A short history of women

Front matter

Also by John Langdon-Davies THE NEW AGE OF FAITH

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Chapter I THE BIOLOGICAL BACKGROUND TO

women’s history

§ 1. What Is A story is told of a little boy and a little girl ^ex- looking at a picture of Adam and Eve at the

London National Gallery. “Which is Adam and which Eve?” asked the boy. “I don’t know,” replied his sister, “but I could tell you if they had their clothes on.” It is a curious fact, but true, that most people, when they think of sex differences, think of a race of beings who wear skirts, living on moderately good terms with a race of beings who wear trousers, and of a natural state of affairs wherein the former exist to solace the latter, and the latter to work for the former.

It is, however, clear that to understand the history of women we must first understand as much as possible about the meaning and use in nature of sex; we must realize that sex existed not only before trousers and skirts, but before men and women; that it is one of the most widespread phenomena in nature, complicated and infinitely variable. For we shall find that our history is based largely upon one misconception about sex after another, beginning with ideas about ribs and ending with the strange pseudoscientific aberrations of extreme feminist propagandists to¬ day; and, moreover, if we have imaginations and a taste for useless speculation, we may consider what sort of society it would be that began with biological fact and modelled its institutions upon chromosomes, endocrines and whatever else science could tell it instead of upon legends and emo¬ tional misinterpretations. But at least a foundation of biol¬ ogy will serve as a useful support to the dreams and ravings of our forefathers and of ourselves, the sum total of which make up history.

What is sex? And why is sex? We do not as yet know one-tenth the necessary facts to make more than hesitating guesses in answer to these questions. We know enough to realize that the difference between a man and a woman is by no means what one might suppose from being one or other of them; and indeed the scientific research of the last twenty years has thrown much light upon practical matters which will in time entirely alter our point of view about these differences.

In order to prepare ourselves for such a change, we must first try to see the word and the thing “sex” from the stand¬ point of a biologist: to think of them in a way which makes them applicable not only to men and women, but to animals, to flowers, to insects and even invisible living things, fulfilling their instincts and passions in every cubic inch of air and water: we must discover a common measure for all these manifestations which is true not only for ourselves but for everything; and it will be a useful rule to assume that the reason for two sexes in man is the same as the reason for two sexes elsewhere in nature, and that any reason suggested by man which is not the same is probably false. Thus, if we find that a female’s place is always to have children, whether she be a human being, a bird, a fish, or a flea, we may assume that that is a universal tenet of femaleness. If someone says a woman should always darn a man’s socks and we find in other animals that often the male darns the female’s socks, metaphorically speaking at least, then we cannot agree, on these facts alone, with the universality of female darning of socks. If, as so many of the early Christian fathers seemed to think, women were “meant” to be a danger and a temptation to all godly men, we shall ask if the female spider, rabbit, butterfly, elephant, was also intended to interfere with her spouse’s salvation, and, if we do not so find, we shall not admit spiritual dangerousness as an inalienable female characteristic.

Clearly, then, we need not apologize for beginning history with biology, and in so doing we shall find that the ques¬ tions we wish to ask the biologist lead finally to this most important question of all: “In the world of everyday things,” we shall say to him, “we find that men and women are different; their bodies are different and their minds are different; most men are physically stronger than most women; women have produced fewer writers, poets, musi¬ cal composers; they are emotionally likely to react in an¬ other direction from the average man; they can almost be said to have another set of virtues and vices; now of all these differences , which are ordained in the biological na¬ ture of things, and which, using the word in its widest sense, are the result of education?”

An answer to this problem is essential to the right in¬ terpretation of women’s history; but before we are in a posi¬ tion to answer it we have a long way to go. for we must ask first for a little information on the nature and meaning of sex and of the existence of two sexes in the world of men and women.

§2. Primitive In the first place we may notice that sex is not Reproduction. 1 ...

by any means universal; there are many ani¬ mals which dispense with it altogether. To divide a species up into male and female is not necessary for life; it is only

one of many ways by which life succeeds in continuing to exist.

It is important to appreciate this fact, because to many generations of human beings the existence of two sexes has seemed an inevitable and universal law of creation: to early man, not only were all animals created male and female, but everything else in nature had sex, earth and heaven, sun and moon, sea and sky, every star and stone, hill and valley. To many people today there are two “principles” in the uni¬ verse, the male and the female, and innumerable philoso¬ phies and mysticisms, all with their repercussions on women’s history, have been built up around this idea.

