BY M. VAERTING
Certain peculiarities of physical form are to-day considered typical feminine sex characters. Thus roundness and fullness of figure are generally regarded as characteristic of women; larger size and strength among men are accepted as a sex difference, biologically determined.
But this theory, like the entire doctrine of secondary sex characters, stands upon a doubtful basis. It has grown up out of a comparison of men and women in very unequal situations. The bodies of men and women whose field of work and type of occupation differ widely have been compared. The man attends to the extra-domestic activities, while the woman is chiefly occupied at home. Bachofen writes: “If a man sits at a spinning-wheel a weakening of body and of soul will inevitably follow.” Charles de Coster in his “Wedding Journey” makes the significant remark: “Work in the fields had given Liska hips like a robust man’s.” Certain of the physical differences between men and women may therefore be sociologically determined rather than due to inborn differences.
One may object that the division of labor between the sexes, in which the woman takes the domestic and the man the extra-domestic sphere, is itself determined by inborn sex differences. Even in Socrates’s time it was believed that the nature of the sexes fixed their fields of activity. Man was unquestionably intended for matters which must be attended to outside the house, “while the weak and timid woman was by divine order assigned to the inner work of the home.” After thorough investigation it appears that this hoary theory, which still persists, is false. The division of labor between man and woman corresponds not to an innate difference but to their power-relation. If man dominates he says that woman’s place is the home, and that work outside the home is fit only for men. If woman is dominant then she has the opposite opinion, takes care of business outside the home, and leaves the man to take care of the family and the housekeeping. The ruling sex, whether male or female, always puts the domestic duties on the subordinate sex and takes to itself work outside the home. To-day man is dominant, but there have been many peoples among whom woman was dominant and the rôle of man and woman was the reverse of that common to-day. In ancient Egypt there was a period when women ruled. Herodotus reports that they unnaturally performed “masculine” activities, carried on commerce in the market-place, while the men stayed at home, sewed, and attended to domestic difficulties. To Herodotus, who came from a state where men were dominant, the work of the Egyptian women naturally seemed “male.” In the Talmud Herodotus’s report is confirmed. The children of Israel, it tells us, were disturbed because their men were forced to do women’s work and their women men’s work. In Sophocles’s “Œdipus Kolonos” Œdipus says to his two daughters: “Ha, how they imitate the Egyptians in the manner and meaning of life. There the men stay home and sit at the spinning-wheel, and the women go out to meet the needs of life.” Œdipus also mentions the fact reported also by Herodotus, that only the daughters, not the sons, were compelled in Egypt to support their parents. The sons could not fulfill that duty, Sophocles says, because, like the Greek girls, they stayed at home and had no income from their labor. Furthermore, they had only a limited right to own property.
One might cite many other peoples where the woman was dominant. Among the Kamchadales the men, in the days of female dominance, were such complete housewives that they cooked, sewed, washed, and were never allowed to stay away from home for more than a day. Similarly among the Lapps there was a period when the men did the housework while the women fished and sailed the sea. Under such circumstances the men also took care of the children. Strabo and Humboldt both report of the Vasko-Iberian races that the women worked in the fields; after child birth they turned the child over to the man and themselves resumed their work in the fields. A similar arrangement prevailed in the days when women ruled Lybia, which bordered upon Egypt.
When one sex is dominant there is always a division of labor.
This differentiation of occupation is one of the chief causes of certain differences in physical form between men and women. It changes the fundamental conditions of development—among others the course of the inner secretions. Where man rules he does the active outside work and is accordingly larger and stronger; where woman rules and does the same “man’s work” her body assumes what are to-day regarded as typically male proportions, whereas the man develops what we call feminine characteristics. We have a few definite proofs of this from states dominated by women.
When woman ruled among the Gauls, and worked outside the home, we are told by Strabo that the female was the larger and stronger sex.
Among the Adombies on the Congo women were in power and did all the hard work. According to Ellis they were stronger and better developed than the men. The same was true of the Wateita in East Africa. Fritsch and Hellwald report that the woman is larger than the man among the Bushmen. Female and male pelvises show no differences, but are alike “male” in our sense of the word.
The Spartan women in the days of their rule had a reputation for enormous strength. Aristophanes says that a Spartan woman could strangle an ox bare-handed. The Egyptian women at the height of their power were called by their neighbors the “lionesses of the Nile,” and they seemed to like the name. When Heracles visited the Lybians, whose state bordered on Egypt and of whose rule by women we have many witnesses, he had to work, like the other men of the country, with the distaff. His wife Omphale, however, wandered about clad in a lionskin and armed with a club, and won respect for her strength.