Sex and Society by William I. Thomas

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SEX AND SOCIETY

Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex

by

WILLIAM I. THOMAS

Associate Professor of Sociology in the University of Chicago

The University of Chicago Press
Chicago, Illinois

1907
Fourth Impression 1913

AUTHOR'S NOTE

These studies have been published in various journals at different
times. They are reprinted together because there is some demand
for them, and they are not easily accessible. In preparing them for
publication in the present form, some of them have been expanded and
all of them have been revised.

While each study is complete in itself, the general thesis running
through all of them is the same--that the differences in bodily
habit between men and women, particularly the greater strength,
restlessness, and motor aptitude of man, and the more stationary
condition of woman, have had an important influence on social forms
and activities, and on the character and mind of the two sexes.

"Organic Differences in the Sexes" appeared in the _American Journal
of Sociology_, III, 31ff., with the title, "On a Difference in the
Metabolism of the Sexes;" "Sex and Primitive Social Control," _ibid._,
III, 754ff.; "Sex and Primitive Industry," _ibid._, IV, 474ff.; "Sex
and Primitive Morality," _ibid._, IV, 774ff.; "The Psychology of
Modesty and Clothing," _ibid._, V, 246ff.; "The Adventitious Character
of Woman," _ibid._, XII, 32ff.; "The Mind of Woman and the Lower
Races," _ibid._, XII, 435ff.; "The Psychology of Exogamy," in the
_Zeitschrift fuer Socialwissenschaft_, V, 1ff., with the title,
"Der Ursprung der Exogamie;" "Sex and Social Feeling," in the
_Psychological Review_, XI, 61ff., with the title, "The Sexual
Element in Sensibility." Portions of a paper printed in the _Forum_,
XXXVI, 305ff., with the title, "Is the Human Brain Stationary?"
are incorporated in the paper on "The Mind of Woman and the Lower
Races," and portions of a paper printed in the _American Journal
of Sociology_, IX, 593ff., with the title, "The Psychology of
Race-Prejudice," are incorporated in the paper on "Sex and Social
Feeling." I acknowledge the courtesy of the editors of these journals
for permission to reprint.

W.I.T.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ORGANIC DIFFERENCES IN THE SEXES

SEX AND PRIMITIVE SOCIAL CONTROL

SEX AND SOCIAL FEELING

SEX AND PRIMITIVE INDUSTRY

SEX AND PRIMITIVE MORALITY

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EXOGAMY

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MODESTY AND CLOTHING

THE ADVENTITIOUS CHARACTER OF WOMAN

THE MIND OF WOMAN AND THE LOWER RACES

INDEX

ORGANIC DIFFERENCES IN THE SEXES

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.

Certain biologists, limiting their attention in the main to the lower
forms of life, have maintained very plausibly that males are more
katabolic than females, and that maleness is the product of influences
tending to produce a katabolic habit of body.[1] If this assumption
is correct, maleness and femaleness are merely a repetition of the
contrast existing between the animal and the plant. The katabolic
animal form, through its rapid destruction of energy, has been carried
developmentally away from the anabolic plant form; and of the two
sexes the male has been carried farther than the female from the plant
process. The body of morphological, physiological, ethnological, and
demographic data which follows becomes coherent, indeed, only on the
assumption that woman stands nearer to the plant process than man,
representing the constructive as opposed to the disruptive metabolic
tendency.[2]