The simplest and earliest animals, however, were neither male nor female; they were sexless; and when they were ready to fulfil the law of life which we call reproduction, they did so in the simplest possible manner: they split in two and each half went its own way. Now if we want to find out the use in nature of sex we can very well begin by asking ourselves why life did not go on forever forming and re¬ forming by such a simple and adequate means as this. Can we see anything which life gained by dividing into male and female?

The answer to this question can be suggested by the be¬ haviour of a minute animal called Copromonas, which can be found in any pond where frogs live. Copromonas is a small mass of protoplasm with a whip-like tail with which it propels itself through the water: it has a mouth with which it absorbs frogs’ dung and when food is plentiful it increases in size for a time and then splits in two and becomes two separate living beings. These two oldnew individuals repeat the process several times until hun¬ dreds of Copromonas exist instead of the original one ani¬ mal.

But this does not go on forever: after a time the Copro¬ monas seem to get exhausted and languid; they no longer split up, life is at a standstill, a sort of impotent old age at¬ tacks the whole colony. Now there occurs a very curious thing : instead of splitting up forever, two individuals come together and mix themselves with one another until they have become a single individual by complete union. After an interval, during which the new individual may be swallowed by a frog and brought once more into close contact with an ample food supply, it once more resumes the process of splitting up; it has become rejuvenated.

This is a most interesting fact, for it seems to show that there is a limit to the amount of splitting power such an animal can possess and when this limit is reached two indi¬ viduals must unite and revivify their bodily powers by such union. The union is not a sexual union ; both individuals are exactly the same as one another and they mix as completely as two drops of water on a window-pane : but it is clearly a step away from the first simple process of reproduction to¬ wards something far more complicated, and' all that is needed for it to become truly sexual is for the two individ¬ uals to be unlike one another in bodily form.

When we realize that the animals of which we are speak¬ ing are formed of one single cell of protoplasm, it will be clear that such sexual differences will be very minute in¬ deed; nevertheless, we can trace their early beginnings in one or two forms of life only a little different from Copromonas.

If you steep a cod’s head in water for a very long time there will appear a miscroscopic animal called a Bodo, which behaves exactly as Copromonas, first splitting up for several generations, then growing tired or age-worn and rejuvenating itself by joining up with another individual. The two Bodos look exactly alike still, but it is noteworthy that one of them remains anchored to a piece of solid matter while the other swims about until it finds the first. Thus the behaviour of the two is different although no microscope has been able to detect any difference in form: one is quiescent and waits to be found, the other goes a-courting.

The next step is to be seen in a microscopic animal with an immense name which lives in the digestive system of a centipede. Like Bodo and Copromonas it consists of one' cell; like them it can increase in numbers for a long time simply by splitting in two; but sooner or later, again like them, it needs to mingle with another individual in order to rejuvenate its failing powers. To accomplish this end it adopts a more complicated method. Some individuals grow into larger egg cells; others split into smaller sperm cells, the egg cells do not move, but have a great deal of nourish¬ ing food stored up in them; the sperm cells move about rapidly and are shaped for motion rather than for food stor¬ age. The sperm cell moves about incessantly until it finds an egg cell, when it bores its way into it. After several more steps the result of this union is a number of individuals like the earlier ones, which split and re-split until their vital force is tired, when once more they change into two different forms and repeat the process ad infinitum.

There in brief is the way in which sex seems to have come into the world: how are we to account for the facts, and what light do they throw on the meaning of sex?

First we can assume that after a time the protoplasm of one individual becomes tired and ceases to grow bigger, so that there is a limit to the number of times it can split up into new beings. Second, by some virtue, chemical or otherwise, the mingling of two individuals with one another

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rejuvenates the protoplasm and enables it to grow and sub¬ divide for a time at least with its original vigour. Third, we see that quite soon in the history of such unions there ap¬ pears a difference of behaviour and form between the two uniting individuals, and that one moves about vigorously and the other waits quietly to be found.

! This last point is the most important for us because to a large extent it explains the origin of sex differences in early forms of life. Motion and nourishing food storage are the two necessities for successful union; they are incompat¬ ible, just as the heaviness of a cart horse is incompatible with the swiftness of a racehorse, and so the two animals divide the labour between them, — one moves, the other stores.

