ORGANIC DIFFERENCES IN THE SEXES
Reading edition
A grand difference between plant and animal life lies in the fact that the plant is concerned chiefly with storing energy, and the animal with consuming it. The plant by a very slow process converts lifeless into living matter, expending little energy and living at a profit. The animal is unable to change lifeless into living matter, but has developed organs of locomotion, ingestion, and digestion which enable it to prey upon the plant world and upon other animal forms; and in contrast with plant life it lives at a loss of energy. Expressed in biological formula, the habit of the plant is predominantly anabolic, that of the animal predominantly katabolic.
This evidence should be considered in connection with the experiments of Yung on tadpoles, of Siebold on wasps, and of Klebs on the modification of male and female organs in plants:
The results obtained by Maupas receive striking confirmation in the universal experience of stock-breeders, that, in order to keep a breed in health, it is necessary to cross it occasionally with a distinct but allied variety. It appears, then, that a mixture of blood has a favorable effect on the metabolism of the organism, comparable to that of abundant nutrition, and that innutrition and in-and-in breeding are alike prejudicial.
The superior activity and variability of the male among lower forms has been pointed out in great detail by Darwin and confirmed by others.
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.
Back Legs Right Forearm
Men 153.0 186.0 56.0
Women 54.0 76.5 21.4
The average weight of the men was 63.1 kilograms, and of the women 51 kilograms; and, making deduction for this, the strength of the men is still not less than twice as great as that of the women. The anthropometric committee reported to the British Association in 1883 that women are little more than half as strong as men.
Yale Vassar
100-yard dash 10-2/5 sec. 15-1/4 sec.
Running broad jump 23 ft. 11 ft. 5 in.
Running high jump 5 ft. 9 in. 4 ft.
220-yard dash 22-3/5 sec. 36-1/4 sec.
Miss Thompson, whose results were obtained in a psychological laboratory, concludes that in reactions where strength is involved men are clearly superior to women, and this is the only respect in which she finds a marked difference:
We have no other than a utilitarian basis for judging some variations advantageous and others disadvantageous. We can estimate them only with reference to activity and the service or disservice to the individual and society implied in them, and a given variation must receive very different valuations at different historical periods in the development of the race. Departures from the normal are simply nature's way of "trying conclusions." The variations which have proved of life-saving advantage have in the course of time become typical, while the individuals in which unfavorable variations, or defects, have occurred have not survived in the struggle for existence. Morphologically men are the more unstable element of society, and this instability expresses itself in the two extremes of genius and idiocy. Genius in general is correlated with an excessive development in brain-growth, stopping dangerously near the line of hypertrophy and insanity; while microcephaly is a variation in the opposite direction, in which idiocy results from arrested development of the brain, usually through premature closing of the sutures; and both these variations occur more frequently in men than in women. There is also evidence that defects in general are more frequent in men than in women.
An examination of 1,345 idiots and imbeciles in Scotland by Mitchell showed the following distribution of the sexes:
Male Female Male Female
Idiots 430 284 or 100 to 66.0
Imbeciles 321 310 or 100 to 96.5
Pathological variations do not become fixed in the species, because of their disadvantageous nature, but their excess in the male is, as we have seen in the case of variations which have become fixed, an expression of the more energetic somatic habit of the male.
Man Woman Boy
Muscle 41.18 35.8 44.2
Fat 18.2 28.2 13.9
The steatopyga of the women of some races and the accumulation of adipose tissue late in life are quasi-pathological expressions of this tendency.
LAWRIE (GLASGOW)
Men Deaths Women Deaths
Pathological amputations 110 cases 29 41 cases 7
Traumatic amputations 106 " 59 14 " 4
Total 216 cases 88 55 cases 11
or, 40.74 deaths per 100 20 deaths per 100
A difference of 20.74 per cent. in favor of women.
MALGAIGNE (HOSPITALS OF PARIS)
Men Deaths Women Deaths
Major pathological amputations 280 cases 138 98 cases 44
Minor pathological amputations 106 cases 9 40 cases 2
Major traumatic amputations 165 " 107 17 " 10
Minor traumatic amputations 73 " 13 10 " 0
Total 624 cases 267 165 cases 56
or, 37.98 deaths per 100 34.18 deaths per 100
A difference of 3.8 per cent. in favor of women.
FENWICK (NEWCASTLE, GLASGOW, EDINBURGH)
Men Deaths Women Deaths
Amputations 304 cases 86 64 cases 16
or, 27.86 deaths per 100 25 deaths per 100
A difference of 2.86 per cent. in favor of women.
TOTAL FOR THE THREE SERIES
Men Deaths Women Deaths
Amputations 1144 cases 441 284 cases 83
or, 38.56 deaths per 100 29.29 deaths per 100
A difference of 9.27 per cent. in favor of women.
