THE EVOLUTION OF SEX IN ADOLESCENCE

I

A French biologist has discovered that when a female oyster is starved, and its constitution thus deteriorated, it becomes transformed into a male.

The male oyster must be inferior, therefore, in organisation to the female. Its constitutional potential is less, since the constitutional potential of the female contains both its own, and the potential of the male. And the lesser, it is admitted, cannot contain the greater; although higher evolutionary forms, when subjected to conditions which preclude them from sustaining these their higher forms, may lapse to modes less complex.

Further and more striking examples of such Sex-transformation are afforded by so-called "mules," or "neuters," which occur in other species. A well-known case is that of a pea-hen belonging to Lady Tynte. Having laid eggs from which chicks were raised, this pea-hen, after moulting, developed feathers proper to the other sex; appearing like a pied peacock. In the third year the same phenomenon occurred in her; she developed spurs, moreover, resembling those of the cock. She never bred after this change in her plumage.

As already mentioned, kindred phenomena of sex-metamorphosis are observed in women after operations involving removal of reproductive glands.

That the female is, indeed, a more complex order of organisation than the male, is not to be doubted, since masculine characteristics emerge from it when it lapses from its normal of condition.

Adolescence as it occurs in the boy and in the girl emphasises this conclusion.

To the age of twelve or thereabouts, the normal boy- and girl-child are like enough to one another; smooth-skinned, active, simple creatures. The boy is, normally, larger, sturdier, stronger and rougher than the girl. But, save for the cut of their hair and of their clothes, the two are very similar.

With the transition to manhood and womanhood, respectively, notable differences accrue, however.

From having been a strong, young, active, boy-like creature, now—provided her development be allowed to take the normal course—the girl loses physical activity and strength. A phase of invalidation sets in. Instinctively, she no longer runs and romps. New languors invest her in mind and in body. She is indisposed to brain-work or to much exertion. She lounges and muses. Her mind is clouded with the mists of awakening sensibilities. She suffers from lassitudes.

She becomes a complex of disabilities, indeed; disabilities which in delicate, sickly or over-taxed girls, show in chlorosis, anÆmia, hysteria and other ills. Obviously, profound changes, with re-adjustments of her constitutional resources, are taking place in her. And most significant of these is that which shows like an arrest of development, physical and intellectual. Because, normally, she develops but little further along direct lines of intellect and muscle. Yet that she is still developing, and this upon wholly new—subtler, higher and more complex lines, is manifest at the end of this transition-period whence she emerges, a woman.

Her developmental arrest and her disabilities (resulting from an intensification of Recessive processes in her) are seen now to have subserved a phase of higher evolution. Nature suddenly locked the door upon her differentiating and escaping energies, in order that these might be conserved and knit into organisation. The active muscularity she has lost reappears in the new factors of symmetry and delicate modelling of limb; in repose and grace of movement. The straight, slim, boy-like lines of the hoyden girl have evolved into the curves and rounded suppleness and beauties of a woman. The girlish, agile and abrupt movements have passed into a woman's poise and grace. The unformed features of the child have become now delicately modelled; the curveless, emotionless lips have bloomed into the flower-like, rosy fullness of a woman's mouth; passionate and tender. New mystery and brilliance light her eyes. Eyes and brows are charged with potencies; with seriousness, with modesty, serenity, elusiveness. Hair and hands, voice and expression, have become transfigured by the magic of a re-creative impulse which has regenerated her whole being.

So too her brain development, arrested along lines of concrete intellection, is seen to have evolved to higher, subtler forms of mentality; to be instinct with delicacy, sympathy, tact, and with that incalculable mode of supra-conscious cerebration which is intuition. In so far as she is of high, womanly type, she is now warm and emotional, sympathetic, intuitive; consciously pure, yet delicately passionate. From a crude and sexless hoyden, she has evolved into an exquisite complexity; invested all round with higher values, human and psychical.

As in their earliest beginnings, however, so now again the Woman-traits manifest as Unfitnesses. Her new departure has actually undone in her much that had been achieved in physical adaptation.

