Sex and Society

Sex and Society

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Title: Sex and Society
Author: William I. Thomas
Release Date: February 13, 2005 [eBook #15015]
Language: English
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SEX AND SOCIETY
Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex
by
WILLIAM I. THOMAS
Associate Professor of Sociology in the University of Chicago
The University of Chicago Press Chicago, Illinois
1907 Fourth Impression 1913

AUTHOR'S NOTE
These studies have been published in various journals at different times.
They are reprinted together because there is some demand for them,
and they are not easily accessible. In preparing them for publication in

the present form, some of them have been expanded and all of them
have been revised.
While each study is complete in itself, the general thesis running
through all of them is the same--that the differences in bodily habit
between men and women, particularly the greater strength, restlessness,
and motor aptitude of man, and the more stationary condition of
woman, have had an important influence on social forms and activities,
and on the character and mind of the two sexes.
"Organic Differences in the Sexes" appeared in the _American Journal
of Sociology_, III, 31ff., with the title, "On a Difference in the
Metabolism of the Sexes;" "Sex and Primitive Social Control," _ibid._,
III, 754ff.; "Sex and Primitive Industry," _ibid._, IV, 474ff.; "Sex and
Primitive Morality," _ibid._, IV, 774ff.; "The Psychology of Modesty
and Clothing," _ibid._, V, 246ff.; "The Adventitious Character of
Woman," _ibid._, XII, 32ff.; "The Mind of Woman and the Lower
Races," _ibid._, XII, 435ff.; "The Psychology of Exogamy," in the
_Zeitschrift für Socialwissenschaft_, V, 1ff., with the title, "Der
Ursprung der Exogamie;" "Sex and Social Feeling," in the
_Psychological Review_, XI, 61ff., with the title, "The Sexual Element
in Sensibility." Portions of a paper printed in the _Forum_, XXXVI,
305ff., with the title, "Is the Human Brain Stationary?" are incorporated
in the paper on "The Mind of Woman and the Lower Races," and
portions of a paper printed in the _American Journal of Sociology_, IX,
593ff., with the title, "The Psychology of Race-Prejudice," are
incorporated in the paper on "Sex and Social Feeling." I acknowledge
the courtesy of the editors of these journals for permission to reprint.
W.I.T.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
ORGANIC DIFFERENCES IN THE SEXES
SEX AND PRIMITIVE SOCIAL CONTROL
SEX AND SOCIAL FEELING
SEX AND PRIMITIVE INDUSTRY
SEX AND PRIMITIVE MORALITY
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EXOGAMY
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MODESTY AND CLOTHING
THE ADVENTITIOUS CHARACTER OF WOMAN

THE MIND OF WOMAN AND THE LOWER RACES
INDEX

ORGANIC DIFFERENCES IN THE SEXES
A grand difference between plant and animal life lies in the fact that the
plant is concerned chiefly with storing energy, and the animal with
consuming it. The plant by a very slow process converts lifeless into
living matter, expending little energy and living at a profit. The animal
is unable to change lifeless into living matter, but has developed organs
of locomotion, ingestion, and digestion which enable it to prey upon
the plant world and upon other animal forms; and in contrast with plant
life it lives at a loss of energy. Expressed in biological formula, the
habit of the plant is predominantly anabolic, that of the animal
predominantly katabolic.
Certain biologists, limiting their attention in the main to the lower
forms of life, have maintained very plausibly that males are more
katabolic than females, and that maleness is the product of influences
tending to produce a katabolic habit of body.[1] If this assumption is
correct, maleness and femaleness are merely a repetition of the contrast
existing between the animal and the plant. The katabolic animal form,
through its rapid destruction of energy, has been carried
developmentally away from the anabolic plant form; and of the two
sexes the male has been carried farther than the female from the plant
process. The body of morphological, physiological, ethnological, and
demographic data which follows becomes coherent, indeed, only on the
assumption that woman stands nearer to the plant process than man,
representing the constructive as opposed to the disruptive metabolic
tendency.[2]
The researches of Düsing,[3] supplementing the antecedent
observations of Ploss,[4] and further supplemented by the ethnological
data collected by Westermarck,[5] seem to demonstrate a connection
between an abundance of nutrition and females, and between scarcity
and males, in relatively higher animal forms and in man. The main
facts in