
represents her as having characteristic differences from man in every organ and tissue, as
conservative in body and mind, fulfilling the function of seeing to it that no acquired good be lost
to mankind, as anabolic rather than katabolic, or disposed to assimilate or digest on a higher
plane, as normally representing childhood and youth in the full meridian of its glory in all her
dimensions and nature so that she is at the top of the human curve from which the higher
super-man of the future is to evolve, while man is phylogenetically by comparison a trifle senile,
if not decadent. Her sympathetic and ganglionic system is relatively to the cerebro-spinal more
dominant. Her whole soul, conscious and [p. 562] unconscious, is best conceived as a
magnificent organ of heredity, and to its laws all her psychic activities, if unperverted, are true.
She is by nature more typical and a better representative of the race and less prone to
specialization. Her peculiar organs, while constituting a far larger proportion of her body than
those of man, are hidden and their psychic reverberations are dim, less-localized, more all-
pervasive. She works by intuition and feeling; fear, anger, pity, love, and most of the emotions
have a wider range and greater intensity. If she abandons her natural naïveté and takes up the
burden of guiding and accounting for her life by consciousness, she is likely to lose more than
she gains, according to the old saw that she who deliberates is lost. Secondary, tertiary, and
quaternary sex qualities are developed far beyond her ken or that of science, in a way that the
latter is only beginning to glimpse. While she needs tension that only the most advanced
modern psychology sees to be sexual at root, we shall never know the true key to her nature
until we understand, how the nest and the cradle are larger wombs; the home, a larger nest;
the tribe, state, church, and school, larger homes and irradiations from it. Biological psychology
already dreams of a new philosophy of sex which places the wife and mother at the heart of a
new world and makes her the object of a new religion and almost of a new worship, that will
give her reverent exemption from sex competition and reconsecrate her to the higher
responsibilities of the human race, into the past and future of which the roots of her being
penetrate; where the blind worship of mere mental illumination has no place; and where her
real superiority to man will have free course and be glorified and the ideals of the old
matriarchates again find embodiment in fit and due degree.
Patrick [1] has summarized the salient points of difference between men and women as follows:
The latter are shorter and lighter save for a brief period at about thirteen, as we have shown in
Chapter I. Her adult height to that of man is as about 16 to 17, and her weight as 9 to 10. Her
form is rounder, she has more fat, more water, less muscle; her dyna-[p. 563]mometer strength
foots up about two-thirds that of man; her trunk is relatively slightly longer; the pelvic bend
makes her a little less erect; the head is less upright, and her gait slightly less steady; her
plantar arch is flatter; her forefinger is relatively longer than the other three; the thyroid larger;
the lung capacity relatively less; the blood has less red corpuscles; her bones a little less
specific gravity; she is more anemic, and her pulse is faster. In the United States about 105
boys are born to 100 girls, but through life the male death-rate is higher, so that in nearly every
land, after the first year or two, there are more females than males. She is more liable to
whooping-cough, scarlet fever, phthisis, diphtheria, but resists diseases best and dies less
often than man at nearly every age. Ballod [2] shows that the average increased duration of life
in the last decennium is for women and not for men, and that large cities and factories tend to
shorten average male longevity. Hegar (Geschlechtstrieb) concludes that before forty, married,
and after forty, unmarried, women are more liable to die, but that married outlive unmarried
men. He is more prone than she to rheumatism, cancer, brain troubles, sudden death from
internal or external causes, can less survive severe surgical operations and grows old more
rapidly; his hair is gray earlier and he is more prone to loss of sight, hearing, memory, senile
irritability, to deformities and anomalies, is less hardy and less resembles children. Woman's
skull is smaller, especially at the base, but large in circumference at the crown, which is flatter
and more angular; her forehead is more vertical; the glabella and superorbital ridges are less,
as are the occipital and mastoid prominences and the parietal prominence; her face is smaller
and a little lower, and she is slightly more prognathic. Her absolute brain weight to that of man
is about as 9 to 10, but her smaller size makes her brain about equal, if not heavier, in weight.
The lower centers are larger in women, and in nearly all these respects women differ less
among themselves than do men. Martin and Clouston found the female brain slightly better
irrigated by blood, especially in the occipital regions, although the number of its corpuscles as
compared to those of man was as 9 [p. 564] to 10. The anterior regions of the brain were best
supplied in man. The specific gravity of the gray matter of all parts of the brain was less in