Biologists, observing this arrest of development in the female, have interpreted it as sign of an organisation inferior to that of the male. In point of fact, the contrary is the case. Her arrest of development along lines of masculine inherence no more proves her inferior to the male than does the human developmental arrest along lines of that tail our ape-progenitor possessed, prove the human inferior to the ape-species.

This arrest of tail-development occurred first in the female, doubtless; being one of those evolutionary mutations in the direction of advance of Type which are engendered in her sex; and which are characterised by a conversion to higher potential, of differentiations in respect of adaptation to environment that have been achieved in the male. Conversion of male Fitness to female Unfitness, therefore.

Seeing that the ape is vastly more adapted than is man to natural environment, it is obvious that the trend of adaptation to environment, far from having been along lines of evolving ape to man, must have been always, on the contrary, impelling reversion of the human to the ape-type. Darwin relates how he and Huxley, watching some boys bathing, "marvelled over the fact, seeming especially strange when they are no longer disguised by clothes, that human beings should dominate over all other creatures and play the wonderful part they do on earth."

Hugo de Vries says: "Natural Selection (whereof Adaptation is modus operandi) ... does not single out the best variations, but simply destroys the larger number of those which are, from some cause or other, unfit for their present environment. In this way it keeps the strains up to the required standard."

While Hoffding states explicitly: "Adaptation and Progress are not the same."

Clearly there are Dual Principles operating in progressive development; one adapting the organism to environment, the other adapting it to the Typal model inherent in species.

II

In the male of stock impoverished by artificial conditions of civilisation, the transition to manhood is attended likewise by some languors, physical and mental. New powers are being developed and occasion more or less strain upon the constitution—a strain wherewith our present-day masters and pastors, in their zeal of intensive culture, reckon far too little. In healthy boys this is in no way comparable, however, with the constitutional stress which adolescence causes in healthy girls. The youth continues to wax in strength of brain and body. The arrest, or involution, normal to the girl, does not occur in him.

While she becomes gentler and more tranquil, by reason of a new poise in her of mind and body, he becomes forceful and restless by reason of a new release in him of energy. Yet though he gains in strength of brain and body by this further differentiation of his resources into concrete faculty and virile energy, he lapses notably in organisation. From the supple, fine-skinned boy—clear-eyed, sweet-voiced, womanly almost in refinement and comeliness—he grows large and hard and muscular; more or less sinewy and rough-hewn, according as he is, or is not, manly of type. His skin loses its fine grain and smoothness, becoming coarser and hirsute; thus reverting, in degree, to the inferior, animal grade of skin. His voice falls nearly an octave, lapsing from sweetness and purity to gruffness and volume. Obviously—although all this being normal, the male has a virile charm and handsomeness of his own—man's is notably a less highly and subtly-evolved organisation than is woman's.

In the boy, is seen a progressive adaptation of body and brain to environment, in order to fit him for his man's task of coping with and advancing the conditions of life, material and ethical. And for this, the more delicate and sensitive woman-physique, demanding more of vital conservation for its upkeep, would be a handicap.

Biological adaptation for his part in reproduction occurs too. But the male development at this epoch is pre-eminently one of adaptation to environment; equipping him with bone and muscle, brain and enterprise, aggressiveness, initiative and energy. Racially indispensable as the reproductive function is in him, it is obviously incidental and subordinate to his general development.

The girl's transition to womanhood is seen, on the contrary, to be one almost entirely of adaptation, physiological and psychical, to the functions of wifehood and child-bearing. Her growth ceases. She loses, in place of gaining, nerve and muscle-power. While, in becoming emotional, her changed mentality unfits far more than it fits her to cope with life at first hand; with life unadapted, that is, and herself unshielded by the male. Her intelligence at eighteen is normally less keen and active—although of higher and more subtle quality and trend—than it had been at twelve.

