The Truth About WomanHartley, C. Gasquoine (Catherine Gasquoine)
History
The Truth About Woman
Hartley, C. Gasquoine (Catherine Gasquoine)
Women; Women -- History; Women -- Social and moral questions
beauty and force of the passions that we have inherited. We shall find
also the causes, so important to us, which led to the reversal of the
early superiority of the female in size and often in function,
replacing it by the superiority of the male. Then, and then only,
shall we be ready to approach the difficult problems of the sexual
differences which have persisted, separating women from men among
human races, and to estimate if these differences are to be considered
as belonging essentially to the female and the male, or whether they
have arisen through special environmental causes.
If we look back anew to the very start of sexuality, where two cells
flow together, thereby to continue life, we find the very simplest
expression of the sex-appetite. There is what may be called
instinctive physical attraction, and the whole process is very much a
satisfaction of protoplasmic hunger.[39] Now it was, of course, a long
step from this incipient cell-union to the varied function of sex in
animal life, and it was a long process from these to the yet more
complex manifestation of the love-passion among men. But in reality
the source of all love is the same; throughout the entire relations of
the sexes we find this cell-hunger instinct; in every case, it matters
not how fine and ennobling the love may be, the single, original,
impelling motive is the union of two cells--the male element and the
female driven to seek one another to continue life. I find it
necessary to insist on this physical basis of all love. Women are so
apt to go astray. It is one of the vicious tendencies of the female
mind to think that the needs of sex are something to be resisted. Let
us face the truth that this great force of love has its roots fastened
in cell-hunger, and it dies when its roots are cut away.
It is evident that at first this sex-appetite cannot have been
purposive, but acted subconsciously by a kind of interaction between
the want of the organism and its power of function. Even in many
complex multicellular organisms the liberation of the sex-elements
continues very passive; and although the differentiation of the
sexual-cells is already complete in plants and animals comparatively
low in the scale, it at first makes little difference in the
development of the other parts of the individual. Among many lower
animals, and most plants, each individual develops within itself both
kinds of cells--that is, female and male. This union of the two sex
functions in one organism is known as hermaphroditism. There is little
doubt that it was once common to all organisms, an intermediate stage
in the sex-progress, after the differentiation of the sexes had been
accomplished.
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