In forming a judgment on this proposition, it must be remembered that civilization covers not more than 10,000 years out of man's history of half a million or more. During 490,000 out of the 500,000 years, man was the hunter and warrior; while woman stayed at home of necessity to bear and rear the young, to skin the prey, to prepare the food and clothing. He must have a small knowledge of biology who could suppose that this long history would not lead to any differentiation of the two sexes; and the biologist knows that man and woman in some respects differ in every cell of their bodies: that, as Jacques Loeb says, "Man and woman are, physiologically, different species."
But the biologist also knows that sex is a quantitative character. It is impossible to draw a sharp line and say that those on one side are in every respect men, and those on the other side in every respect women, as one might draw a line between goats and sheep. Many women have a considerable amount of "maleness"; numerous men have distinct feminine characteristics, physical and mental. There is thus an ill-defined "intermediate sex," as Edward Carpenter called it, whose size has been kept down by sexual selection; or better stated there is so much overlapping that it is a question of different averages with many individuals of each sex beyond the average of the other sex.
A perusal of Havelock Ellis' book, Man and Woman, will leave little doubt about the fact of sex differentiation, just as it will leave little doubt that one sex is, in its way, quite as good as the other, and that to talk of one sex as being inferior is absurd.
It is worth noting that the spread of feminism will reinforce the action of sexual selection in keeping down the numbers of this "intermediate sex." In the past, women who lacked femininity or maternal instinct have often married because the pressure of public opinion and economic conditions made it uncomfortable for any woman to remain unmarried. And they have had children because they could not help it, transmitting to their daughters their own lack of maternal instinct. Under the new régime a large proportion of such women do not marry, and accordingly have few if any children to inherit their defects. Hence the average level of maternal instinct of the women of America is likely steadily to rise.
We conclude that any claim of biological equality of the two sexes must use the word in a figurative sense, not ignoring the differentiation of the two sexes, as extreme feminists are inclined to do. To this differentiation we shall return later.
2. Political equality includes the demand for the vote and for the removal of various legal restrictions, such as have sometimes prevented a wife from disposing of her own property without the consent of her husband or such as have made her citizenship follow that of her husband. In the United States, these legal restrictions are rapidly being removed, at such a rate that in some states it is now the husband who has a right to complain of certain legal discriminations.
Equal suffrage is also gaining steadily, but its eugenic aspect is not wholly clear. Theoretically much is to be said for it, as making use of woman's large social sympathies and responsibilities and interest in the family; but in the states where it has been tried, its effects have not been all that was hoped. Beneficial results are to be expected unless an objectionably extreme feminism finds support.
In general, the demand for political equality, in a broad sense, seems to the eugenist to be the most praiseworthy part of the feminist program. The abolition of those laws, which now discharge women from positions if they marry or have children, promises to be in principle a particularly valuable gain.
3. Economic equality is often summed up in the catch phrase "equal pay for equal work." If the phrase refers to jobs where women are competing on piecework with men, no one will object to it. In practice it applies particularly to two distinct but interlocking demands: (a) that women should receive the same pay as men for any given occupation—as, stenography, for example; and (b) that child-bearing should be recognized as just as much worthy of remuneration as any occupation which men enter, and should be paid for (by the state) on the same basis.
At present, there is almost universally a discrimination against women in commerce and industry. They sometimes get no more than half as much pay as men for similar grades of employment. But there is for this one good reason. An employer needs experienced help, and he expects a man to remain with him and become more valuable. He is, therefore, willing to pay more because of this anticipation. In hiring a woman, he knows that she will probably soon leave to marry. But whatever may be the origin of this discrimination, it is justified in the last analysis by the fact that a man is paid as the head of a family, a woman only as an individual who ordinarily has fewer or no dependents to support. Indeed, it is largely this feature which, under the law of supply and demand, has caused women to work for low wages.