286 HUMAN BIOLOGY 



woman Is excluded from the preparation for the hunt and 

 for war; the explanation usually given is that men fear she 

 will magically contaminate their weapons and offend 

 their guardian spirits. But this is probably putting the 

 explanation before the thing to be explained; the chances 

 are that the segregation of the sexes is deep set in savage 

 society and that these superstitions are afterthoughts in 

 defence of the practice. 



The adult who attempts to justify a social convention to a 

 questioning child uses such secondary explanations, and 

 those who recall such experiences can the better understand 

 the savage mind. Yet this is of httle moment at present, 

 since we find savage society marked by what seems to us 

 extreme segregation of the sexes, and the failure of any 

 savage to conform to the tribal patterns of segregation would 

 be frowned upon as a matter of course. What our women com- 

 plain of is this same savage exclusiveness on the part of 

 modern man. It is this old attitude, they say, which attempts 

 to bar women from industry and from pohtical hfe. If, how- 

 ever, this segregation, this resistance to integration, is as old 

 as the race, we are justified in suspecting a biological basis. 

 Recent studies of primates present in clear outhne a dis- 

 tinction in behavior patterns between the males and the 

 females. Female primates adjust themselves to a new situa- 

 tion by attitudes and movements of one kind, the males of 

 the same species by another. These respective attitudes are 

 seen in the adults of the species in purposeful association, 

 not only in sex activity, but in other lines of action. This 

 suggests that submerged in the organism of the human 

 species are sex patterns which tend to segregate the sexes. 

 In simpler terms, men have a group of response patterns 

 peculiar to themselves, by virtue of which they draw apart 

 from women. Women, on their part, are thrown together 

 for similar reasons. The process is automatic, or at least 

 subconscious. One or two women may readily adjust them- 

 selves to a group of men, or be harmoniously tolerated, and 

 vice versa; but when, as in a normal human community, 

 the number of each sex Is about the same, each tends to 

 respond en bloc, and thus they pull apart. This Is much like 

 what happens when dark and white races attempt to live 



