Sex and Society by William I. Thomas

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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
------------------------------------

Of the 459 centenarians 188 were men and 271 were women.[88] In
Bavaria the women aged from 51 to 55 years alive in 1874 had lived in
the aggregate more than seven million years, while the men of the same
age had lived not so much as six and one-half million.[89] Turquan[90]
gives a table showing the death-rate of centenarians in all France
during a period of twenty years (1866-85). From this it appears that
there died in these years an annual average of 73 centenarians, of
whom 27 were men and 46 women. In only one year of the twenty did the
deaths of men exceed those of women. Lombroso and Ferrero have shown
that between 1870 and 1879 the inhabitants of the prisons and convict
establishments in Italy who were over 60 years of age showed a
percentage of 4.3 among the women, and 3.2 among the men, although the
number of men condemned to prison for long periods is far greater than
among women.

Women are not only longer-lived than men, but have greater
powers of resistance to misfortune and deep grief.

This is a well-known law, which in the case of the female
criminal seems almost exaggerated, so remarkable is her
longevity and the toughness with which she endures the
hardships, even the prolonged hardships, of prison life.... I
know some denizens of female prisons who have reached the
age of 90, having lived within those walls since they were 29
without any grave injury to health.[91]

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.

Dr. Lloyd Jones has determined that between 17 and 45 years of age the
specific gravity of the blood of women is lower than that of men. In
old women the specific gravity rises above that of old men, and he
suggests that their greater longevity is due to this.[92] No doubt
the greater longevity of women is to be associated with the rise
in specific gravity of their blood, but this rise in the specific
gravity of women after 45 years is consequent upon their anabolic
constitution. High specific gravity in general is associated with
abundant and rich nutrition; it falls in women during pregnancy,
lactation, and menstruation, and when these functions cease it is
natural that the constructive metabolic tendency on which they are
dependent should show itself in a heightened specific gravity of the
blood (i.e., greater richness), and in consequence greater longevity.

Some facts in the brain development of women point to the same
conclusion. The growth of the brain is relatively more rapid in
women than in men before the twentieth year. Between 15 and 20 it has
reached its maximum, and from that time there is a gradual decline in
weight until about the fiftieth year, when there is an acceleration
of growth, followed by a renewed diminution after the sixtieth year.
The maximum of brain weight is almost reached by men at 20 years,
but there is a slow increase until 30 or 35 years. There is then a
diminution until the fiftieth year, followed by an acceleration, and
at 60 years again a rapid diminution in weight; but the acceleration
is more marked and the final diminution less marked in woman than in
man.[93] A table prepared by Topinard shows that woman from 20 to 60
years of age has from 126 to 164 grams less brain weight than man,
while her deficit from 60 to 90 years is from 123 to 158 grams.[94]

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.

SEX AND PRIMITIVE SOCIAL CONTROL

The greater strength and restlessness of man and the more stationary
condition of woman have a striking social expression in the fact that
the earliest groupings of population were about the females rather
than the males.

While at a disadvantage in point of force when compared with the male,
the female has enjoyed a negative superiority in the fact that her
sexual appetite was not so sharp as that of the male. Primitive man,
when he desired a mate, sought her. The female was more passive and
stationary. She exercised the right of choice, and had the power to
transfer her choice more arbitrarily than has usually been recognized;
but the need of protection and assistance in providing for offspring
inclined her to a permanent union, and doubtless natural selection
favored the groups in which parents co-operated in caring for the
offspring. But assuming a relation permanent enough to be called
marriage, the man was still, as compared with the woman, unsettled
and unsocial. He secured food by violence or cunning, and hunting and
fighting were fit expressions of his somatic habit.

The woman was the social nucleus, the point to which he returned from
his wanderings. In this primitive stage of society, however, the bond
between woman and child was altogether more immediate and constraining
than the bond between woman and man. The maternal instinct is
reinforced by necessary and constant association with the child. We
can hardly find a parallel for the intimacy of association between
mother and child during the period of lactation; and, in the absence
of domesticated animals or suitable foods, and also, apparently, from
simple neglect formally to wean the child, this connection is greatly
prolonged. The child is frequently suckled from four to five years,
and occasionally from ten to twelve.[95] In consequence we find
society literally growing up about the woman. The mother and her
children, and her children's children, and so on indefinitely in
the female line, form a group. But the men were not so completely
incorporated in this group as the women, not only because parentage
was uncertain and naming of children consequently on the female side,
but because the man was neither by necessity nor disposition so much a
home-keeper as the women and their children.

