Sex and society: studies in the social psychology of sex

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AUTHOR'S NOTE:These studies have been published in various journals at different times. They are reprinted together because there is some demand for them, and they are not easily accessible. In preparing them for publication in the present form, some of them have been expanded and all of them have been revised. While each study is complete in itself, the general thesis running through all of them is the samethat the differences in bodily habit between men and women, particularly the greater strength, restlessness, and motor aptitude of man, and the more stationary condition of woman, have had an important influence on social forms and activities, and on the character and mind of the two sexes.*** TABLE OF CONTENTS: ORGANIC DIFFERENCES IN THE SEXESSEX AND PRIMITIVE SOCIAL CONTROLSEX AND SOCIAL FEELINGSEX AND PRIMITIVE INDUSTRYSEX AND PRIMITIVE MORALITYTHE PSYCHOLOGY OF EXOGAMYTHE PSYCHOLOGY OF MODESTY AND CLOTHINGTHE ADVENTITIOUS CHARACTER OF WOMANTHE MIND OF WOMAN AND THE LOWER RACESINDEX excerpt from ORGANIC DIFFERENCES IN THE SEXES: A grand difference between plant and animal life lies in the fact that the plant is concerned chiefly with storing energy, and the animal with consuming it. The plant by a very slow process converts lifeless into living matter, expending little energy and living at a profit. The animal is unable to change lifeless into living matter, but has developed organs of locomotion, ingestion, and digestion which enable it to prey upon the plant world and upon other animal forms; and in contrast with plant life it lives at a loss of energy. Expressed in biological formula, the habit of the plant is predominantly anabolic, that of the animal predominantly katabolic. Certain biologists, limiting their attention in the main to the lower forms of life, have maintained very plausibly that males are more katabolic than females, and that maleness is the product of influences tending to produce a katabolic habit of body.1 If this assumption is correct, maleness and femaleness are merely a repetition of the contrast existing between the [pg 4] animal and the plant. The katabolic animal form, through its rapid destruction of energy, has been carried developmentally away from the anabolic plant form; and of the two sexes the male has been carried farther than the female from the plant process. The body of morphological, physiological, ethnological, and demographic data which follows becomes coherent, indeed, only on the assumption that woman stands nearer to the plant process than man, representing the constructive as opposed to the disruptive metabolic tendency.