Among the ancients Celts, Teutons and Slavs, than which few races have been more virile, women, when necessary, used to fight side by side with their men. It is said of the virile Similkameen Indians, that “the women were nearly as good hunters as the men.”[62] The whole race survived only by means of hunting. It was therefore an advantage for the females to approximate to the men in their skill. By this means a double strain of hunting virtues descended to the offspring, thus leading to ever greater and greater refinement and specialization of instinct and judgment. From the reading of the biographies of great men also we are in a position to determine to what extent the quality which to-day is opprobriously referred to as female “masculinity” was present in their mothers. Think of Schopenhauer, Byron, and, above all, of King Alfred the Great, to whose mother history declares the monarch owed everything! She could hardly have reared so manly a king, had she not herself possessed some innate knowledge of manliness and masculine virtue. This manliness of women, therefore, far from being a disaster, is rather a desirable trait, if a particularly virile race of men is required. And since the existence of women with pronounced male characteristics cannot possibly be a novelty in this world, it is far more likely that the outcry against them, which is modern, is due to modern conditions, than that they are truly and intrinsically undesirable. “But,” argue the man and woman of taste, “the masculine woman in our society is surely disagreeable!” I agree. But while I shall now endeavour to explain why she is, or has become, disagreeable, I should like to repeat that she is by no means the only example of a disagreeable sex-phenomenon in our midst; that there are other phenomena just as obnoxious, and that all take their root not necessarily in abnormality of an incurable kind, but in the condition of ill-adaptation into which sex has fallen in this country—a condition that sex-psychologists do not sufficiently reckon with when they regard as pathological the unfortunate modern female who is either sadistic, hostile to man, unnatural in her love and pursuit of women, or blatantly and ostentatiously masculine in her tastes, her kit and her interests. The maleness of women, considered from the standpoint of marriage—which is the only standpoint relevant to this chapter[63]—can be deprecated only when it renders impossible, or more than usually difficult, the cohesion of that valuable unit in society known as the family. As this is not a work on the pathology of sex, I cannot deal with cases of genuine physical and mental aberration in which a woman is so intensely masculine that motherhood is quite out of the question. I can only deal with those cases where male elements are present in sufficient quantities in the female to avert serious dilution of virile qualities in a stock.