“The tone of the voice even, in simpler conditions of civilization, is generally far more alike in the two sexes. The high tenor, the feminine man’s voice, and the deep alto, the masculine woman’s voice, are among civilized peoples far rarer than among savage races, in whom masculine and feminine varieties sometimes seem hardly distinguishable. Our bandmasters travel to Hungary and Galicia to find clear high tenors, whilst deep alto voices are now increasingly difficult to find, for the reason that among the civilized peoples the masculine-feminine contraltos die out. =Dominant, on the other side, is the distinct contrast between the two sexual tones of voices--soprano and bass.= This fact has already had a determining influence in our school of song; it affects our vocal tone-teaching--to such a hidden, out-of-the-way path have we been led by our recognition of the continually increasing contrast between man and woman.” Certain phenomena and aberrations of the movement for the emancipation of women, such as the adoption of a masculine style of dress and the use of tobacco, are no more than =relapses= into a primitive condition, which among the common people has persisted unaltered to the present day. We need merely allude to the man’s hat, the short coat, and the high-laced boot of the Tyrolese women, and to the tobacco-smoking of the women at the wedding festivals among the German peasantry. A false “emancipation” of this kind is frequently encountered among peasants, vagabonds, and gipsies, to which, moreover, the neuter designation of the women of this class as _das Mensch_ and “woman-fellow,” etc., bears witness; we have herein characteristic indications of the fact that “peculiar to the woman of the people is a self-conscious, actively progressive masculine nature.” That the comparative obliteration of sexual contrasts among the lower orders of modern society is a vestigial relic of primitive conditions, is shown also by the primeval history of the nations. The idea appearing already in the Biblical creation myth, and the thought later expressed by Plato, and recently by Jacob Böhme, that the first human being was originally both man and woman, and that the woman was subsequently formed out of this primeval human being Adam--this pregnant thought merely expresses the fact of the indifference of the sexes among savage people and in the primitive history of mankind. The hermaphrodite of ancient art is, like the man-woman of the modern woman’s movement, an atavism, a retrogression to these long-past stages, of which we have only the above-mentioned vestiges to remind us.[20]