We may prefer the maternal to the surgical type, and there
may be good reason for our preference; but the surgeon may be very
useful, and, useful or not, the question is not one of ought. Thoughtful
people should know better than to make this constant confusion between
what ought to be and what is. Let us hold to our ideals, let us by all
means have our scale of values; but the first question in such a case as
this is as to what _is_. In point of fact all women are not of the same
type; and our expression of what ought to be is none other than the
passing of a censure upon Nature for her deeds. We may know better than
she, or, as has happened, we may know worse.
VII
BEFORE WOMANHOOD
We have seen that the sex of the individual is already determined as
early as any other of his or her characters, though the realization of
the potentialities of that sex may be much modified by nurture, as in
the contrasted cases of the queen bee and the worker bee. Children,
then, are already of one sex or other, and though our business in the
present volume is not childhood of either sex, a few points are worth
noting before we take up the consideration of the individual at the
period when the distinctive characteristics of sex make their effective
appearance.
Despite the abundance of the material and the opportunities for
observation, we are at present without decisive evidence as to the
distinctiveness of sex in any effective way during childhood.
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