Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
Her developmental arrest and her disabilities (resulting from an
intensification of Recessive processes in her) are seen now to have
subserved a phase of higher evolution. Nature suddenly locked the door
upon her differentiating and escaping energies, in order that these
might be conserved and knit into organisation. The active muscularity
she has lost reappears in the new factors of symmetry and delicate
modelling of limb; in repose and grace of movement. The straight, slim,
boy-like lines of the hoyden girl have evolved into the curves and
rounded suppleness and beauties of a woman. The girlish, agile and
abrupt movements have passed into a woman's poise and grace. The
unformed features of the child have become now delicately modelled; the
curveless, emotionless lips have bloomed into the flower-like, rosy
fullness of a woman's mouth; passionate and tender. New mystery and
brilliance light her eyes. Eyes and brows are charged with potencies;
with seriousness, with modesty, serenity, elusiveness. Hair and hands,
voice and expression, have become transfigured by the magic of a
re-creative impulse which has regenerated her whole being.
So too her brain development, arrested along lines of concrete
intellection, is seen to have evolved to higher, subtler forms of
mentality; to be instinct with delicacy, sympathy, tact, and with that
incalculable mode of supra-conscious cerebration which is intuition. In
so far as she is of high, womanly type, she is now warm and emotional,
sympathetic, intuitive; consciously pure, yet delicately passionate.
From a crude and sexless hoyden, she has evolved into an exquisite
complexity; invested all round with higher values, human and psychical.
As in their earliest beginnings, however, so now again the Woman-traits
manifest as Unfitnesses. Her new departure has actually undone in her
much that had been achieved in physical adaptation.
Biologists, observing this arrest of development in the female, have
interpreted it as sign of an organisation inferior to that of the male.
In point of fact, the contrary is the case. Her arrest of development
along lines of masculine inherence no more proves her inferior to the
male than does the human developmental arrest along lines of that tail
our ape-progenitor possessed, prove the human inferior to the
ape-species.
This arrest of tail-development occurred first in the female, doubtless;
being one of those evolutionary mutations in the direction of advance of
Type which are engendered in her sex; and which are characterised by a
conversion to higher potential, of differentiations in respect of
adaptation to environment that have been achieved in the male.
Conversion of male Fitness to female Unfitness, therefore.
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