Legouest states in the same article that the lowest mortality of all is in children from 5 to 15 years of age. Ellis quotes a passage from a paper read by Lombroso at the International Congress of Experimental Psychology held in London:
Men Women
Germany (1852-61) 9.61 8.08
Prussia (1869-77) 6.00 7.00
Saxony (1875-78) 4.61 6.21
Belgium 1.34 0.84
France (1873-78) 14.28 13.56
Italy (1866-77) 6.70 8.50
Vienna (1851-59) 9.20 10.04
Vienna (1869-78) 7.73 70.37
Paris (1851-59) 10.27 11.22
Madrid (1884) 31.81 31.25
Men Women
Germany (1852-61) 37.75 18.46
Saxony (1875-78) 6.64 1.52
Belgium 4.65 4.02
Italy (1866-77) 7.00 4.60
Italy (1866-77) (financial reverses) 12.80 2.20
Norway (1866-70) 10.30 4.50
Vienna (1851-59) 6.64 3.10
But the excess of male suicides over females is so great that, reckoned absolutely, about one woman to seven or ten men is driven by want to take her life.
Physical suffering and want are among the motives which, constitutional differences aside, would appeal with about the same force to the two sexes. But the great excess both of suicide (3 or 4 men to 1 woman) and of crime (4 or 5 men to 1 woman) in men, while directly conditioned by a manner of life more subject to vicissitude and catastrophe, is still remotely due to the male, katabolic tendency which has historically eventuated in a life of this nature in the male.
Disease Year Male Female
Smallpox 1854-87 183 148
Measles 1848-87 426 408
Scarlet fever 1859-85 763 738
Diphtheria 1859-87 157 176
Croup 1848-87 221 192
Whooping-cough 1848-87 451 554
Diarrhoea, dysentery 1848-87 932 835
Enteric fever 1869-87 288 277
We should expect the death-rate of men to run high during the period of manhood, in consequence of their greater exposure to peril, hardship, and the storm and stress of life. But two tendencies operate to reduce the comparative mortality of men between the twentieth and about the fortieth year: the fact of the severe male mortality in infancy, which has removed the constitutionally weak contingent, and the fact that during this period women are subject to death in connection with childbirth. So that in the prime of life the mortality of males does not markedly exceed that of females. But the statistics of longevity show that with the approach of old age the number of women of a given age surviving is in excess of the men, and that their relative tenacity of life increases with increasing years. Ornstein has shown, from the official statistics of Greece from 1878 to 1883, that in every period of five years between the ages of 85 and 110 years and upward a larger number of women survive than of men, and in the following proportion:
Years Men Women
85-90 1,296 1,347
90-95 700 820
95-100 305 370
100-105 116 168
105-110 52 69
110 and over 20 34
Women are not only longer-lived than men, but have greater powers of resistance to misfortune and deep grief.
Woman's resistance to death is thus more marked at the two extremes of life, infancy and old age, the periods in which her anabolism is uninterrupted. Menstruation, reproduction, and lactation are at once the cause of an anabolic surplus and the means of getting rid of it. At the extremes of life no demand of this kind is made on woman, and her anabolic nature expresses itself at these times in greater resistance.
The only explanation at hand of this relative superiority of brain weight in old women is that with the close of the period of reproduction (the anabolic surplus being no longer consumed in the processes associated with reproduction) the constructive tendency still asserts itself, and a slight access of growth and vitality results to the organism.
It must be confessed that the testimony of anthropologists on the difference in variability of men and women is to be accepted with great caution. As a class they have gone on the assumption that woman is an inferior creation, and have almost totally neglected to distinguish between the congenital characters of woman and those acquired as the result of a totally different relation to society on the part of women and men. They have also failed to appreciate the fact that differences from man are not necessarily points of inferiority, but adaptations to different and specialized modes of functioning. But, whatever may be the final interpretation of details, I think the evidence is sufficient to establish the following main propositions: Man consumes energy more rapidly; woman is more conservative of it. The structural variability of man is mainly toward motion; woman's variational tendency is not toward motion, but toward reproduction. Man is fitted for feats of strength and bursts of energy; woman has more stability and endurance. While woman remains nearer to the infantile type, man approaches more to the senile. The extreme variational tendency of man expresses itself in a larger percentage of genius, insanity, and idiocy; woman remains more nearly normal.
The fact that society is composed of two sexes, numerically almost equal, but differing in organic and social habits, is too significant to remain without influence on the structural and occupational sides of human life, and in the following chapters we shall note some of the influences of sex, and of the differences in bodily habit of men and women, on social forms and activities.