The tangential disposition of the male is expressed in the system of
exogamy so characteristic of tribal life. The movement toward exogamy
doubtless originates in the restlessness of the male, the tendency to
make new co-ordinations, the stimulus to seek more unfamiliar women,
and the emotional interest in making unfamiliar sexual alliances. But,
quite aside from its origin, exogamy is an energetic expression of
the male nature. Natural selection favors the process by sparing the
groups which by breeding out have heightened their physical vigor.[96]
There results from this a social condition which, from the standpoint
of modern ideas, is very curious. The man makes, and, by force of
convention, finally must make, his matrimonial alliances only with
women of other groups; but the woman still remains in her own group,
and the children are members of her group, while the husband remains
a member of his own clan, and is received, or may be received, as
a guest in the clan of his wife. Upon his death his property is
not shared by his children, nor by his wife, since these are not
members of his clan; but it falls to the nearest of kin within his
clan--usually to his sister's children.

The maternal system of descent is found in all parts of the world
where social advance stands at a certain level, and the evidence
warrants the assumption that every group which advances to a culture
state passes through this stage. Morgan gives an account of this
system among the Iroquois:

Each household was made up on the principle of kin. The
married women, usually sisters, own or collateral, were of
the same gens or clan, the symbol or totem of which was often
painted upon the house, while their husbands and the wives of
their sons belonged to several other gentes. The children were
of the gens of their mother. While husband and wife belonged
to different gentes, the predominating number in each
household would be of the same gens, namely, that of their
mothers. As a rule the sons brought home their wives, and in
some cases the husbands of the daughters were admitted to
the maternal household. Thus each household was composed of
a mixture of persons of different gentes, but this would not
prevent the numerical ascendency of the particular gens to
whom the house belonged. In a village of one hundred and
twenty houses, as the Seneca village of Tiotohatton described
by Mr. Greenbalge in 1677, there would be several houses
belonging to each gens. It presented a general picture of the
Indian life in all parts of America at the epoch of European
discovery.[97]

Morgan also quotes Rev. Ashur Wright, for many years a missionary
among the Senecas and familiar with their language and customs:

As to their family system, when occupying the old log houses,
it is probable that some one clan predominated, the women
taking in husbands, however, from the other clans, and
sometimes for novelty, some of their sons bringing in their
young wives until they felt brave enough to leave their
mothers. Usually the female portion ruled the house, and were
doubtless clannish enough about it. The stores were in common,
but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless
to do his share of the providing. No matter how many children
or whatever goods he might have in the house, he might at any
time be ordered to pick up his blanket and budge, and after
such orders it would not be healthful for him to attempt to
disobey; the house would become too hot for him, and, unless
saved by the intercession of some aunt or grandmother, he must
retreat to his own clan, or, as was often done, go and start
a new matrimonial alliance in some other. The women were the
great power among the clans as everywhere else. They did not
hesitate, when occasion required, to "knock off the horns," so
it was technically called, from the head of a chief and send
him back to the ranks of the warriors. The original nomination
of the chiefs, also, always rested with them.[98]

Traces of the maternal system are everywhere found on the American
continent, and in some regions it is still in force. McGee says of the
Seri stock of the southwest coast, now reduced to a single tribe, that
the claims of a suitor are pressed by his female relatives, and, if
the suit is favorably regarded by the mother and uncles of the girl,
the suitor is provisionally installed in the house, without purchase
price and presents. He is then expected to show his worthiness of a
permanent relation by demonstrating his ability as a provider, and by
showing himself an implacable foe to aliens. He must support all the
female relatives of his bride's family by the products of his skill
and industry in hunting and fishing for a year. He is the general
protector of the girl's family, and especially of the girl, whose
bower and pelican-skin couch he shares, "not as husband, but as
continent companion," for a year. If all goes well, he is then
permanently received as "consort-guest," and his children are added
to the clan of his mother-in-law.[99] With few exceptions, descent
was formerly reckoned in Australia in the female line, and the usage
survives in some regions. Howitt, in a letter to Professor Tylor,
reports of the tribes near Maryborough, Queensland:

When a man marries a woman from a distant locality, he goes to
her tribelet and identifies himself with her people. This is
a rule with very few exceptions. Of course, I speak of them
as they were in their wild state. He becomes a part of, and
one of, the family. In the event of a war expedition, the
daughter's husband acts as a blood-relation, and will fight
and kill his own blood-relations, if blows are struck by his
wife's relations. I have seen a father and son fighting under
these circumstances, and the son would most certainly have
killed the father, if others had not interfered.[100]

In Australia there is also a very sharp social expression of the fact
of sex in the division of the group into male and female classes in
addition to the division into clans.[101] In the Malay Archipelago the
same system is found.

