Surely there is great enlightenment here: for the discovery of the
factors determining sex is a very small affair compared with the
suggestive inference as to the constitution of womanhood. Let us compare
man and woman on the basis of this assumption.
In the man there is nothing but maleness. This is not to deny that he
may possess the protective instinct and the tender emotion which is its
correlate, even though these were undoubtedly feminine in origin. But it
is to deny that any injury to, or arrested development of, the male can
reveal in him characters distinctively female. He may fail to become a
man and may remain a boy; or, having been a man, he may perhaps return,
under certain conditions, to a more youthful state; but he will never,
can never, display anything distinctive of the woman.
Not such, however, must be the woman's case. If anything should
interfere with the development and dominance of the femaleness factor in
her, there is not another "dose" of femaleness, so to speak, to fall
back upon; but a dose of maleness. We may be right in thus seeking to
explain certain familiar phenomena, observed in women under various
conditions--as, for instance, the growth of hair upon the face in
elderly women, the assumption of a masculine voice and aspect, and so
forth. Such facts are frequently to be observed after the climacteric or
"change of life," which probably denotes the termination of the
dominance of the femaleness factor.
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