be more frequently ill than women the duration of their sickness is shorter. Taking a Swiss Insurance Company, I find, "Among 100 insured men an average of 26.76 received sick relief but among women only 24.26. The men who received sick relief averaged 23.55 days of illness, the women averaged 32.36." The women showed a lower percentage of relief but a longer average duration of sickness, and as a result of these two circumstances the average morbidity of the women is higher than that of the men, 7.87 as against 6.30. In one of the German Insurance Societies for each 100 persons the men averaged 21.6 days lost through sickness and the women 24.4 days, while in an Austrian Society the men lost 16.5 days and the women 18.8. Generally speaking women lose more days from sickness than men; they are less able to bear the strain which modern industrial methods are imposing upon them.

Special Functions of the Female

Girls, as already indicated, reach maturity somewhat sooner than boys. In the tropics the first menstruation usually occurs by the age of twelve; in colder countries at sixteen. Maturity not only brings to the girl a physiological phenomenon unknown to boys (menstruation), but it makes new and different demands on her metabolism. Just how significant menstruation itself is in the life of woman is a matter of dispute. Often it is a period of suffering and mental depression. There is a marked decrease of lime in the blood while certain poisons are found in the fluids of the body. So, too, the menopause often introduces troubles from which man seems free.

For some unknown reason, the thyroid gland which affects brain growth in both sexes is intimately related in woman to the reproductive organs. In as much as woman must bear the children it is evident that nature must provide the needed equipment. Possibly due to this need the brain of woman slackens growth by the age of fifteen and stops at eighteen while the brain of man grows till twenty-five or thirty. It may be that some of these physiological changes have pro

found effect on the emotional life. More than this it is unsafe to say in the light of present information though extravagant and often preposterous statements are very common.

Alleged Mental Inferiority of Women

Skulking behind most current discussions is a theory that woman is not as well endowed mentally as man. The evidence offered is far from conclusive. Structurally woman's brain is the same as man's. Since man is larger and heavier his brain weight seems likely to be greater. The results of seven students averaged together gives a brain weight of 1,376 grams to man, 1,237 grams to woman-a difference of 139 grams.10 No one knows that this difference has any meaning, nor that total weight is important. Some low-grade men have had heavy brains, far above the average, and some very able men have had to get along with light brains. The attempt to correlate brain weight to body weight is unsatisfactory, for it gives an advantage to woman because man's body weight as compared to woman's is about 100 to 83; while that of the brain is 100 to 90.

In reality we must turn to achievement for our evidence, but achievement is conditioned upon so many things in addition to inherent capacity that the evidence is most unsatisfactory. Put the two sexes side by side in the same schools and no difference in their attainments is evident. Language is a great human achievement but woman seems not to be handicapped in its use. In fact, most of current argument that woman has not done this or that in history is equivalent to complaining that where sovereignty has been limited to men there were no female sovereigns. The division of labor, intellectual as well as physical, has debarred women from active competition with men in many intellectual fields. History, therefore, wholly fails to indicate what women might have done had conditions favored the attempt. The verdict of Thomas merits attention:

It must be confessed that the testimony of anthropologists on the difference of variability of men and women is to be accepted with great caution. As a class they have gone on the assumption that woman is an inferior creation and have almost totally neglected to distinguish between the congenital characters of women and those acquired as the result of a totally different relation to society on the part of women and men. They have also failed to appreciate the fact that differences from man are not necessarily points of inferiority, but adaptations to different and specialized modes of functioning. But, whatever the final interpretation of details, I think the evidence is sufficient to establish the following main propositions: Man consumes energy more rapidly; woman is more conservative of it. The structural variability of man is mainly towards motion; woman's variational tendency is not toward motion but toward reproduction. Man is fitted for feats of strength and bursts of energy; woman has more stability and endurance. While woman remains nearer to the infantile type, man approaches more to the senile. The extreme variational tendency of man expresses itself in a larger percentage of genius, insanity and idiocy; woman remains more nearly normal.11

In this hurried survey we have glanced at most of the real or alleged sex differences now known. It would seem that the differences are either those due to sex or to social arrangements. No one disputes the importance of sex and it is hard to overstate the rôle it has played in history. It is foolish to talk of the superiority or inferiority of either sex. We must not forget that each person has two parents and that his qualities depend as much on the contribution of the mother as on those of the father. The sire has as much to do with the quantity and quality of the milk given by the cow as does the dam. The chromosomes in each cell of the body come from both parents, not from one alone. There are more biological facts about sex which we do not understand at present. It is evident that many of the sex divisions of labor and customs have been based upon artificial or, at least, trivial differences.

Division of Labor between the Sexes

When one has read a considerable number of accounts of the social life of the various peoples of earth he realizes quickly that it is quite impossible to devise any one scheme to show the activities of men as compared to women. There is a shadowy line of separation due to the long pregnancy of the mother and the subsequent nursing of the baby-a process extending two or three years among primitive people. This makes it easier for the father to roam about and has been a factor at least in giving him chief responsibility for such activities as hunting. To him falls also the warfare, both offensive and defensive. As the home developed among sedentary peoples, household duties, the preparation of food, and oftentimes the making of clothing and such related tasks as the care of the garden have been allotted to woman, but the older men no longer active have shared these tasks. No one can state that the duties of woman have been easier, for to our modern eyes they often appear as even more onerous than those of man. On the other hand, it is foolish to say that man has deliberately and maliciously taken advantage of the situation to impose on woman. The truth appears to be that the division of labor between the sexes has come about as a practical adjustment to a given situation without any special theory involved. Once established, custom and emotion play their part and a philosophy develops to justify any given practice.

From the moment when the purely physical care of the infant changes into the education of its mind, the boy is trained to be a man, the girl, a woman. To most students it seems that Freud and his followers have grossly overemphasized the sexual but they are probably correct in asserting that our deepest instincts grow out of the most intimate associations of family life. The boy is taught to act as a boy, to play as a boy, to learn the ways of men. How different the training of the girl! Thus there comes to be not only a division more or less accidental of activities but a separation-deliberate and inculcated-of viewpoint and emotional reactions. Nothing is more condemned than the development of traits of the other sex. We want a woman to be womanly, a man, manly. Thus there comes to be a classification of virtues (and vices) almost in terms of sex. Beauty is feminine; bravery, masculine.

The difficulty with such a program lies in our desire to make it both universal and final. Everywhere circumstances arise which compel individuals to assume the responsibilities of the other sex, as during the late war. In such an emergency no one knows how far we may drift from old standards.

The Position of Women in Society

Much more serious, historically speaking, is the fact that such sex distinctions may come to be thought of as higher or lower. It is a curious paradox that Christianity which has always stressed the worth of the individual and which has especially emphasized the virtues which we of to-day would call feminine, started with a distinct bias against sex in general and woman in particular from which it has never wholly escaped. The church fathers give us the impression that Adam would have been both happy and sinless but for Eve. So the Council at Macon in the sixth century learnedly debated the question as to whether or not woman had a soul. The decision was in the affirmative but stated that woman suffered under serious handicaps as compared to man. The comments of the fathers on woman are damagingly coarse and vulgar. Ecclesiasticus states: "Of the women came the beginning of sin and through her all maladies."

This attitude found expression in the canon law which gave woman a position very different from the one she had attained in Roman law. As Langdon-Davies puts it: "Later Roman Law left the woman in a position of great personal and proprietary independence; from the very beginning