Unfortunately, feminists show a
tendency to go beyond this and to minimize differentiation in their
claims of equality. An attempt is made to show that women do not differ
materially from men in the nature of their capacity of mental or
physical achievement. Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman makes the logical
application by demanding that little girls' hair be cut short and that
they be prevented from playing with dolls in order that differences
fostered in this way be reduced.
In forming a judgment on this proposition, it must be remembered that
civilization covers not more than 10,000 years out of man's history of
half a million or more. During 490,000 out of the 500,000 years, man was
the hunter and warrior; while woman stayed at home of necessity to bear
and rear the young, to skin the prey, to prepare the food and clothing.
He must have a small knowledge of biology who could suppose that this
long history would not lead to any differentiation of the two sexes;
and the biologist knows that man and woman in some respects differ in
every cell of their bodies: that, as Jacques Loeb says, "Man and woman
are, physiologically, different species."
But the biologist also knows that sex is a quantitative character.
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