A very striking report comes from near New Guinea, where the woman was stronger than the man. There it was a common sight to see a woman spanking her husband with a paddle. Through the brute force of superior strength she oppressed the man just as men oppress women where the woman is weaker.
Thus through legend and the records of travelers we have clear testimony that man is not larger and stronger than woman because of innate differences, as is generally supposed, but that physical superiority is a characteristic of the dominant sex, regardless whether that be male or female.
Similarly those secondary physical characteristics which are to-day regarded as female are found among males when they occupy the subordinate position in which woman lives to-day. Woman is inclined to-day to full, rounded curves and even to stoutness. Among the Celts the woman dominated, and according to Strabo the men of that people were inclined to be fat and heavy-paunched. The same was true of the Kamchadales in the days of woman rule. The men were strikingly voluptuous and well rounded. The male Eskimos too were inclined to fatness in the days when they did the housekeeping. The more subordinate the fatter.
In this connection the Oriental women are typical; their exuberance of figure is as well known as their absolute subordination and their confinement to the home. They may be contrasted with the fat and subordinate male Kamchadales, whose wives were slim and firm breasted into old age.
Equal rights do away with this division of labor. There are no longer male and female jobs; not sex but inclination and fitness now begin to determine the individual’s occupation. In late Egypt, when the domination of woman was merging into a period of equal rights, there are many indications that both sexes did the same work without any differentiation of occupation. In the marriage contract in the time of Darius, the woman—who then made the contract alone—says, “All, which you and I may together earn....” Victor Marx has studied the position of woman in Babylon in the period 604-485 B.C., and finds a similar situation. In an inheritance case of that period a woman recites that “I and my husband carried on business with my dowry and together bought a piece of land.” Such common businesses by man and woman are frequently mentioned. Under such circumstances it was natural that neither man nor woman bound themselves at marriage to live in the same house, for both went to work outside the home.
To-day, when we are passing from male domination to equal rights it is natural that the woman should be seeking more and more to get out of the home. The greater her power the more she seeks to level the lines between male and female work. This effort is strongest in the subordinate sex—in this case the feminine—because it seeks naturally to better its position. In this transition period, therefore, women are pressing into male pursuits much faster than men into domestic occupations. Yet even in Germany a beginning has been made. For women the male professions seem higher and better, because they have hitherto belonged to the dominant sex, while for the men feminine occupations seem to have about them something degrading; but the more women approach equality the less odium attaches to what has been their sphere, and the more men tend to enter it.
The same phenomenon may be observed in periods of transition from female to male domination. Among the Batta, for instance, both sexes worked in the fields, but the man alone cared for the children. This was obviously a step toward equal rights. The men already shared the extra-domestic occupations of the women, but the women still refused to share the work of the hitherto subordinate men.
When equal rights put an end to the differentiation of occupation the physical differences between men and women also disappear. We are to-day still far enough away from equality of the sexes, but there have been people where equal rights prevailed, and among such people the physical form of the two sexes was so like that they could hardly be distinguished. In Tacitus’s day, when equality was probably general among the Germans, men and women are reported to have had exactly the same weight and strength. Albert Friedenthal says of the Cingalese that a stranger could not distinguish the sexes. Men and women were so alike among the Botocudos that one had to count their tresses to tell them apart. Lallemant found among this people “a swarm of men-women and women-men, not a single man or a single woman in the whole tribe.” This good man came from a state where men dominated and did not suspect that when the power-relation of the sexes changed their physical appearance changed too. If a Botocudo had come to Europe in those days he would presumably have judged by his own standards and noted with equal horror the outer differences of European men and women.
Every age holds its own standards absolute. The domination of one sex depends upon the artificial development of as many and as striking bodily differences as possible, and therefore approves them and insists upon emphasizing them. Equal rights tend to develop the natural similarity of the sexes and considering that the norm, regards it as ideal.
There is ample opportunity to observe to-day that equality of the sexes coincides with a tendency slowly to do away with artificial physical differences. The disappearance of the so-called feminine figure was so striking in America, where the sexes are more nearly equal than in Europe, that Sargent and Alexander prophesied in 1910 that soon men and women could hardly be distinguished from one another. A comparison with pictures of thirty or forty years ago makes it plain that even in Europe male and female figures are coming closer to each other. The narrow waists and full bosoms of the women and the full beards of the men have disappeared. And, as a result of our investigation, we may prophesy that the coming equality will still more completely iron out those differences which hitherto have been regarded as genuine secondary sex characters.