The different forms which this division of labour imposes are what we call sex differences: the moving individual we call the male, the larger, richer individual the female.

In one sentence, let us remember that division of labour is the cause of different sex forms ; the male does one thing and is by definition therefore male; the female another and is by definition therefore female. So long as all animals com¬ bined in themselves the ability needed to carry on and prop¬ agate life, sex did not exist: only in so far as animals specialized, did they become male and female.

If then life had never evolved into any higher form than these microscopical animals infesting the inside of centi¬ pedes, the answer to the question, what is sex? would be: First, it seems a rule of living matter that it cannot go on forever growing and splitting up without becoming vitally exhausted, and this exhaustion is counteracted by the physi¬ cal mingling of two individuals and the mixing of their protoplasm; and second, it is easier to bring about the satis¬ factory mingling of individuals if one devotes itself to stor¬ ing up rich protoplasm and the other to keeping thin and moving rapidly in every direction in search of its mate.”

§ 3. Sex-cells Life, however, did not stop short at the microand Other scopical animal infesting the inside of centi¬ pedes: it went further and produced inci¬ dentally the centipede itself, and after it many other forms, including man. We must therefore at this point digress from the history of that division of labour which we call sex, and consider another division of labour between living cells, the result of which has been even more important.

The animals we have considered so far are all of them single-celled animals ; in them one small piece of protoplasm does all the work for each individual,— motion, digestion, sensation, reproduction, all are accomplished by one and the same cell, by the same implement which is the complete indi¬ vidual. Such a state of affairs did not last long.

It seems to be an invariable rule of life that living matter becomes more and more efficient exactly in so far as it spe¬ cializes in the work it does. When two lowly cells happened to divide the work of food storage and motion between them, instead of both trying to move and to grow fat at once, they gave themselves a start over their competitors in the struggle for life, which carried them far. In exactly the same way the peasant craftsman who sits in his shop making the whole of a few beautiful earthenware pots is not so efficient in the modern struggle for survival as the factory where each v orker concentrates on one out of twenty or thirty processes ; although the latter loses all sense of the beauty of the whole through concentrating on the part. So, too, early in the his¬ tory of life two and more single cells, instead of leading sep¬ arate existences, remained or became joined together and ex¬ isted as parts of a many-celled animal. We can guess what happened and see some of the steps still going on in nature. For example, a group of cells combined together to form a tube of living matter, in which some cells pointed outwards to the world at large, others inwards to the bore of the tube. Automatically these two groups found themselves confronted with different problems and forced to perform different labours: the outside cells protected the whole from attacks from without, and they moved the animal from one spot to another; the inside cells accepted the food which floated in through the tube, — they digested it and absorbed it. Thus, in place of a single cell occupying itself with all the pro¬ cesses necessary to life, we have a division of labour, a fac¬ tory of specialized processes; and life became more efficient than before in the struggle to survive.

In these many-celled animals some of the cells take upon themselves the single process of reproduction: instead of the whole animal being concerned in propagating life, only a part of it is so concerned, and we have indeed'animals with organs of sex, just as they have also organs of motion and organs of digestion; sex has become a part only of the liv¬ ing form and we have clearly advanced a step nearer to what the plain man or woman understands by sex.

We have moreover complicated our understanding of sex enormously by bringing in a new problem: in all these ani¬ mals where only some of the cells, only part of the body, performs any sexual function, we ask ourselves what is the relationship between the sex cells and the rest of the body? Is the whole of the animal male or female, or is only that part of it which is sexual male or female, and the rest neu¬ tral or neuter? Before attempting to answer these new ques¬ tions, we must safeguard ourselves from any too narrow an idea of what a living being with many cells and two sexes must be like. It is good to see how many schemes Nature has up her sleeve, and how different the sex relationship and life may be from that which we know to exist between men and women.

It will be valuable to see how different the method of re¬ production can be from the human method, by studying for a moment the history of the Hydra. The Hydra is a very small water animal, just visible to the naked eye, and living in every ditch and pond. By one end it is anchored to a piece of plant matter and it looks like a branched tree itself. It is really a tube, the walls of which are lined with two thick¬ nesses of cells, and there is an opening at the end opposite to the one by which it is attached. From the main tube or trunk sprout branches, and tentacles surround the mouth opening, waving in the water and forming little currents down which float particles of food. The inner lining of cells digests this food, while the outer lining protects the animal from being hurt by hard things grazing against it.

