Sex and Society | Page 4

to the superior variational tendency of the male,
resulting in characters which persist in the species wherever they prove
of life-saving advantage.[25]
The superior activity and variability of the male among lower forms

has been pointed out in great detail by Darwin and confirmed by others.
Throughout the animal kingdom, when the sexes differ in external
appearance, it is, with rare exceptions, the male which has been more
modified; for, generally, the female retains a closer resemblance to the
young of her own species, and to other adult members of the same
group. The cause of this seems to lie in the males of almost all animals
having stronger passions than the females.[26]
Darwin explains the greater variability of the males--as shown in more
brilliant colors, ornamental feathers, scent-pouches, the power of music,
spurs, larger canines and claws, horns, antlers, tusks, dewlaps, manes,
crests, beards, etc.--as due to the operation of sexual selection, meaning
by this "the advantage which certain individuals have over others of the
same sex and species solely in respect of reproduction,"[27] the female
choosing to pair with the more attractive male, or the stronger male
prevailing in a contest for the female. Wallace[28] advanced the
opposite view, that the female owes her soberness to the fact that only
inconspicuous females have in the struggle for existence escaped
destruction during the breeding season. There are fatal objections to
both these theories; and, taking his cue from Tylor,[29] Wallace
himself, in a later work, suggested what is probably the true
explanation, namely, that the superior variability of the male is
constitutional, and due to general laws of growth and development. "If
ornament," he says, "is the natural product and direct outcome of
superabundant health and vigor, then no other mode of selection is
needed to account for the presence of such ornament."[30] That a
tendency to spend energy more rapidly should result in more striking
morphological variation is to be expected; or, put otherwise, the fact of
a greater variational tendency in the male is the outcome of a
constitutional inclination to destructive metabolism. It is a general law
in the courtship of the sexes that the male seeks the female. The
secondary sexual characters of the male are developed with puberty,
and in some cases these sexual distinctions come and go with the
breeding season. What we know as physiological energy is the result of
the dissociation of atoms in the organism; expressions of energy are the
accompaniment of the katabolic or breaking-up process, and the
brighter color of the male, especially at the breeding season, results
from the fact that the waste products of the katabolism are deposited as

pigments.
When we compare the sexes of mankind morphologically, we find a
greater tendency to variation in man:[31]
All the secondary sexual characters of man are highly variable, even
within the limits of the same race; and they differ much in the several
races.... Numerous measurements carefully made of the stature, the
circumference of the neck and chest, the length of the backbone and of
the arms, in various races ... nearly all show that the males differ much
more from one another than do the females. This fact indicates that, as
far as these characters are concerned, it is the male which has been
chiefly modified, since the several races diverged from their common
stock.[32]
Morphologically the development of man is more accentuated than that
of woman. Anthropologists, indeed, regard woman as intermediate in
development between the child and the man.
The outlines of the adult female cranium are intermediate between
those of the child and the adult man; they are softer, more graceful and
delicate, and the apophyses and ridges for the attachment of muscles
are less pronounced,... the forehead is ... more perpendicular, to such a
degree that in a group of skulls those of the two sexes have been
mistaken for different types; the superciliary ridges and the glabella are
less developed, often not at all; the crown is higher and more horizontal;
the brain weight and cranial capacity are less; the mastoid apophyses,
the inion, the styloid apophyses, and the condyles of the occipital are of
less volume, the zygomatic and alveolar arches are more regular.[33]
Wagner decided that the brain of a woman, taken as a whole, is
uniformly in a more or less embryonic condition. Huschke says that
woman is always a growing child, and that her brain departs from the
infantile type no more than the other portions of her body.[34]
Weisbach[35] pointed out that the limits of variation in the skull of man
are greater than in that of woman.
Several observers have recorded the opinion that women of
dolichocephalic races are more brachycephalic, and women of
brachycephalic races more dolichocephalic, than the men of the same
races. If this