CONTENTS OF CHAPTER V
The fact of psychical sexual differences — Attempts to deny their existence — Rosa Mayreder’s “Critique of Femininity” — The sexual nuances of the psyche — Ineradicability of these — Condemnation of psychical bisexuality — Expression of psychical difference in the demeanour of the sperm cell and the germ cell — Original representatives of the differing natures of man and woman — Recent researches regarding psychical sexual differences — Sensory sensations — Intellectual differences — Experiments of Jastrow, Minot, and others — Inquiries of Delaunay and Havelock Ellis — Readier suggestibility of women — Tendencies to independent activity on the part of women — Higher spiritual activities in man and woman — Woman’s talent for politics — Emotivity of woman — Greater susceptibility to fatigue — Decline of emotivity in the modern woman — Artistic talents of man and woman — Greater variability of man — Influence of menstruation on the feminine physique — Psychological experiments of H. B. Thompson — Woman and man heterogeneous natures — Comparison by Alfons Bilharz — The enigmatical in woman — Poets and thinkers on this question — A saying of Theodor Mundt — Antipathy of the sexes — Love as the solution of the enigma — Significance of psychical differences for the woman’s question — Part played by women in civilization — Retrospect of primeval history — Women as the discoverers of handicrafts and arts — As the teachers of man — Thomas Henry Huxley on the woman’s question — The value of work for woman — Improvement of domestic service according to Schmoller — The woman of the future.
Appendix: Sexual Sensibility in Woman. — An old topic of dispute — Sexual sensibility in man — Feminine erotic types — Theory of Lombroso and Ferrero — Adler’s monograph — Refutation of the theory of the lesser sensual sensibility of woman — Diffuse character of the feminine sexual sphere — Researches of Havelock Ellis regarding the sexual impulse in woman — Experience of alienists regarding sexuality in woman — A case of temporary sexual anæsthesia — Causes of sexual frigidity.
CHAPTER V
The unquestionably existing physical differences between the sexes respectively, correspond equally without question to existing psychical differences. Psychically, also, man and woman are completely different beings. We must not employ the word “psychical,” as it is so often employed, in the sense of pure “intelligence”; we must understand the term to relate to the entire conception and content of the psyche, to the whole spiritual being—the spiritual habitus, emotional character, feelings, and will: we shall then immediately be convinced that masculine and feminine beings differ through and through, that they are heterogeneous, incomparable natures.
Under the influence of Weininger’s book, the attempt has recently been made to deny the existence of sexual differences in the psychical sphere, and especially to contest the origin of these differences from the fundamentally different nature of the masculine and feminine types. (Weininger himself not only went so far as to declare the obliteration and equalization of sexual differences, but he even asserted that all feminine nature was a personification of nothingness, of evil; he wished to annihilate femininity, in order to allow the existence of one sex only, the male, this being to him the embodiment of the objective and the good.) I recently read with great interest a most intelligent book, one full of new ideas, by Rosa Mayreder—“Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit” (A Critique of Femininity), Jena, 1905—in which the author maintains what she calls the “primitively teleological character of sexuality”; that is, she considers the different sexual functions of man and woman to be comparatively unimportant for the determination of their spiritual nature, and regards the individual psychical differentiation as independent of sexuality and of the different sexual natures. In her opinion, sexual polarity does not extend to the “higher nature” of mankind, to the spiritual sphere. She offers as a proof of this, among other points, the fact that by crossed inheritance spiritual peculiarities of the father can be transmitted to the daughter. Very true. Moreover, no objective student of Nature will deny that a woman can attain the same degree of individual psychical differentiation as a man, or that she can bring her “higher nature” to an equally great development. But quite as incontestable is the fact which Rosa Mayreder keeps too much in the background: that everything psychical, the entire emotional and voluntary life, receives from the particular sexual nature a peculiar characterization, a distinctive colouring, and a specific nuance; and that these precisely constitute the heterogeneous and the incomparable in the masculine and the feminine natures.
The attempts to annihilate sexual differences in theory are very old,[24] but they have always proved untenable in practice. They have invariably been shattered by contact with—sexual differences.
Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret (You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but she will inevitably return). And this return of Nature is, in fact, a step forward, in advance of primitive hermaphroditic states. Sexual differences are ineradicable; civilization shows an unmistakable tendency to increase them. There is also an individual differentiation of sexual characters. It is proportional to the differentiation of the psychical characters of man and woman. And the problem is this: How is it possible for woman to ensure the development and perfectibility of her higher nature, without eliminating and obscuring her peculiar character as a sexual being?
When Rosa Mayreder herself, at the end of her book (p. 278), comes to the conclusion—