The Hydra takes no chances in its effort to reproduce itself; each branch can in time detach itself from the parent stem and float off, a complete animal, to become attached to some straw or weed on its own; and besides this a-sexual way of reproduction there is also a true sexual way. Just below the mouth and its bodyguard of ten¬ tacles a small swelling appears in the outer layer; these cells split up into smaller ones, each with a whip-like tail. They are male sperm cells and can move about to find the female eSS cells. In shape and function they are just like the same sperm cells in higher animals and in man himself. On the same individual, near the attached end, another lump ap¬ pears formed of a colony of cells in the outer wall ; but in¬ stead of these cells splitting up and becoming sperm cells, they eat one another until only one large well-nourished egg cell is left. When this egg cell is fully grown, it breaks the wall which has hitherto guarded it, and becomes exposed to the surface. Sooner or later a sperm cell, attracted in some way or other towards it, finds it out, bores its way to the cen¬ tre and thereby fertilizes it. After a short period of growth, the new individual breaks away from its parent, falls to the bottom of the pond and becomes in course of time a full-grown Hydra.

This short description will help us to see how sex as we know it is only one of many ways of performing the same need of living matter. The Hydra reproduces both with and without sex, but we must note carefully that even when it uses sex there is only one individual concerned, that the parent Hydra is both father and mother of its offspring. Clearly we need to widen our ideas of the universe by the inclusion of this experience of life, and to realize that not only is there reproduction without sex at all, but also sex which does not include the participation of two individuals.

§ 4. How Na- At first sight perhaps the Hydra does not tVarietv‘nSUreS t^irow much light on the question which ultimately we hope to answer, namely, what is the relationship between the sex-cells and the rest of the body of a many-celled animal? Clearly as the same indi¬ vidual Hydra has both egg cells and sperm cells, it is hermaphrodite and the rest of its body must either be both male and female, or neither male nor female; and we shall learn little about the difference, let us say, between a man’s body and a woman’s in either case. But the Hydra has sug¬ gested another question which wrill lead up to what we are trying to discover. The very fact of the Hydra’s being herm¬ aphrodite, that is, having both sexes in one individual, and of its being able to fertilize its eggs with its own sperm, without the help of another individual, leads us to ask this question: “Why does life prefer that the sex cells in a many-celled animal should be divided between two individuals, so that the sperm cells of one individual fertilize the egg cells f of the other?” That life does prefer this is perfectly plain from the facts; it is only low forms of life like the Hydra which are hermaphrodite and all the higher forms are bi¬ sexual.

That it is an advantage for the living being to have sep¬ arate individuals -for its father and mother, is nowhere more clearly suggested than by the efforts and stratagems adopted by flowers which have both seed and pollen in one individual to bring about what is called cross-fertilization and to prevent its opposite — self-fertilization. An excellent example of this can be seen in the common primrose.

Every primrose flower has both male and female germ cells, that is, both pollen and seed; and so each flower could perfectly well fertilize itself, but in actual fact the fertilizing is accomplished by insects attracted by honey, and carrying the pollen of one flower to the seed of another.

Now in order to avoid the quite simple way of each flower fertilizing itself and to substitute for it the fertilizing of one flower by another, the primrose has developed an amazingly complicated machinery. In the first place, it cannot move about in order to find another flower, and so it has to employ an insect as a carrier; and since insects, like all other car¬ riers, require payment for service rendered, it has had to secrete honey from itself in order to attract insects. But it has done more than this ; it has developed a means whereby an insect cannot fertilize the seed of any flower with pollen taken from any other flower on the same plant.

If you will look at a bed of primroses, you will find that

V half the plants bear flowers of a shape different from the others: the two shapes are known to gardeners as pin-eyed and thrum-eyed; and if you pick specimens and tear them open, you will find that in the pin-eyed flower the pollen is low down the tube and the seed, or rather the organ by which the pollen is conveyed to the seed in order to fertilize it, is high up. In the thrum-eyed flower, the positions are exactly reversed.