Indications of Nature which point unmistakably to diametrically different modes of culture and of training for the sexes, and, in consequence, to wholly different applications of their respective powers and aptitudes in every department of life.

In the boy, the Male-traits receive, with adolescence, a great influx of energy; wholly dominating the Woman-traits which had made him more or less a feminine creature.

More and more each day, the potential virile in his every cell asserts itself in structure and in function; dominating the Woman-traits inherent in him. He waxes big and strong of body; restless and active of mentality. And the less, within normal limits, virility has been prematurely forced in him by too hard strain of mind or body, the better for the evolution of his manhood. Unless the Woman-traits have been unduly drilled and hardened out of him, they will now refine, inspire and fructify his awakening masculine powers. The too hard struggle for existence put, by necessity, on boys of the poorer classes, and, in the higher classes, forced on sensitive boys called upon, too young, to fight for survival in the semi-savage communities that public schools are, hardens them too soon and too summarily, and thus frustrates their best development.

It is said that there is no atrocity a boy-community will not commit.

In this stage of development, the moral consciousness of the genus is at low ebb. The accentuation of Male-traits now occurring occasions a recrudescence of primal instincts. And the collective atmosphere such recrudescence engenders in a boy-community, marooned in school-life apart from the refining, softening influences of home and womenkind, is only too often an evil and a demoralising one. Boarding-schools should be abolished; good day-schools substituted.

More than at any other phase of his existence, the masculine needs now the Woman-influences from without; because the Woman-traits within are, for a period, submerged beneath a surge of Maleness.

Notwithstanding these obvious truths, however, during the years when body and mind should be adapting gradually, consciously and subconsciously, to the social environment wherein their lives are to be passed; when the mental horizon should be expanding simultaneously with the expanding intelligence, when the moral should be rising to the new demands upon it, boys are imprisoned in scholastic institutions, where they are hemmed in by routine and restrictions, in an atmosphere of puerile conceptions, puerile traditions, puerile conventions and associations; their chief outlet and respite the narrow rules and the narrowing absorptions of so-called "Games," supervised by martinet Games-masters.

And then, when we bring them to the field of life, we are surprised to find many of them unintelligent, unadapted, unadaptable; resourceless, inept and incompetent. Cooped during those impressionable years in a wholly artificial environment, when confronted by the world of living actualities, which is not ruled by similar narrow restrictions, nor shaped upon the artificial forms and puerile misconceptions in which their young ductile natures have been run and have set—they show themselves wholly unfitted for life, with its varied, difficult and complex conditions and adjustments. They have become, in point of fact, mentally and temperamentally "provincial."

The good form which some of them acquire is derived less from school-ethics or training than from an aristocratic strain of boys with whom they have been associated. And being acquired, when it is not the form of their own social order, it appears only too frequently as a counterfeit; engendering insincerity and snobbishness, and marring individuality.

It has seemed to me that, in both sexes, the first seven years of life—during which native faculty and attribute are evolving at great pace—are a phase in which the Recessive, or anabolic, mode, conservative of the resources and vitalising of the tissues, is in the ascendant. The true child of both sexes is normally, during these years, a typification of the Woman-traits; receptive, plastic, gentle, affectionate, trustful, intuitive, emotional; quickly fatigued, quickly recuperative; more or less lovely and angelic. In this phase, native intuitive faculty makes children sometimes phenomenal; lightning calculators, musical prodigies, precocious poets, artists. So too, their marvellously rapid apprehension of the complex meanings and implications of life betokens Supra-conscious mentality.

At seven years old and thence onward to fourteen, a male, and katabolic, phase sets in. Phenomenal faculty vanishes. Concrete development of body, brain and energy proceeds apace. The child becomes active, intelligent, enterprising, inquiring. The boy becomes appreciably male; the girl more or less of a hoyden, more male, indeed, than she is normally at any other period of her existence. Unless, that is, this hoyden phase is rendered permanent in her by masculine training.

At fourteen, with the evolution of sex, the sex of boy and girl, with its respective opposite modes of constitution and of function, makes for marked development, each along its characteristic lines.

