Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of SexThomas, William Isaac
Science
Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex
Thomas, William Isaac
Sex; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
All the secondary sexual characters of man are highly variable,
even within the limits of the same race; and they differ much in the
several races.... Numerous measurements carefully made of the stature,
the circumference of the neck and chest, the length of the backbone
and of the arms, in various races ... nearly all show that the males
differ much more from one another than do the females. This fact
indicates that, as far as these characters are concerned, it is the
male which has been chiefly modified, since the several races diverged
from their common stock.[32]
Morphologically the development of man is more accentuated than that
of woman. Anthropologists, indeed, regard woman as intermediate in
development between the child and the man.
The outlines of the adult female cranium are intermediate
between those of the child and the adult man; they are softer,
more graceful and delicate, and the apophyses and ridges for
the attachment of muscles are less pronounced,... the forehead
is ... more perpendicular, to such a degree that in a group of
skulls those of the two sexes have been mistaken for different
types; the superciliary ridges and the glabella are less
developed, often not at all; the crown is higher and more
horizontal; the brain weight and cranial capacity are less;
the mastoid apophyses, the inion, the styloid apophyses,
and the condyles of the occipital are of less volume, the
zygomatic and alveolar arches are more regular.[33]
Wagner decided that the brain of a woman, taken as a whole, is
uniformly in a more or less embryonic condition. Huschke says that
woman is always a growing child, and that her brain departs from
the infantile type no more than the other portions of her body.[34]
Weisbach[35] pointed out that the limits of variation in the skull of
man are greater than in that of woman.
Several observers have recorded the opinion that women of
dolichocephalic races are more brachycephalic, and women of
brachycephalic races more dolichocephalic, than the men of the
same races. If this is true, it is a remarkable confirmation of the
conservative tendency of woman. "I have thought for several years that
woman was, in a general way, less dolichocephalic in dolichocephalic
races, and less brachycephalic in brachycephalic races, and that she
had a tendency to approach the typical median form of humanity."[36]
The skin of woman is without exception of a lighter shade than that of
man, even among the dark races. This cannot be due to less exposure,
since the women and men are equally exposed among the uncivilized
races, but is due to the same causes as the more brilliant plumage of
male birds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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