Two suggestions which Mrs. Gallichan makes in the biological section are especially striking. One is derived from the bee, and one from the spider. The bee, she reminds us, belongs
to a highly evolved and complex society, which may be said to represent a very perfected and extreme socialism. In this society the vast majority of the population—the workers—are sterile females, and of the drones, or males, only a very few at the most are ever functional. Reproduction is carried on by the queen-mother ... specialized for maternity and incapable of any other function.... I have little doubt that something which is at least analogous to the sterilization of the female bees is present among ourselves. The complexity of our social conditions, resulting in the great disproportion between the number of the sexes, has tended to set aside a great number of women from the normal expression of their sex functions.
The danger to society, when maternity shall be left to the stupid parasitic women who are unable to exist as workers, is pointed out by Mrs. Gallichan; as is also that exaggerated form of matriarchy which is realized among the ants and bees. And she reminds women who are workers, not mothers, that in the bee-workers the ovipositor becomes a poisoned sting. She warns women not to become like the sterile bees; but she warns them also against state endowment of motherhood. And she does not suggest how the great excess of women are to become mothers without reorganizing society.
The second example she cites in warning, the common spider, whose courtship customs Darwin described in The Descent of Man, is “a case of female superiority carried to a savage conclusion.” And from this female who ruthlessly devours her lover, Mrs. Gallichan deduces a theory for “many of those wrongs which women have suffered at the hands of men. Man, acting instinctively, has rebelled, not so much, I think, against woman as against this driving hunger within himself, which forces him helpless into her power.”
The stages by which parasitism was transferred from the male to the female still need some elucidation—like the stages by which marriage passed from endogamy to exogamy. But Mrs. Gallichan’s suggestion about the male preserving himself by appearing as self-sufficient and as dominant as he can, is highly interesting. It will probably not be long before we know a great deal more of this.
In the historical section of her book, Mrs. Gallichan devotes four admirable chapters to the mother-age civilization, and four others to the position of women in Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome.
Of immense significance is the relation between the enviable status of women in Egypt and that love of peace and of peaceful pursuits which characterized the Egyptian people. War, patriarchy, and the subjection of women, have gone hand in hand. Social organizations in which might was right have minimized the worth of women; those in which ingenuity, resourcefulness, and ideality were set above brute force have given women most justice.
Mrs. Gallichan’s chapter on the women of Athens and of Sparta is most suggestive. So is that on the women of Rome.
In her modern section she discusses women and labor:
The old way of looking at the patriarchal family was, from one point of thought, perfectly right and reasonable as long as every woman was ensured the protection of, and maintenance by, some man. Nor do I think there was any unhappiness or degradation involved to women in this co-operation of the old days, where the man went out to work and the woman stayed to do work at least equally valuable in the home. It was, as a rule, a co-operation of love, and in any case it was an equal partnership in work. But what was true once is not true now. We are living in a continually changing development and modification of the old tradition of the relationship of woman and man.... The women of one class have been forced into labor by the sharp driving of hunger. Among the women of the other class have arisen a great number who have turned to seek occupation from an entirely different cause, the no less bitter driving of an unstimulating and ineffective existence, a kind of boiling-over of women’s energy wasted, causing a revolt of the woman-soul against a life of confused purposes, achieving by accident what is achieved at all. Between the women who have the finest opportunities and the women who have none there is this common kinship—the wastage not so much of woman as of womanhood.