The researches of Duesing,[3] supplementing the antecedent observations
of Ploss,[4] and further supplemented by the ethnological data
collected by Westermarck,[5] seem to demonstrate a connection between
an abundance of nutrition and females, and between scarcity and
males, in relatively higher animal forms and in man. The main facts in
support of the theory that such a connection exists are the following:
Furriers testify that rich regions yield more furs from females and
poor regions more from males. In high altitudes, where nutrition is
scant, the birthrate of boys is high as compared with lower altitudes
in the same locality. Ploss has pointed out, for instance, that in
Saxony from 1847 to 1849 the yield of rye fell, and the birth-rate of
boys rose with the approach of high altitudes. More boys are born in
the country than in cities, because city diet is richer, especially
in meat; Duesing shows that in Prussia the numerical excess of boys is
greatest in the country districts, less in the villages, still less
in the cities, and least in Berlin.[6] In times of war, famine, and
migration more boys are born, and more are born also in poor than in
well-to-do families. European statistics show that when food-stuffs
are high or scarce the number of marriages diminishes, and in
consequence a diminished number of births follows, and a heightened
percentage of boys; with the recurrence of prosperity and an increased
number of marriages and births, the percentage of female births
rises (though it never equals numerically that of the males).[7]
More children are born from warm-weather than from cold-weather
conceptions,[8] but relatively more boys are born from cold-weather
conceptions. Professor Axel Key has shown from statistics of 18,000
Swedish school children that from the end of November and the
beginning of December until the end of March or the middle of April,
growth in children is feeble. From July-August to November-December
their daily increase in weight is three times as great as during the
winter months.[9] This is evidence in confirmation of a connection
between maleness, slow growth, and either poor nutrition or cold
weather, or both. Professor Key's investigations[10] have also
confirmed the well-known fact that maturity is reached earlier in
girls than in boys and have shown that in respect of growth the
ill-nourished girls follow the law of growth of the boys. Growth is a
function of nutrition, and puberty is a sign that somatic growth is
so far finished that the organism produces a surplus of nutrition to
be used in reproduction. Organically reproduction is also a function
of nutrition, and, as Spencer pointed out, is to be regarded as
discontinuous growth. The fact than an anabolic surplus, preparatory
to the katabolic process of reproduction, is stored at an earlier
period in the female than in the male, and that this period is
retarded in the ill-nourished female, is a confirmation of the view
that femaleness is an expression of the tendency to store nutriment,
and explains also the infantile somatic characters of woman. Finally,
the fact that polyandry is found almost exclusively in poor countries,
coupled with the fact that ethnologists uniformly report a scarcity
of women in those countries, permits us to attribute polyandry to a
scarcity of women and scarcity of women to poor food conditions.

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:

According to Yung, tadpoles pass through an hermaphroditic
stage, in common, according to other authorities, with most
animals.... When the tadpoles were left to themselves,
the females were rather in the majority. In three lots the
proportion of females to males was: 54-46, 61-39, 56-44. The
average number of females was thus about fifty-seven in the
hundred. In the first brood, by feeding one set with beef,
Yung raised the percentage of females from 54 to 78: in the
second, with fish, the percentage rose from 61 to 81; while in
the third set, when the especially nutritious flesh of frogs
was supplied, the percentage rose from 56 to 92. That is to
say, in the last case the result of high feeding was that
there were 92 females and 8 males.[11]

Similarly, the experiments of Siebold on wasps show that the
percentage of females increases from spring to August, and
then diminishes. We may conclude without scruple that the
production of females from fertilized ova increases with
the temperature and food supply, and decreases as these
diminish.[12]

Nor are there many facts more significant than the simple and
well-known one that within the first eight days of larval
life the addition of food will determine the striking and
functional differences between worker and queen.[13]

It is certainly no mere chance, but agrees with other
well-known facts, that for the generation of the female organ
more favorable external circumstances must prevail, while
the male organ may develop under very much more unfavorable
conditions.[14]

These facts are not conclusive, but they all point in the same
direction, and are probably sufficient to establish a connection
between food conditions and the determination of sex. But behind the
mere fact that a different attitude toward food determines difference
of sex lies the more fundamental--indeed, the real--explanation of
the fact, and this chemists and physiologists are not at present
able to give us. Researches must be carried farther on the effect of
temperature, light, and water on variation, before we may hope to
reach a positive conclusion. We can only assume that the chemical
constitution of the organism at a given moment conditions the sex of
the offspring, and is itself conditioned by various factors--light,
heat, water, electricity, etc.--and that food is one of these
variables.[15] It is sufficient for our present purpose that sex is
a constitutional matter, indirectly dependent upon food conditions;
that the female is the result of a surplus of nutrition; and that the
relation reported among the lower forms persists in the human species.

In close connection with the foregoing we have the fact, reported
by Maupas,[16] that certain Infusorians are capable of reproducing
asexually for a number of generations, but that, unless the
individuals are sexually fertilized by crossing with unrelated forms
of the same species, they finally exhibit all the signs of senile
degeneration, ending in death.[17] After sexual conjugation there
was an access of vitality, and the asexual reproduction proceeded as
before. "The evident result of these long and fatiguing experiments
is that among the ciliates the life of the species is decomposed into
evolutional cycles, each one having for its point of departure an
individual regenerated and rejuvenated by sexual copulation."[18]

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.