III

The French have a saying: La femme est une malade. Woman is not, of course, an invalid. Nature does not fashion invalids. Woman's organisation is normally delicate and sensitive and highly strung, because of its special and complex sex-differentiation. She resembles the child, in that howsoever healthful (in proportion, indeed, as she is normal and healthfully organised) her cells of brain and body re-act resiliently and vitally to all the agencies, physical and psychical, about her.

This sensitive re-activity is not only a sign, it is, as well, a source of health. Because the greater delicacy and sensitiveness of organisation which characterise women and children, resulting in their quick re-activity to deleterious conditions, secure a permanently more highly-vitalised condition of body than is the case with man, whose cells are less sensitive, more tolerant of fatigue, of cold, and of other injurious agents. Immunity against injurious factors is the parent of degeneracy. Life being re-activity, in terms of living processes, to the factors of environment, such immunity entails loss of vital re-activity to vivifying as much as against deteriorative factors.

We complain that Nature, in place of making our bodies of cast iron, so to speak, makes them, on the contrary, vulnerable at every point. The reason is, surely, that the less we are constituted like cast iron—the more vital and complex, intelligent and responsive, our tissues are, accordingly—the more conducive to change and advance (because the more sensitively re-active to subtler and psychical stimuli) they are likewise. We cannot be, at the same time, hardy and obtuse, yet exquisitely sensitive. Living tissue-cells are characterised, beyond all other developments, by a range of contrasting abilities. An arm serves as softest cushion for a child's head, or, by stiffening of its muscles, becomes rigid as steel. An eye that sees for miles will focus to a pin-point. But being, as we are, still in the making, our tissues necessarily have limitations—and the defects, accordingly, of both their sets of qualities. High sensitiveness of function is necessarily attended by corresponding complexity and delicacy of structure. Such structural delicacy obliges us to adapt environment to its complexities. It is thus an incentive to progress.

It obliges us, as well, to moderate our activities, and, by thus restricting the output of our cruder powers, our resources are husbanded and directed into higher channels.

The purpose of the complex differentiations which handicap the adolescent girl is obvious. The curving bones, the expanding pelvis, the rounded contours, the inhibited muscles, the languors and recurring disabilities, are designed to restrict activity, physical and mental.

Physicists tell us that the Conservation of Motion and the Conservation of Energy are one and the same thing. This must be true, as well, of Vital Energy. The conservation of Vital Activity subtends the Conservation of Vital resources. The new developments are by no means incidental merely to the new processes; they are an integral part of The Plan. In half-closing the doors on avenues of active output, Nature conserves the Woman-powers for more intrinsic use. Every brain and body-cell is raised thereby to higher levels both of constitution and of function.

As stored mechanical energy becomes transformed into the higher form of electrical energy, so the power stored in Woman's anabolic cells is raised to higher evolutionary forms. Thus she becomes fitted to be mother of the Child—the blossom of the Race. Her part in the child will contain the inherence of these new higher evolutionary values, as the father's part in it will contain the inherence of the concrete powers he has developed. And while her body spontaneously raises all its issues in order to fit her to be a Mother, so it develops powers and functions adapting her to serve as soft environment, physical and attributal, for the rearing of her child.

All this complex differentiation and evolution are designed, as well, to adapt woman for the love-passion, and to draw and bind her mate to her. And Nature has so cunningly interwoven the two plans and the two developments that, for the most part, those physical traits and emotional attributes which best qualify for motherhood most potently attract and closely attach the woman's mate to her.

Woman is "une malade," because, throughout the more than thirty years of her potential maternity, she suffers periodically those which, biologically speaking, are minor childbirths; each entailing a cycle of complex physiological processes, with more or less considerable constitutional and nervous stress, debility and incapacitation. Nature exacts from her this recurring toll to Life and to the Race, not only to preserve in her, in healthful and efficient function, the power and mechanism of actual child-bearing, but (only second in importance) perpetually to recruit her emotional womanhood and wifehood.