Among the Padang Malays the child always belongs to its
mother's _suku_, and all blood-relationship is reckoned
through the wife as the real transmitter of the family, the
husband being only a stranger. For this reason his heirs are
not his own children, but the children of his sister, his
brothers, and other uterine relations; children are the
natural heirs of their mother only.... We may assume that,
wherever exogamy is now found coexisting with inheritance
through the father (as among Rejangs and Bataks, the people
of Nias and Timor, or the Alfurs of Ceram and Buru), this was
formerly through the mother; and that the other system has
grown up out of dislike to the inconveniences arising from the
insecure and dependent condition of the husband in the wife's
family.[102]

In Africa descent through females is the rule, with exceptions. The
practice of the Wamoima, where the son of the sister is preferred in
legacies, because "a man's own son is only the son of his wife," is
typical.[103] Battel reported that the state of Loango was ruled by
four princes, the sons of the former king's sister, since the own sons
of the king never succeeded.[104]

Traces of this system are found in China and Japan, and it is still in
full force in parts of India. Among the Kasias of northeast India the
husband resides in the house of his wife, or visits her occasionally.

Laws of rank and property follow the strictest maternal type;
when a couple separate, the children remain with the mother;
the son does not succeed his father, but the raja's neglected
offspring may become a common peasant or laborer; the sister's
son succeeds to rank, and is heir to the property.[105]

Male kinship prevails among the Arabs, but Professor Robertson Smith
has discovered abundant evidence that the contrary practice prevailed
in ancient Arabia.

The women of the Jahiliya, or some of them, had the right to
dismiss their husbands, and the form of dismissal was this:
If they lived in a tent, they turned it round, so that, if the
door had faced east, it now faced west, and when the man saw
this, he knew that he was dismissed, and did not enter.[106]

And after the establishment of the male system the women still held
property--a survival from maternal times. A form of divorce pronounced
by a husband was, "Begone! for I will no longer drive thy flocks to
the pasture."[107]

Our evidence seems to show that, when something like regular
marriage began, and a free tribeswoman had one husband or one
definite group of husbands at a time, the husbands at first
came to her and she did not go to them.[108]

Numerous survivals of the older system are also found among the
Hebrews. The servant of Abraham anticipated that the bride whom he was
sent to bring for Isaac might be unwilling to leave her home, and the
presents which he carried went to Rebekah's mother and brother.[109]
Laban says to Jacob, "These daughters are my daughters, and these
children are my children;"[110] the obligation to blood-vengeance
rests apparently on the maternal kindred;[111] Samson's Philistine
wife remained among her people;[112] and the injunction in Gen. 2:24,
"Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall
cleave unto his wife," refers to the primitive Hebraic form of
marriage.[113] Where the matriarchate prevails we naturally find
no prejudice against marriage with a half-sister on the father's
side, while union with a uterine sister is incestuous. Sara was a
half-sister of Abraham on the father's side, and Tamar could have
married her half-brother Amnon,[114] though they were both children of
David; and a similar condition prevailed in Athens under the laws of
Solon.[115] Herodotus says of the Lycians:

Ask a Lycian who he is, and he will answer by giving his
own name, that of his mother, and so on in the female line.
Moreover, if a free woman marry a man who is a slave, their
children are free citizens; but if a free man marry a foreign
woman, or cohabit with a concubine, even though he be the
first person in the state, the children forfeit all rights
of citizenship.[116]

Herodotus also relates that when Darius gave to the wife of
Intaphernes permission to claim the life of a single man of her
kindred, she chose her brother, saying that both husband and children
could be replaced.[117] The declaration of Antigone in Sophocles,[118]
that she would have performed for neither husband nor children the
toil which she undertook for Polynices, against the will of the
citizens, indicates that the tie of a common womb was stronger than
the social tie of marriage. The extraordinary honor, privilege,
and proprietary rights enjoyed by ancient Egyptian and Babylonian
wives[119] are traceable to an earlier maternal organization.