If this is true, and if heightened nutrition yields an increased
proportion of females, we ought to find that breeding-out is favorable
to the production of females, and breeding-in to the production of
males; and a considerable body of evidence in favor of this assumption
exists.[19]

Observations of above 4,000 cases show that, among horses, the
more the parent animals differ in color, the more the female
foals outnumber the male. Similarly, in-and-in-bred cattle give
an excessively large number of bull calves. Liaisons produce an
abnormally large proportion of females;[20] incestuous unions,
of males.[21] Among the Jews, who frequently marry cousins, the
percentage of male births is very high.

According to Mr. Jacobs' comprehensive manuscript collection
of Jewish statistics ... the average proportion of male and
female Jewish births registered in various countries is 114.5
males to 100 females, whilst the average proportion among the
non-Jewish population of the corresponding countries is 105.25
males to 100 females.... His collection includes details
of 118 mixed marriages; of these 28 are sterile, and in the
remainder there are 145 female children and 122 male--that is,
118.82 females to 100 males.[22]

The testimony is also tolerably full that among _metis_ and among
exogamous peoples the female birth-rate is often excessively high.[23]

Viewed with reference to activity, the animal is an advance on the
plant, from which it departs by morphological and physiological
variations suited to a more energized form of life; and the female may
be regarded as the animal norm from which the male departs by further
morphological variations. It is now well known that variations are
more frequent and marked in males than in females. Among the lower
forms, in which activity is more directly determined mechanically
by the stimuli of heat, light, and chemical attraction, and where
in general the food and light are evenly distributed through the
medium in which life exists, and where the limits of variation
are consequently small, the constitutional nutritive tendency of
the female manifests itself in size. Among many Cephalopoda and
Cirripedia, and among certain of the Articulata, the female is larger
than the male. Female spiders, bees, wasps, hornets, and butterflies
are larger than the males, and the difference is noticeable even in
the larval stage. So considerable is the difference in size between
the male and female cocoons of the silk-moth that in France they are
separated by a particular mode of weighing.[24] The same superiority
of the female is found among fishes and reptiles; and this relation,
wherever it occurs, may be associated with a habit of life in which
food conditions are simple and stimuli mandatory. As we rise in the
scale toward backboned and warm-blooded animals, the males become
larger in size; and this reversal of relation, like the development
of offensive and defensive weapons, is due to the superior variational
tendency of the male, resulting in characters which persist in the
species wherever they prove of life-saving advantage.[25]

The superior activity and variability of the male among lower forms
has been pointed out in great detail by Darwin and confirmed by
others.

Throughout the animal kingdom, when the sexes differ in
external appearance, it is, with rare exceptions, the male
which has been more modified; for, generally, the female
retains a closer resemblance to the young of her own species,
and to other adult members of the same group. The cause of
this seems to lie in the males of almost all animals having
stronger passions than the females.[26]

Darwin explains the greater variability of the males--as shown in
more brilliant colors, ornamental feathers, scent-pouches, the power
of music, spurs, larger canines and claws, horns, antlers, tusks,
dewlaps, manes, crests, beards, etc.--as due to the operation of
sexual selection, meaning by this "the advantage which certain
individuals have over others of the same sex and species solely in
respect of reproduction,"[27] the female choosing to pair with the
more attractive male, or the stronger male prevailing in a contest for
the female. Wallace[28] advanced the opposite view, that the female
owes her soberness to the fact that only inconspicuous females have
in the struggle for existence escaped destruction during the breeding
season. There are fatal objections to both these theories; and, taking
his cue from Tylor,[29] Wallace himself, in a later work, suggested
what is probably the true explanation, namely, that the superior
variability of the male is constitutional, and due to general laws
of growth and development. "If ornament," he says, "is the natural
product and direct outcome of superabundant health and vigor, then no
other mode of selection is needed to account for the presence of such
ornament."[30] That a tendency to spend energy more rapidly should
result in more striking morphological variation is to be expected;
or, put otherwise, the fact of a greater variational tendency in the
male is the outcome of a constitutional inclination to destructive
metabolism. It is a general law in the courtship of the sexes that the
male seeks the female. The secondary sexual characters of the male are
developed with puberty, and in some cases these sexual distinctions
come and go with the breeding season. What we know as physiological
energy is the result of the dissociation of atoms in the organism;
expressions of energy are the accompaniment of the katabolic or
breaking-up process, and the brighter color of the male, especially at
the breeding season, results from the fact that the waste products of
the katabolism are deposited as pigments.