Now consider what happens to a bee which explores flower after flower for honey: he must thrust his proboscis deep down into the tube past seed and pollen in his search. If the flower is pin-eyed, some pollen will stick to the higher part of his proboscis; if it is thrum-eyed, to the lower, and he flies about with two different kinds of pollen on two different parts of his proboscis. When he visits a pin-eyed flower the pollen from a thrum-eyed flower will come in contact with the seed — the other pollen will be in the wrong position ; and the same will be true when he visits a thrum¬ eyed flower — only the pin-eyed pollen will reach the seed, Thus as all the flowers on one plant are of the same sort, no flowers will be fertilized except by pollen from a different plant.

What do we learn from this? It confirms our suspicion that, for some reason, it is so much better that separate plants should fertilize one another, that even when a plant could quite easily fertilize itself, the most complicated ma¬ chinery is evolved in order to secure cross-fertilization, and to avoid self-fertilization; and that in the same way with animals, a very definite value results from the separation of male and female germ cells in different bodies, since even when they are not separated the greatest pains are taken to avoid one and the same being, animal or plant, becoming both father and mother of the new generation.

§ 5. Advan- What is this hardly- won advantage which togcs of Sex. primrose has gained over the Hydra? We

can easily answer the question now.

It is a law of life that all offspring take after their parent or parents, but that within limits offspring vary from their parents. All children have some features like their fathers or mothers, but no child is exactly like them. The little Hydras will be Hydras as their parents were, but within lim¬ its they will be different: they will have fewer or more tenta¬ cles, longer or shorter stems, quicker or slower movements, stronger or weaker powers of anchoring themselves to the weeds of their ocean pool or stagnant pond.

Now out of this tendency to vary has come, we believe, the whole evolution of animal and vegetable life into higher forms ; for some of the variations will be valuable to the in¬ dividual, wall give it a start in the struggle for existence against all those individuals which do not possess that par¬ ticular variation. In short, ability to vary is of the utmost value to life and rewards its possessor with the prizes of vital development into higher forms.

Since then offspring vary only within limits and take after their parents, it is an enormous advantage to have two parents from whom to acquire one’s characteristics, for it increases the possibility of variation.

Let us imagine, for the sake of example, that there are two plants of the same kind of flower; one with white petals, the other with red; one with a hairy stem, the other smooth; one ripening in May, the other in June; one requir¬ ing a great deal of water, the other less. Suppose also that these plants, as is the case with so many others, could ferti¬ lize either themselves or one another. Plainly, in the first case, each plant would have offspring only like itself, with slight variations ; but in the second case, since there are two parents from each of which characters can be inherited, any one of the four characters could be inherited along with any of the other three, so that there would be the possibility of sixteen major variations, out of which several might be more fitted to survive than either of the parents.

In short, the existence of two sexes enriches the inheri¬ tance, increases the chance of survival and improves the race; so that those species which like the primrose succeeded in evolving complicated safeguards to ensure cross¬ fertilization, or those species which avoided the danger of self-fertilization altogether by having only one sex in one individual, were best fitted to survive and have done so, leaving the rest at the bottom of the evolutionary scale. The primrose plants, though not so different as the hypothetical plants we have invented, differ among themselves to a less degree; each of them contains in itself the experience and variations of a long line of ancestors which are shared by their joint offspring.

Hence we can now give several partial answers to the questions with which we began, namely, what is sex and why is sex?

I. Sex is rejuvenation; whereby the senility of the indi¬ vidual protoplasmic cell is made young again and capable of growth and renewal.

II. Sex is division of labour, whereby two individuals by sharing the labours of life are better able to perform them than either would be alone.

III. Sex is increased ability for variation, whereby the offspring has a greater reservoir of characteristics upon which to draw, and in consequence an exalted chance of success in the struggle for existence.

§ 6. The Story We have now cleared the way for a full conof Phylloxera. si(jera^on 0f vitaj qUestion suggested as

long ago as the third section, namely, what is the relation¬ ship between the sex cells and the rest of the body in a many-celled animal? Is the whole of the animal male or female, or is only that part of it which is sexual male or fe¬ male, and the rest neutral or neuter? On how we answer this depends the whole interpretation which we shall put upon the history of women, and it is therefore of the utmost im¬ portance to try and find a clear answer. Let us proceed by way of a concrete object lesson, and see how bodily sex forms may vary in order to fulfil varying needs — which is excellently shown in the life history of the Phylloxera.