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Page 5
On the moral side, as Professor Thomas has so admirably pointed
out,[15] women have evolved a morality of the person and of the family,
while men have evolved a morality of the group and of property. Since
men have had a monopoly of property and of law-making they have shaped
laws mainly for the protection of property, and in a secondary degree
for the protection of the person. Under these laws a man who beats
another nearly to death is less severely punished than one who signs the
wrong name to a check for five dollars. Man's katabolic nature and his
greater freedom have given him almost a monopoly of crime under these
laws which he has made. Offences against the coming generation, against
health, social efficiency and good taste have until recently been left
to the tribunal of public opinion as expressed in social usage; and
here, as we have seen, women are generally the judges and executioners.
In this, her own field of moral judgment, woman is idealistic and
uncompromising. If one of her sisters falls from virtue she will often
pursue her unmercifully. If a man, on the other hand, commits a burglary
or forgery her sympathy and mercy may make her a very lenient judge.
[15] WILLIAM I. THOMAS, _Sex and Society_, p. 149. University of Chicago
Press, 1907. ELLEN KEY, in _Love and Marriage,_ G.P. Putnam's Sons,
1911, traces the same lines of growth.
In �sthetics, the differences follow the same general law. Women express
beauty in themselves; jewels are for their ornament; and rooms are
furnished as a setting for themselves. The lives of millions of workers
go to the adornment of women. In painting they sometimes excel, but a
Madame Le Brun does her best work when she paints herself and her child,
and when Angelica Kauffmann would paint a vestal virgin, she drapes a
veil over her own head and transfers her features to the canvas.
Sculpture and architecture are too impersonal and abstract to attract
much attention from women at present. Even a sculptor like Mrs. Bessie
Potter Vonnoh finds her truest theme in statuettes of mothers with their
children about them.
During the past few years psychologists have paid great attention to
secondary sex characteristics of the mind, and doubtless many qualities
of the thought and feeling of men and women owe their origin to the same
source as brilliant plumage, antlers, combs and wattles. Thus the shy,
retiring, reticent, self-effacing, languishing, adoring excesses of
maidenhood and the peculiar psychological manifestations of the late
forties must probably be understood from this point of view. So, also,
must the bold, swaggering, assertive, compelling bearing of youth be
interpreted. The shy or modish, dandified, lackadaisical cane-carrying
youth is naturally disliked as a sexual perversion.
Women alone, whether individually or in groups, tend to develop certain
hard, dry, arid qualities of mind and heart, or they become emotional
and unbalanced. Losing a sense of large significances, they become
overcareful, saving, sometimes penurious, while in matters of feeling
they lavish sentiment and sympathy on unimportant pets and movements.
Men, when alone, become selfish, coarse, and reckless; their judgments
become extravagant and their pursuits remorseless.
Thus it is certainly true that men and women supplement each other in
the subjective as in the objective life. Man creates, woman conserves;
man composes, woman interprets; man generalizes, woman particularizes;
man seeks beauty, woman embodies beauty; man thinks more than he feels,
woman feels more than she thinks. For new spiritual birth, as for
physical birth, men and women must supplement each other.
To be a woman then, is to be for twenty-five years a girl and then a
young woman, capable of feeding and protecting herself, possessed of
preparing and conserving powers superior to her brothers. After that,
for twenty-five years, she is a human being primarily devoted to
romanticism, finding her largest fulfilment only in wifehood and
motherhood, direct or vicarious; in the last twenty-five years, she
should be a wise woman, of ripe experience, carrying over her gathered
training and powers to the service of the group. All this time she is,
like the man, an incomplete creature, realizing her greatest power and
her greatest service only when working in loving association with the
man of her choice.
II
Woman's Heritage
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