Our Changing Morality: A Symposium

by Unknown

In the possession of these traits, then, as here understood, woman is somehow restricted. She has them, of course, and exercises them, but not on the very highest level.

We might stop right here, but it is hard to suppress at least a tentative interpretation.

If the personality-imagination complex is where woman fails at the top, then it becomes a priori probable that this difference between man and woman constitutes a remote sex characteristic. And if this is so, then it may prove worth our while to look for a corresponding difference on a level more directly connected with sex life. No sooner is this done than a difference does indeed appear, and it meets our expectations, for it lies in the direction of personality or self-concentration as well as of imagination. Woman is never so much “a part of” as when she loves, man never so “whole”; her self dissolves, his crystallizes. Also, woman’s love is less imaginative than man’s: man is more like what woman’s love makes him out to be than woman is like what man’s love makes her out to be. Relatively speaking, his love is romantic, hers realistic.

This difference in the diagnostic features of man’s love and woman’s love confirms our suspicion that the discrepancy in performance, where the personality-imagination complex is involved, constitutes a remote sex characteristic.

We must now turn once more to woman’s achievement in the different fields of cultural creativeness, for the variation in the degree of excellence reached by her provides a valuable clue as to where her strength lies. In an ascending series of woman’s achievements musical composition is at the bottom of the list, then come sculpture and painting, then literature (with a strange drop in dramatic writing), then instrumental and vocal performance; acting, finally, heads the list.

This order is most illuminating. The relative excellence of woman’s achievement is seen to rise with the concreteness of the task and the prominence of the technical and human elements. Creativeness is more abstract in music than in the plastic and graphic arts, more abstract in these than in literature; and in each case woman’s relative achievement increases as abstractness decreases. Even the peculiar drop in dramatic writing when compared with other forms of literature is explicable in terms of a more abstract sort of creativeness required by the formal elements of dramatic art. Again, the high position in the list of musical performers and actresses, must in part be ascribed to the importance of the technical element in these arts. The preeminence of the musical performers is probably entirely due to this factor, although the intrusion of the human element (performing for an audience) may also have a share in the result.

In the case of acting the human element is the most important factor, for here there is not only an audience to act to but the human content of the acting itself. The human orientation also accounts for the relatively high position of literature in the list when compared to sculpture and painting and to musical composition. Finally, the creativeness of musical performance and acting—two fields in which woman excels—is concrete when compared to that of literature, the arts and musical composition. Incidentally, a sidelight is thus thrown on the case of science where woman’s relative preeminence is found in the concrete and technical domain of the laboratory.

The preceding analysis leads to the conclusion that woman’s strength lies in the concrete as contrasted with the abstract, the technical as contrasted with the ideational, the human as contrasted with the universal and detached. This conclusion, it may be of interest to note, harmonizes perfectly with the general consensus of mankind, as expressed in lay opinion and the judgments of literary men.

To summarize: in all fields of cultural activity opened to her, woman has shown creative ability, but since cultural conditions have made major creativeness possible, she has failed, in comparison with man, in the highest ranges of abstract creativeness. On the other hand, woman has shown in her psychic disposition affinities for the concrete, the technical and the human.

Before closing, these findings may be utilized for a prognostication of woman’s activities in the immediate and more remote future.