CONSTITUTIONAL CONSERVATISM OF WOMEN 299 



THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONSERVATISM OF WOMEN 



BT De. OTTO CHARLES GLASER 



UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 



IN the course of his essay on emancipation — black and white — written 

 at the close of our civil war, Huxley says that with few excep- 

 tions the ideal of womanhood in his generation seemed to oscillate be- 

 tween Clarchen, on the one hand, and Beatrice, on the other. That wo- 

 men are intended neither as guides nor as playthings, but as comrades, 

 fellows and equals, in so far as nature herself raises no bar to equality, 

 at that time had not penetrated the minds of those entrusted with the 

 education of girls. But even the densest media are ultimately perme- 

 able, and if we can now point with pride to certain accomplished results, 

 it is because the underlying principles have not only been discovered and 

 understood, but practically applied. 



At heart these principles are biological, and the success which has 

 attended their application depends on the fact that women share the 

 senses, perceptions, feelings, emotions and reasoning powers of men, 

 and that the average woman deviates less in these respects from the 

 standard of men, than one brother differs from another. But problems 

 are fatefully linked together, and the answer to one is invariably the 

 herald of others. If the education of women has demonstrated both its 

 feasibility and value, the inevitable next question clamors for solution 

 no less insistently than its progenitor. Now that she is educated, what 

 shall we do with her? Perhaps at this point biology can aid us anew 

 and point the moral to a tale which itself may have proceeded no farther 

 than the opening paragraph. 



Whoever has sufficient temerity to read all that has been written on 

 the subject of sex in twenty years, is likely, sooner or later, to revert 

 with a sense of freedom to Geddes and Thompson's splendid work, 1 

 there to rejoice in a view by no means out of harmony with recent 

 results, and so comprehensive that the truth, though still " in block," 

 lies well within the field of vision. 



Beginning with the simplest cases, and ending with the almost hope- 

 lessly complex sexual life of man himself, these writers reduce all to 

 elementary terms in physiology, and find the fundamental difference 

 between the sexes in the essentially disruptive diathesis of the male, and 

 the essentially constructive diathesis of the female. 



1 Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thompson, ' ' The Evolution of Sex, ' ' Amer- 

 ican edition published by Scribners. 



