Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
"The mother transmits to her daughter the dominant faculty of
femaleness, but to balance this, as it were, she transmits to her
sons another quality which her daughters do not receive ... among
human families, in respect to particular qualities, the sons tend
to resemble their mothers more than their daughters do."
A striking illustration of such transmission by mother to son of a
paternally-derived abnormal inherence _which she herself does not
develop_, is found in so-called "bleeders"; persons who suffer from the
disease, hæmophilia. The daughters of a "bleeder" father show no symptom
at all of the affliction, but they, nevertheless, pass on to their sons
this male heritage of the grandfather.
There are numerous other examples of traits and diseases thus "skipping
a generation"--in other words, of lying dormant, or potential, merely;
overshadowed in the constitution and psychology of the sex to which they
do not rightly belong, but developing in a succeeding generation in
offspring of that sex whereof they are a natural trait, or (so to speak)
a natural defect.
Since the woman-half she contributes to their hybrid constitution
engenders the potential of their living processes, the mother may be
regarded as still mothering her children throughout development and
maturity, and to the end of their natural term. Accounting for that
mystical sympathy between mother and child which intuitively informs her
of fatalities occurring to absent sons and daughters--but to sons
pre-eminently. Marvellously, they remain one living flesh so long as
life persists.
During the War, mothers at a distance have known by an intuitive flash,
and have told of the death of sons cut down in battle. One mother
described the sensation she experienced as being precisely _as though
one side of her body had been suddenly torn away_. So too, mothers whose
infants have died during childbirth or shortly after, describe as
persisting for months subsequently a sense as though part of them were
dead.
The father too must function in the hybrid living constitution. With the
immense difference, however, that his part therein is a factor of the
development of traits, not of the mystical functioning of Life. A
notable feature of this paternal heritage is that in women at middle-age
(when the wane of reproductive power releases vital potential from
maternal investments) not only may masculine physical traits emerge, but
there may develop in them notable brain-capacities inherited from the
father. Capacities inherent in them previously, but long inhibited in
action by the normal female brain-Recessiveness.
VII
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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