When girls in course of developing the maternal function, with all its attendant psychical implications, are strained by athletics, by over-culture or industrial exhaustion, the vital resources are so diverted from the evolution of this function as to cause incapacitation in them, partial or complete, for wifehood, and for the bearing of sound and fine offspring. Sterilisation, absolute or partial, is induced; with dwarfed structure, blighted emotions and warped instincts. Even in women who have developed normally, disease or atrophy of reproductive organs may follow constitutional strain or undue effort.

Toll to Life, in genesis of potential lives, is exacted likewise from the male. It is a reflex in him of the vital maternal function, inherent in his Woman-side. And this perpetual Life-tax upon his energies so reduces these as to temper his physical and nervous activities and his bent for individuation, and thus inhibits him from squandering his whole potential of Life-power in volitional output. Thus is preserved in him that normal proportion between Individuation and Perpetuation which Herbert Spencer describes as existing in inverse ratio to one another.

Thus also is preserved in him the normal mental balance between the Male and the Female departments of his dual brain. Men muscularly or intellectually overactive become lopsided and ineffective; restless and wasteful of their forces, chill and sterile of temperament; having lost that fine fructifying calm wherein creative potential is engendered for concrete achievement; having lost also that equipoise of faculty whereon mental and moral stability depend.

* * * * *

The Life-tax levied on the male is incomparably less, however, than that exacted of the female.

IV

It is because of their anabolic mode of tissue-cells, less wasteful upon the material plane, that girls and women normally require less food than boys and men do. Notwithstanding that their bodies are more highly nourished than are those of males. Healthy young women continue to be plump and pretty, healthful and active on bread-and-butter, fruits and sweetmeats. While mannish women, whose physiology has deteriorated to the katabolic, disruptive and forceful, male mode, possess frequently the hungry appetites of men; not only for food but for drink. And yet withal, they are lean and for the most part plain, and poorly nourished.

With the wane in her of the anabolic mode of cellular conservation, and the release thereby of vital resources which, sealed up in her tissue-cells at adolescence, remain invested in organisation during her years of possible motherhood, woman in whom sex is not highly developed reverts more or less (as does the constitutionally-deteriorated oyster) to the masculine type. She lapses to a katabolic metabolism.

At middle-age, accordingly, provided she be still healthy, she derives a considerable accession of energy, physical and intellectual. Now for the first time relieved of the Life-tax upon her resources, her powers are released from bond, and become more fully available for individuation and personal activity.

At the same time, with this conversion of constitutional investment to the form of current and available energy, there occurs a proportional—sometimes a very signal—impoverishment of organisation; and, after a phase of recrudescent emotionalism, a cooling and thinning of passional feeling. Because such realisation of invested vital capital is inevitably the precursor of decline. Thenceforward her cells, no longer sustaining their high evolutionary states, generate more of concrete energy, and endow her with increased powers of action. But their conditional deterioration is manifest in general deterioration of physique, of looks, and frequently of health.

Not seldom, indeed, when her constitutional reserves had been previously depleted by over-expenditure, physical or mental, the cell-deterioration of this epoch lapses to serious disease or disability; to rheumatism, gout, cancer or other perverted forms.

With the constitutional and biological changes come psychical changes too. In women in whom sex is not highly-specialised, middle-age entails, with its quasi-masculine physical phase, quasi-masculine mental traits. They may become strenuous and combative, sometimes difficult and domineering. Perhaps they attach themselves to political and ethical "anti"-movements, as arena for their new combativeness, their augmented intellection, and increased physical activity.

In the most womanly of women also (as in men at a later epoch) there occurs at this period a natural transposition of the parental traits of Altruism and Chivalry to the impersonal plane; moving them to mother and father the world in general, by way of Charity, Philanthropy, Reform.

V

Is it not waste of power and faculty, is asked, for able and cultured women to permit their development, physical and mental, to adapt to the simple requirements of a nursery?

