REPRODUCTION AND SEX 575 



ated as any one of their granddaughters, and what a lot of children, 

 thank Heaven, many of them had. 



This may be a fitting place for a reference to the interesting 

 suggestion that the intellectuals among women should keep them- 

 selves free for work in the world which needs them so badly, and 

 should leave it to their more placid, less ambitious, less intellectual 

 sisters to be the wives and mothers. Those who admire the beehive 

 will even point to it in support of their suggestion, for the queen- 

 mother's brain certainly does not develop so well as that of the 

 workers. 



But the biological objection is just the same as against nunneries. 

 It is sheer perversity to support a suggestion which deliberately 

 leaves maternity to the less intellectual. And besides the clever 

 mother's contribution to the organic inheritance of the child, there 

 is the hardly less important nurtural influence in the home. The 

 idea of leaving maternity to a docile and domesticated type of cow- 

 like placidity, while the intellectuals run the world, is mischievously 

 non-biological. 



Third Proposition.— The third side of our thesis is that the lines 

 of evolution to be followed are those which seem likely to make 

 the most of the deeply rooted organic distinction between male and 

 female, and to make the most of those masculine and feminine 

 characteristics that have proved themselves for ages of vital value. 



Taking a simple illustration first, we submit that Man — both 

 male and female — is a very slowly varying organism, though he 

 hides his persistence of type under ever-changing garments of 

 acquirement and convention. In spite of affectation and pose there 

 is still a wholesome abundance of that mutual attractiveness of 

 complementaries which has given a spice to life from the beginning, 

 and is of enormous biological importance. We venture to say that 

 attempts to lessen the old-fashioned natural differences between the 

 sexes are to be regarded with extreme suspicion. There is a whole- 

 some natural prejudice against the masculine woman and the 

 feminine man. What a resource of progress there is in sexual selec- 

 tion! How it will advance when economic conditions favour more 

 discriminate preferential mating on the woman's part ! 



And if it be important that the culture of the body should be 

 congruent with the fundamental distinction between male and 

 female, and should make the most of the normal masculine and 

 feminine attractions, the same is true in regard to the contrasted 

 intellectual qualities, say, of mental experiment on the one hand 

 and rapid intuitive insight on the other hand, or the contrasted 

 moral qualities of, say, courage and affection. We have, perhaps, 

 got away from the stupid anachronism of discussing the superiority 

 of one sex or the other ; but we have not sufficiently freed ourselves 

 from obscurantism, since we are slow to act constructively, in 



