Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
As already mentioned, Sex is regarded by the large and ever-increasing
order of the adherents of Mendel as a "Mendelian factor." But in
applying Mendelian truth to humans, I venture to think the applications
have not been carried to their ultimate and most momentous conclusions.
Because, given the keynote to the Principle of Duality in the phenomenon
of the Contrasting Traits found manifesting in plant-heredity and
constitution, the duality of the Human Sexes, with their respective
orders of Contrasting characteristics, suggests itself as being
analogous.
Human attributes, physical and mental, are seen, like those of plants,
to group themselves into two distinct categories, the Male and the
Female sex-characteristics, primary and secondary. And these, though
wholly contrary in nature and in trend, are found--precisely as occurs
in plants--linked together in the hybrid offspring of the two parents
from whom they were, respectively, derived; blending in a temporal
unity, but remaining, nevertheless, unchanged in their essential
differences; coming to means and counterpoises in individual
organisations, yet nevertheless preserved distinct and unalloyed in
these, as is shown by their emergence, unaltered, in offspring of
opposite sexes.
As a hybrid plant is the product of two parents characterised by
opposite traits--Tallness and Dwarfness, for example--so, I submit, a
human creature is the hybrid offspring of two parents characterised by
opposite traits--Maleness and Femaleness, with the Sex-traits
differentiating one sex from the other.
And at once a solution of the many baffling presentments and problems of
Sex presents itself--of the enigma of man with Woman potential in him,
of woman with Man potential in her; a key to the mysterious Duality of
human biology and psychology, with its conflict of battling impulses,
its harmonies of blending attributes, its innumerable and diverse
developments in proportions, in means, in extremes; in normalities,
eccentricities, deviations and reversions. And the analogy between the
two orders of Traits--in Plant-life at the lower end of the scale of
species, and in Human life and psychology at the higher end--suggests
that the ever-increasing complexity of organisation and faculty which
has characterised Evolutionary Progress, has had for aim, as it has had
for method, the ever further differentiation and more perfect
segregation, but, nevertheless, the ever closer and more intricate
association of the contrary factors of Maleness and Femaleness.
In the lower organisms--plant and animal--the two groups of Traits are
but crudely differentiated as characteristics distinguishing one sex
from the other. In such lower organisms, Sex-development is merely
rudimentary; the first foreshadowings in Life of two intrinsic orders of
Essential Attribute, the progressive evolution whereof reveals two
contrary trends in physiological and psychical inherences.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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