Uncultured and more or less brainless women of an inferior class, it is said, should be adequate, surely, to cope with the minds and the needs of these immature beings.

Immature they are, in truth. But they are nevertheless strangely complex; exquisitely sensitive. And they are men and women in the making—or the marring. Behind the eyes of any child that looks at you in dumb and wistful impotence to express itself, to defend itself, to provide and to care for itself, may lie the mind, in bud, of a Shakespeare, of a Newton, of a Shelley; of a Florence Nightingale, a Mrs. Somerville, a Charlotte BrontË.

How the most ordinary child, indeed, of cultured parents suffers acutely in feeling, and deteriorates in mind and character under the regime of blundering rebuffs, scoldings and misapprehensions, he meets at every turn in the nursery ruled by a crude, hard woman of the labouring classes!

How, when they have grown older in years but are still only young in understanding, all youth suffers from the shallow motherhood that was kind, maybe, and helpful to it in its childhood, but fails it utterly in the stress and difficulties of its teens!

True motherhood is the greatest of the Creative Arts; Mother-craft, the most vital and complex of the Sciences. Life has never received more than a tithe of that which Nature destined for it, owing to lack of mother-nurture. Genius has never fruited to full bloom and potence, because the mothers have so seldom realised the greatness of their task.

Nearly all the records of childhood that writers have given us are annals of bewildered mental suffering and of moral torture, which have left their evil mark in injured health or warped mentality—not seldom in both.

The home, with all the intuitive wisdoms, the powers and sympathies and the maternal ministry of a true mother, is indispensable to the nurture of Individualism, and thereby to the evolution of human character and faculty.

The true home is the temple of the soul. Souls are exquisitely sensitive, infinitely shy. And only in the warm and fostering atmosphere of kindred beings do they find courage to unfold in living attribute. Every home should be a unique environment, pre-eminently specialised and adapted to the evolution of the young and tender nursling-individualities shaping in it. To uproot these prematurely from their native soil and transplant them in an alien one, is to blight nascent talent and to warp character. For the reason that it necessitates too early individuation, with precocious development of self-protective and other qualities of worldly expedience.

To plant out the shivering, exquisitely sensitive seedling, the human Babe, in the chill, communal atmosphere of a CrÈche or other institution, is as inhuman a social crime as it is an inhuman social crime to defraud its mother of her highest evolutionary impulse and function in the nurture of her little one—a responsibility she has incurred, a privilege she has earned by right of her maternity.

In her nursery, the mind of woman opens new windows of illumination, glimpses new vistas of thought and emotion, higher and lovelier apprehensions of the profounder meanings of Life. In her nursery, her eyes learn tenderness, her voice sweet modulation, her speech new purity and fondness.

In good and happy homes where young persons, in place of being banished to schools, grow up in the natural bracing and inspiring atmosphere of parental influence and affection, Sex evolves new issues, in those attractions and sympathies of its Contrasting Traits which are evoked by the relations of mother and son, of father and daughter, of brother and sister.

Under modern conditions, in which children and young persons renew intermittent acquaintance merely with parents and brothers and sisters during brief holiday visits—returning home, with every added term of absence, more and more strangers to their kin, their personalities and interests increasingly detached from those of the home circle—such potent and inspiring developments of sex are vanishing.

A wide gulf, truly, separates from their fathers these modern self-centred, self-opinionated young sportswomen and over-academised girls. The charming filial relation, engendering new and tender sex-amenities in the daughter's hero-worship and reliance on the manhood of her sire, in the father's protective chivalry and recruital of his youth in the company and interests of his young daughter, is waning toward extinction. The vast majority of fathers feel dismally constrained, indeed, and out of countenance in the presence of their girls—so smart and sophisticated, so superior, critical and self-sufficing are our latter-day school and college-maidens. For the most part, their own daughters are the last among womenkind to whom men turn, to reap something of the freshness and fairness of the younger generation they have sown and laboured for.

While the up-to-date mother aspires to no higher or more beautiful place in her boy's life and affections than that of "good chum!"