All ethnologists admit that descent through females has been very
widespread, but some deny that this system has been universally
prevalent at any stage of culture. Those who have diminished its
importance, however, have done so chiefly in reinforcement of their
denials of the theory of promiscuity. It has been very generally
assumed that maternal descent is due solely to uncertainty of
paternity, and that an admission that the maternal system has been
universal is practically an admission of promiscuity. Opponents
of this theory have consequently felt called upon to minimize the
importance of maternal descent.[120] But descent through females is
not, in fact, fully explained by uncertainty of parentage on the male
side. It is due to the larger social fact, including this biological
one, that the bond between mother and child is the closest in nature,
and that the group grew up about the more stationary female; and
consequently the questions of maternal descent and promiscuity are
by no means so inseparable as has commonly been assumed. We may
accept Sir Henry Maine's terse remark that "paternity is a matter
of inference, as opposed to maternity, which is a matter of
observation,"[121] without concluding that society would have been
first of all patriarchal in organization, even if paternity had been
also a matter of observation. For the association of the woman with
the child is immediate and perforce, but the immediate interest of the
man is in the woman, through the power of her sexual attractiveness,
and his interest in the child is secondary and mediated through her.
This relation being a constant one, having its roots in the nature
of sex rather than in the uncertainty of parentage, we may safely
conclude that the so-called "mother-right" has everywhere preceded
"father-right," and was the fund from which the latter was evolved.

But while it is natural that the children and the group should grow up
about the mother, it is not conceivable that woman should definitely
or long control the activities of society, especially on their motor
side. In view of his superior power of making movements and applying
force, the male must inevitably assume control of the life direction
of the group, no matter what the genesis of the group. It is not
a difficult conclusion that, if woman's leaping, lifting, running,
climbing, and slugging capacity is inferior to man's, by however
slight a margin, her fighting capacity is less in the same degree;
for battle is only an application of force, and there has never been
a moment in the history of society when the law of might, tempered by
sexual affinity, did not prevail. We must then, in fact, recognize
a sharp distinction between the law of descent and the fact of
authority.

The male was everywhere present in primitive society, and everywhere
made his force felt. We can see this illustrated most plainly in the
animal group, where the male is the leader, by virtue of his strength.
There is also a stage of human society which may be called the
prematriarchal stage, from the fact that ideas of kinship are so
feeble that no extensive social filiation is effected through this
principle, in consequence of which the group has not reached the
tribal stage of organization on the basis of kinship, but remains in
the primitive biological relation of male, female, and offspring. The
Botocudos, Fuegians, Eskimos, West Australians, Bushmen, and Veddahs
represent this primitive stage more or less completely; they have
apparently not reached the stage where the fact of kinship expresses
itself in maternal organization. They live in scattered bands, held
together loosely by convenience, safety, and inertia, and the male
is the leader; but the leadership of the male in this case, as among
animals, is very different from the organized and institutional
expression of the male force in systems of political control growing
out of achievement. This involves a social history through which these
low tribes have not passed.

Organization cannot proceed very far in the absence of social mass,
and the collection of social mass took place unconsciously about the
female as a universal preliminary of the conscious synthetization of
the mass through males. From the side of organization, the negative
accretion of population about female centers and filiation through
blood is very precious, since filiation based on relation to females
prepares the way for organization based on motor activities.[122]
But in the prematernal stage, in the maternal stage, and in the
patriarchal stage the male force was present and was the carrier
of the social will. In the fully maternal system, indeed, the male
authority is only thinly veiled, or not at all. Filiation through
female descent precedes filiation through achievement, because it is
a function of somatic conditions, in the main, while filiation through
achievement is a function of historical conditions. This advantage of
maternal organization in point of time embarrasses and obscures the
individual and collective expression of the male force, but under
the veil of female nomenclature and in the midst of the female
organization we can always detect the presence of the male authority.
Bachofen's conception of the maternal system as a political system was
erroneous, as Dargun and others have pointed out,[123] though woman
has been reinforced by the fact of descent, and has so figured
somewhat in political systems.

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