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Page 4
This habit of dealing with particulars, and disinclination for
abstraction, leads easily to habitual action. It is easy for women to
stock up their lower nerve centers with reflex actions. This, of course,
goes along with the general anabolic characteristics of the sex. Hence
women are the conservers of traditions; rules of conducting social
intercourse appeal to them; and they are the final supporters of
theological dogmas.[12] Women naturally uphold caste, and Daughters of
the Revolution and Colonial Dames flourish on the scantiest foundations
of ancestral excellence. Man, on the other hand, is more radical and
creative. He has perfected most of our inventions; he has painted our
great pictures; carved our great statues; he has written music, while
women have interpreted it.
[12] HELEN B. THOMPSON, _Psychological Norms in Men and Women_, p. 171,
University of Chicago Press, 1903.
Along with these fixed qualities of action, women have a tendency to
indirection when they advance. We say they have diplomacy, tact and
coquetry, while man is more direct and bald in his methods. Of course,
one easily understands how these qualities may have arisen, since "fraud
is the force of weak natures," and woman has always been driven to
supplement her weakness with tact, from the days of Jael and Delilah
down to the present day adventuress.
These qualities of mind naturally drive women to literary interests
which are concrete, personal and emotional. Men turn more easily than
women to the abstract generalizations of science. Of course, there are
marked exceptions to these general statements, in both sexes. Madame
Curie, who was recently a candidate for the honors of the French
Academy, and who, in 1911, was given the Nobel prize for her
distinguished services to chemistry, is but one of many women who are
famous to-day in the world of science. Still the private life of these
women, as in the case of S�nya Koval�vsky, seems to bear out our general
conclusion. Men, on the other hand, as milliners and editors of ladies'
journals, show marked skill in catering to women's tastes; but on the
whole the differences indicated seem important and widely diffused.
Another profound difference between men and women is the woman's greater
tendency to periodicity in all her functions and adjustments to
life.[13] In all normal societies the life of the man is fairly regular
and constant from birth to old age. He moves along lines mainly
predetermined by his heredity and his environment, his habits and his
work. Even puberty is less disturbing in its effect upon a boy than upon
a girl; and often by eighteen we can anticipate the life of a young man
with great accuracy. The one element in his life hardest to forecast is
the effect of his love-affairs.
[13] See chapter on Periodicity in G. STANLEY HALL'S _Adolescence_, Vol.
I, p. 472.
With a woman, it is quite different. As a girl, the period of puberty
produces profound changes; and after that, for more than thirty years
she passes through periodical exaltations and depressions that must play
a large part in determining her health, happiness and efficiency. In the
forties, comes another great change which affects her life to a degree
strangely ignored by those who have dealt with her possibilities in the
past.[14]
[14] KARIN MICHA�LIS, _The Dangerous Age_, John Lane Co., 1911, is said
to have sold 80,000 in six weeks when it first appeared in Berlin. _The
Bride of the Mistletoe_, by JAMES LANE ALLEN (Macmillan), deals with the
same period.
But the great element of uncertainty, always fronting the girl and young
woman, is marriage. Marriage for her generally means abandonment of old
working interests, and a substitution of new; it brings her geographical
change; new acquaintances and friendships; and the steady adjustment of
her personal life to the man she has married in its relation to
industry, religion, society and the arts. If children come to her, they
must inevitably retire her from public life, for a time, with the danger
of losing connections which comes to all who temporarily drop out of the
race.
A boy, industrious, observant, with some power of administration,
studies mining engineering, moves to a mining center and expresses his
individual and social powers along the lines of his work until he is
sixty. The women who impinge against his life may deflect him from the
mines in California to those in Australia, or from the actual work of
superintendence to an office; or from an interest in Browning to
Tennyson; or from Methodism to Christian Science. The girl with
industrious and observant interests studies stenography and
type-writing, moves to the vicinity of offices, but is then caught up in
the life of a farmer-husband who shifts her center of activity to a farm
in Idaho where she must devote herself to entirely different activities,
form new associations, think in new terms, respond to new emotions, and
adjust herself to her farmer-husband's personality. When, after
twenty-five years, she has reared a family of children, and when
improved circumstances enable them to move up to the county seat, she
confronts many of the conditions for which she originally prepared
herself, but with farm habits, diminishing adaptability and diminishing
power of appealing to her husband. His powers are still comparatively
unimpaired, and as a dealer in farm produce or farm machinery his
interests undergo slight change. In general, it may be said that a
woman's life falls into three great periods of twenty-five years each.
The first twenty-five years of childhood and girlhood is a time of
getting ready for the puzzling combination of her personal needs as a
human being, her needs as a self-supporting social unit, and her
probabilities of matrimony. The second twenty-five years, the domestic
period of her life, is a time of adjustments as wife and mother, which
may instead prove to be a period of barren waiting, or a time of
professional and industrial self-direction and self-support. The third
twenty-five years is a time of mature and ripened powers, of lessened
romantic interests, and if the preceding period has been devoted to
husband and children, it is often a time of social detachment, of
weakened individual initiative, of old-fashioned knowledge, of
inefficiency, of premature retirement and old age.
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