It is true that my primary concern has been to furnish, for
the individual woman and for those in charge of girlhood, a guide of
life based upon the known physiology of sex. But it is a poor guide of
life which considers only the transient individual, and poorest of all
in this very case.
If it were true that woman is merely the vessel and custodian of the
future lives of men and women, entrusted to her ante-natal care by their
fathers, as many creeds have supposed, then indeed it would be a
question of relatively small moment how the mothers of the future were
chosen. Our ingenious devices for ensuring the supremacy of man lend
colour to this idea. We name children after their fathers, and the fact
that they are also to some extent of the maternal stock is obscured.
But when we ask to what extent they are also of maternal stock, we find
that there is a rigorous equality between the sexes in this matter. It
is a fact which has been ignored or inadequately recognized by every
feminist and by every eugenist from Plato until the present time.
Salient qualities, whether good or ill, are more commonly displayed by
men than by women. Great strength or physical courage or endurance,
great ability or genius, together with a variety of abnormalities, are
much more commonly found in men than in women, and the eugenic emphasis
has therefore always been laid upon the choice of fathers rather than of
mothers.
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