Feminism and Sex-Extinction. Arabella Kenealy

      So that here again, evolutionary racial advance may derive its impulse from the Female factor.

      A singular phenomenon, recorded by the biologist, Rörig, and one which materially supports my argument, is that disease of the ovaries of a female deer will cause male antlers to develop in her. Proving a male organism concealed, or held Recessive, in her, by power of her female sex-organs normally to inhibit the development of her inherited male-traits. A strange feature of this abnormal occurrence is that disease of one ovary only causes antlers to develop on one side only—and this on the side opposite to that of the diseased gland.

      On the other hand, castration of male sheep of the Merino breed (only the males of which are horned) occasions hornlessness.

      V

      Male traits being paramount on the plane of concrete function, although they exist (normally) in Recessive form in the female, it is from the male inherence of her active right side and its allied brain-half that she derives her concrete powers alike of body and of brain.

      It is obvious, therefore, that when abnormally stimulated by undue exercise, such male-traits may develop into abnormal dominance.

      The left arm of woman is essentially the woman-member. In its half-passive action of supporting her infant for hours together, it is stronger for this maternal ministration than is the more active and doughty right arm of the male. Her left hand is more delicate of form, gentler and more soothing of motion than her right hand is. It is the hand she caresses with. While for direct, strong action—masculine action, that is—the paternal right half of her is dominant, as in the male. And although in our present-day stages of Evolution, the Recessive Woman-traits have emerged as definite characteristics, emancipating themselves from subjection by the Dominant male-traits, it must be remembered that their impulse and their powers are yet but rudimentary. Woman is still more male than she is female; her methods being more masculine still than they are womanly. And this in the degree of her cruder racial stock, or of the harder conditions (natural or artificial) of the environment in which she finds herself, demanding more of masculine proclivity in her—of physical activity and mental assertiveness—than of her intrinsic Woman-qualities of emotion and ministry.

      Civilisation, foreshadowing evolutionary ideals, discountenances, the fighting female. Nevertheless, the cruder female fights still with her male right arm, and the more cultured female, with tongue and tactics.

      The intrinsic Woman-qualities, whereof Christianity is the gospel, are yet in their infancy of development; are yet more ideals for which we are shaping and waiting than they are realised and abiding facts.

      Even their own babes are not secure from the instinct of blows inherent in the male-muscles of their mothers' right arms, when these are restrained neither by a woman's tenderness nor by a man's chivalry. Girl-babies, save those of the rarer higher types, beat their mothers and nurses only rather less frequently and less fiercely than boy-babies do.

      Later in their life-history, that new impulse to the evolution of the Woman-traits which characterises their development to womanhood, normally negatives and further tempers in girls the male instincts of fight and of sport. But many of our modern amazons, brought up like boys, are more male than are their brothers. The male fighting-instinct which moved man to invent a club (destructive) has become so tempered by the increasingly potent Woman-traits in him that, save when angry or at war, he is content to turn his club into a golf-stick, a cricket bat, or tennis racquet; his sword into a plough-share. Whereas, on the contrary, the Woman-traits which moved woman to invent the needle (constructive) are becoming so over-ridden by the male in her that modern woman, artificially masculinised, abhors the needle, and is almost as much dominated as the other sex is by the male instinct for a weapon in the hand.

      The class, Vertebrates, would seem to represent an adaptation to environment typically Male; earlier than and contrary in trend to that of the Mammalia, whereof the impulse was obviously Female.

      Increasing vertebration was characterised by such a progressive differentiation of Male from Female traits as progressively segregated these in opposite sides of the body; with spinal column and spinal cord for, respectively, physical and nervous central lines of demarcation. Thus the Male traits were enabled more and more to detach themselves at will from Female inhibition, and thereby increasingly to specialise and exercise those powers of force and fierceness and activity by way of which species became ever more individuated; aggressive, intelligent, efficient, in terms of Fitness for the struggle for survival.

      Until that later evolution of female adaptation to Unfitness, in the sacrificial function of Lactation, inhibiting and tempering the earlier male trend, engendered the yet higher order of Mammalia.

      (With that intuitive illumination inspiring speech, men and races lacking in virility are contemptuously described as being "invertebrate.")

      According to this hypothesis, the paternal (and male) inherences of any mother may be said to be transmitted to the grandson in the direct male line of her heredity—an unbroken line of Maleness reaching back to its amœbic origin. While the maternal (and female) inherences of any father are transmitted, in the direct female line, to the grand-daughter—a similar line of continuity. The Woman-sex and traits of the grandmother remain thus for a generation dormant, or Recessive, in the father; "skipping a generation," as the phrase is. Then, in the third generation, they re-appear in the grand-daughter; by power of a maternal contribution in which the female inherence is prepotent. While the male-sex and traits of the grandfather remain dormant, or potential, in the mother; likewise "skipping a generation." Then they emerge in the grandson, by power of a male gamete evoking the inherent male in them.

      VI

      The attributes of the one sex invested thus in the other, although normally submerged, form nevertheless a valuable endowment; supplying supplementary and complementary factors to counterpoise, to energise, and fructify the powers proper to the sex of the individual.

      Man bears throughout life the Woman-potential his mother transmitted to him. But it is not his to realise. He bears it in trust for his daughters. He transmits it to his daughters, and in them this potential, recovering its woman-impulse, evolves to a further degree of woman-power. The like with mothers and sons.

      All of which is supported by the Mendelian doctrine that the mother transmits "Femaleness" as a Dominant factor to her daughters and as a Recessive factor to her sons.

      But the method whereby this is achieved has remained a mystery.

      Professor Punnett says with regard to the phenomenon:

      "The mother transmits to her daughter the dominant faculty of femaleness, but to balance this, as it were, she transmits to her sons another quality which her daughters do not receive ... among human families, in respect to particular qualities, the sons tend to resemble their mothers more than their daughters do."

      A striking illustration of such transmission by mother to son of a paternally-derived abnormal inherence which she herself does not develop, is found in so-called "bleeders"; persons who suffer from the disease, hæmophilia. The daughters of a "bleeder" father show no symptom at all of the affliction, but they, nevertheless, pass on to their sons this male heritage of the grandfather.

      There are numerous other examples of traits and diseases thus "skipping a generation"—in other words, of lying dormant, or potential, merely; overshadowed in the constitution and psychology of the sex to which they do not rightly belong, but developing in a succeeding generation in offspring of that sex whereof they are a natural trait, or (so to speak) a natural defect.

      Since the woman-half she contributes to their hybrid constitution engenders the potential of their living processes, the mother may be regarded as still mothering her children throughout development and maturity, and to the end of their natural term. Accounting for that mystical sympathy between mother and child which intuitively informs her of fatalities occurring to absent sons and daughters—but to sons pre-eminently. Marvellously, they remain one living flesh so long as life persists.

      During