Are Men Equal to Women?

As men have the stronger sex urge, women have the stronger “sympathy” urge.

Instead of asking the question: “Are women equal to men?” we should reverse the question to: “Are men equal to women?” and we will have a question which can not as easily be answered by a resounding “Yes”.
The obvious fact - no less scientific because it is obvious - is that women can be mothers and men cannot. Biologically speaking there is no comparison between motherhood and fatherhood for the simple reason that a man is all but unrelated to his own child in that the mother has alone been carrying the child for nine months; the mother is the one who has been feeding and coddling and burping and tending the child; she has all but monopolised him and he her. Man is an extern, a foreigner, an intruder in the biological process which has cast him aside as a mere casual incident. He does posses a muscular superiority and dominance but his system is not changed according to whether or not his sperm shall have impregnated an ovum; his whole life has not taken on a sudden, overwhelming, terrifically personal new meaning; to him there has been no radical change of outlook, no constant feeling of personal responsibility and dedication, no deep-seated pulsation throbbing throughout his system saying: “We are no longer one but two.” And as the days of confinement and hour of delivery draw near, there is not the same numbing apprehension of an impending rendezvous with destiny, the glorious climax of immediate cooperation with God in the struggle that new existence may find his way into a bright world; nor with the victory won does there come to man the warm rich glow of achievement and honour and personal fulfilment as a tender warm bundle of life looks up with clear but unsteady eyes into the wan smiling face of the woman he will ever after call “Mother.”
It is impossible for an adult, even for an adult savage, not to understand that it is particularly from the mother and within the mother that the child lives and moves and derives its being. More than that: after the child is born, nature has decreed that the child needs its mother for “a nourishment that has never been equalled” and the mother needs the child not only for deep psychological reasons but because the child “through its (breast-feeding) functioning is related to the uterine involution which it facilitates and completes.” Mother and child need each other for their physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. In all of this, the man is certainly not equal.
The burden of hundreds of weighty doctoral dissertations and thousands of excellent educational experiments has been: a child’s earliest days are his most important and impressionable days. Yet biology is oblivious to any complaint of the male that the woman is by nature destined to be closer to the child. Or that she will have more to say about moulding the human race. Or that she will be the one who will more closely cooperate with God in moulding and developing the future inhabitants of home, state, and heaven, if God had wanted the man to be closer to the child, he would have given the male the appropriate nurturing equipment and functions.
Sociability
A woman is much more likely to become emotional about somebody. Her greater affectivity is toward persons; she is a more social person. She is interested in the living human being; not in things, actions, accomplishments, theories, statistics, or impersonal plans as such. She is more interested in getting along with others, and she works at it. Allport and Hartman found that girls are less resistant to social situations generally; they are the greater “conformists.
Heidbreder found that women prefer more socially approved traits than do the men; they prefer more desirable social traits in themselves and in others, while men-egotists as they seem to be, prefer more desirable traits in others than in themselves. The man is less willing to put himself out to “get along”; he is more satisfied with the role of the “great independent” or the lone wolf. In considering woman’s greater sociability there is the biocultural factor that the woman “gets ahead” through marriage and therefore by attracting another through personality, charm, and ingratiating ways, while the man “gets ahead” by proving himself in business and other more impersonal ways.
Cooperation
As men have the stronger sex urge, women have the stronger “sympathy” urge. As women need greater affection, social attention, emotional response, personal assistance and aid, they feel others need it too. And they respond accordingly. Their spirit of cooperation, their willingness to subordinate their own personal aggrandisement or pet project for the common good, their “social aid and uplift tendencies,” are all indicated at an early age. Girls’ “service score” and “altruistic attitudes” surpass consistently those of their brothers even though their male counterparts have a worse reputation for lack of cooperation than seems to be warranted. Daughters perform more kind deeds and do more chores for both parents.
If we ask why it is that from early childhood to old age it is the female sex which in general is the more “socially aware” and altruistic, the answer seems obvious enough: women expand their “motherliness” into the whole broad, needy world with which they come in contact. In this second division of the emotions, the altruistic, there is accordingly no doubt that women are superior.
The Hardy Sex
Doctors agree the woman has the more viable, more resistant body, The secret of her success in this field, as in so many others, is her excess of female hormones, Our hormone supply is our medicinal supply-we always have an ever-ready automatic medicine kit, Nevertheless, as Dr. Hugh H. Darby of Columbia University points out, though both sexes produce both “male” and “female” hormones the production overwhelmingly favours the woman for:
Even among children from three to ten years old, little boys, on the average, produce twice as much of the “male hormones” as do little girls while little girls produce forty or fifty times as much of the “female” hormones as do little boys.
This excess of hormones with their healing power gives woman such marvelous recuperative powers that she can look forward to six more years of life than the male. At all ages the female death rate is at least twenty-five per cent lower than the male. Not only will the Woman benefit proportionately wherever there are improved living and medical conditions but she has less chance of being a victim of anyone of the major diseases.
Physical versus Psychological
Leclercq characterises man as more “carnal” and woman as more “passionate.” Man’s libidinous affectability is localised and propulsive; woman’s diffuse and more amenable to psychological implications. This dimorphic sex impetus gives rise to such rough approximations as the followings:
It is estimated that in about 90% of the boys it is the physical factor (of the sex instinct) that predominates, while in about 90% of the girls it is the psychic factor. Dr. Bigelow expresses it this way: The sexual instincts of the young man are characteristically active, aggressive, spontaneous, and automatic; while those of the girl, as a rule, are passive, and subject to awakening by external stimuli, especially in connection with affection.
Not only in the human world but in the whole animal world it is primarily the male who searches for the female. In the cellular origins of multicellular life it is the spermatozoa which seek out the ova and vice versa. This basic male-female pattern as existing among the games continue the biologic stairways right into the formal ballroom of mankind: the male is the aggressor and the female is the coy latent potential mother - the conserver, nourisher, personal protector, and builder of the vital world. To the male, the sexual union is more often an end in itself; to the woman it is more often a means: a means to satisfy the male, or a means to obtain children.
The consideration of these basic sociological, and psychological differences helps us understand why there is some truth in saying that for the male love is ninety per cent physical and ten per cent psychological, and for the female love is ten per cent physical and ninety per cent psychological. Do they also go to prove women are far superior to men?