When we compare the sexes of mankind morphologically, we find a
greater tendency to variation in man:[31]

All the secondary sexual characters of man are highly variable,
even within the limits of the same race; and they differ much in the
several races.... Numerous measurements carefully made of the stature,
the circumference of the neck and chest, the length of the backbone
and of the arms, in various races ... nearly all show that the males
differ much more from one another than do the females. This fact
indicates that, as far as these characters are concerned, it is the
male which has been chiefly modified, since the several races diverged
from their common stock.[32]

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.

The outlines of the adult female cranium are intermediate
between those of the child and the adult man; they are softer,
more graceful and delicate, and the apophyses and ridges for
the attachment of muscles are less pronounced,... the forehead
is ... more perpendicular, to such a degree that in a group of
skulls those of the two sexes have been mistaken for different
types; the superciliary ridges and the glabella are less
developed, often not at all; the crown is higher and more
horizontal; the brain weight and cranial capacity are less;
the mastoid apophyses, the inion, the styloid apophyses,
and the condyles of the occipital are of less volume, the
zygomatic and alveolar arches are more regular.[33]

Wagner decided that the brain of a woman, taken as a whole, is
uniformly in a more or less embryonic condition. Huschke says that
woman is always a growing child, and that her brain departs from
the infantile type no more than the other portions of her body.[34]
Weisbach[35] pointed out that the limits of variation in the skull of
man are greater than in that of woman.

Several observers have recorded the opinion that women of
dolichocephalic races are more brachycephalic, and women of
brachycephalic races more dolichocephalic, than the men of the
same races. If this is true, it is a remarkable confirmation of the
conservative tendency of woman. "I have thought for several years that
woman was, in a general way, less dolichocephalic in dolichocephalic
races, and less brachycephalic in brachycephalic races, and that she
had a tendency to approach the typical median form of humanity."[36]
The skin of woman is without exception of a lighter shade than that of
man, even among the dark races. This cannot be due to less exposure,
since the women and men are equally exposed among the uncivilized
races, but is due to the same causes as the more brilliant plumage of
male birds.

The form of woman is rounder and less variable than that of man, and
art has been able to produce a more nearly ideal figure of woman than
of man; at the same time, the bones of woman weigh less with reference
to body weight than the bones of man, and both these facts indicate
less variation and more constitutional passivity in woman. The trunk
of woman is slightly longer than that of man,[37] and her abdomen
is relatively more prominent, and is so represented in art. In these
respects she resembles the child and the lower races, i.e., the less
developed forms.[38] Ranke states that the typical adult male form is
characterized by a relatively shorter trunk, relatively longer arms,
legs, hands, and feet, and relatively to the long upper arms and
thighs by still longer forearms and lower legs, and relatively to
the whole upper extremity by a still longer lower extremity; while
the typical female form approaches the infantile condition in having
a relatively longer trunk, shorter arms, legs, hands, and feet;
relatively to short upper arms still shorter forearms, and relatively
to short thighs still shorter lower legs, and relatively to the whole
short upper extremity[39] a still shorter lower extremity--a very
striking evidence of the ineptitude of woman for the expenditure of
physiological energy through motor action.[40]

The strength of woman, on the other hand, her capacity for motion,
and her muscular mechanical aptitude are far inferior to that of man.
Tests of strength made on 2,300 students of Yale University[41] and
on 1,600 women of Oberlin College[42] show the mean relation of the
strength of the sexes, expressed in kilograms:

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.

The first field day of the Vassar College Athletic Association was
held November 9, 1895, and a comparison of the records of some of
the events with those of similar events at Yale University in the
corresponding year gives us a basis of comparison:[43]

Yale Vassar
100-yard dash 10-2/5 sec. 151/4 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. 361/4 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:

Motor ability in most of its forms is better in men than in
women. In strength, rapidity of movement, and rate of fatigue
they have a very decided advantage. These three forms of
superiority are probably all expressions of one and the same
fact--the greater muscular strength of men. Men are very
slightly superior to women in precision of movement. This fact
is probably also connected with their superior muscular force.
In the formation of a new co-ordination women are superior.
The superiority of men in muscular strength is so well known
that it is a universally accepted fact. There has been more
or less dispute as to which sex displayed greater manual
dexterity. According to the present results, that depends on
what is meant by manual dexterity. If it means the ability to
make very delicate and minutely controlled movements, then it
is slightly better in men. If it means ability to co-ordinate
movements rapidly to unforeseen stimuli it is clearly better
in women.[44]

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.

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