conceptions have undergone trivial corrections; they have been sent to the workshop and patched in head and limbs; they have been lopped and added to, expanded here, contracted there, as when new needs pierce through and through an old law of suffrage, bursting bond after bond. None the less, in spite of all amendment and alteration, we have still to reckon with the primitive conceptions, male and female.
It is true that among those we call women are some who are meagre, narrow-hipped, angular, muscular, energetic, highly mentalised; there are “women” with short hair and deep voices, just as there are “men” who are beardless and gossiping. We know, in fact, that there are unwomanly women, man-like women, and unmanly, womanish, womanlike men. We assign sex to human beings from their birth on one character only, and so come to add contradictory ideas to our conceptions. Such a course is illogical.
In private conversation or in society, in scientific or general meetings, we have all taken part in frothy discussions on “Man and Woman,” or on the “Emancipation of Women.” There is a pitiful monotony in the fashion according to which, on such occasions, “men” and “women” have been treated as if, like red and white balls, they were alike in all respects save colour. In no case has the discussion been confined to an individual case, and as every one had different individuals in their mind, a real agreement was impossible. As people meant different things by the same words, there was a complete disharmony between language and ideas. Is it really the case that all women and men are marked off sharply from each other, the women, on the one hand, alike in all points, the men on the other? It is certainly the case that all previous treatment of the sexual differences, perhaps unconsciously, has implied this view. And yet nowhere else in nature is there such a yawning discontinuity. There are transitional forms between the metals and non-metals, between chemical combinations and mixtures, between animals and plants, between phanerogams and cryptogams, and between mammals and
