Man and woman : a study of human secondary sexual characters / by Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Man and woman : a study of human secondary sexual characters / by Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

    483/538 (page 459)
    Almost the only attempt to consider them, indeed, which I have met is in a review of The Chatices of Death by Professor W. F. R. Weldon, in Natural Science. This sympathetic critic, with a biologist's instincts, clearly felt that there was something- wrong with Mr. Pearson's triumphant demonstration, although as the subject lay outside his own department he was not able to indicate the chief flaws. There is indeed one initial flaw in Professor Pearson's argu- ment to which Professor Weldon called attention; it could scarcely fail to attract the notice of a biologist. We are told that we must put aside characteristics which are themselves characteristics of sex, like gout and colour-blindness, since, without being confined to one sex, they are yet peculiarly fre- quent in one sex. Thus, we see, characteristics not confined to one sex may yet be characteristic of one sex, and when we seek to find what characters are more frequent in one sex than in the other, we must carefully leave out of account all these characters which are most clearly more frequent in one sex than in the other. Professor Pearson thus sets out with an initial con- fusion which is never cleared up. His object, he tells us, is to seek such degrees of variability as are secondary sexual characters of human beings, and we infer from the course of his argument that the desired characters, while not confined to one sex, may yet be peculiarly frequent in one sex. Yet these are precisely the group of characters ruled inadmissible at the outset! No definition of secondary sexual characters is any- where given, or on such premises could be given. Professor Pearson seems to assume that the conception of a secondary sexual character is too obvious to need definition. As a matter of fact there is considerable difference of opinion. Since Hunter first spoke of the secondary properties of sex, which he regarded as dependent on the primary, only develop- ing at puberty, and principally, though not entirely, confined to the male, the conception has very much changed; there has been a tendency to throw all sorts of miscellaneous sexual differences into the category. I have suggested that it would be convenient to introduce a group of tertiary sexual char- For men at most differ as heaven and earth, But women, worst and best, as heaven and hell. But while Mr. Galton merely used these lines, in a perfectly legitimate manner, to illustrate a tendency to variation in morals, Mr. Pearson seeks to give them a physical meaning which was certainly far from the poet's mind. In a chapter of the present work on the affectability of woman I had already pointed out that the heaven and hell of woman are both aspects of her greater affectability; not only does one woman differ from another as heaven and hell, but the same woman may so vary at different times.