of appeals to vanity. An aristocracy is a group of persons closely united who define the possession of things for which they are admired and which the masses do not possess. Vanity leads to all types of absurdities and indecencies in dress. Teeth are knocked out for the sake of appeasing vanity. An Indian woman puts a board on the forehead of her baby to make the forehead recede.
(4) Fear as a motive rules the lives of primitives. Fear of ghosts and spirits is peculiarly enslaving. Pestilence, defeat in war, bodily pain were all considered the result of the wrath of the gods.