Taboo and genetics

From the facts briefly stated in the preceding chapters it is quite evident that the general superiority of man over woman or vice versa cannot be proven by biology. Such an idea arises from a careless and unscientific use of language. Superiority is a term which, when used to express the rather exact ideas of biology, is employed in a carefully limited and specific, not in a general, sense. That is, superiority, even if an apparently general idea like survival value is referred to, always implies a given, understood environment where such is not specifically mentioned. Wolves, for example, might be found to possess superior chances for survival over foxes, beaver or partridges in a given environment. A biologist would probably use more exact and less ambiguous terms to express such a fact, and say that wolves were the best adapted to the given surroundings. If all these animals continued to live side by side in the given environment, they could be compared only as to specific details—size, strength, cunning, fleetness in running, swimming or flying, concealment from enemies, etc. Then the biologist would probably make his meaning perfectly clear by stating that one is specialized in one direction or another.

Especially is general superiority a vague idea when the things compared are different but mutually necessary or complementary. If their functions overlap to some extent (i.e., if certain acts can be performed by either), we may say that one is better adapted to a certain activity than the other. Thus it may be that women are generally better adapted to caring for young children than are men, or that men are on the whole better adapted to riveting boiler plates, erecting skyscrapers, or sailing ships. Where their activities do not overlap at all, even the word adaptation hardly applies. For example, women are not better "adapted" to furnishing the intra-maternal environment for the young, since men are not adapted to it at all. It is a case of female specialization.

Men being neither specialized nor adapted, to any extent whatever, to this particular activity, any attempt at comparison is obviously fruitless, since one term is always zero. This specialization, absolutely necessary to the survival of human groups, is either present or it is absent in a given individual. Any attempt to formulate a general proposition about superiority either attaches purely arbitrary values to different kinds of activity or is absurd from the standpoint of the most elementary logic.

From the standpoint of biology, reproduction is not an individual but a group problem, however many problems of detail it may give rise to in individual lives. Sex involves the division of the reproductive process, without the exercise of which any human group would perish very shortly, into two complementary, mutually necessary but unequal parts. (This statement applies only to the reproductive process, as obviously the male and female gametes contribute equally to the formation of the new individual). Neither part (the male or the female) of this process is more necessary than the other, both being absolutely necessary. But the female specialization for furnishing the intra-maternal environment makes her share more burdensome.

Biologically considered, not even two individuals (male and female), together with their offspring, can be more than an arbitrary "unit" as concerns sex, since inbreeding eventually impoverishes the stock. Hence outcrosses are necessary. To intelligibly consider the sex problem in the human species, then, we must always predicate a considerable group of people, with such organization and division of activities as to guarantee that all the processes necessary to survival will be carried on. Sex is a group problem. Considering the mutual interdependence and the diversity of activities in human society, to make the generalization that one sex is superior to the other is on a par with saying that roots and branches are superior to trunks and leaves. It is sheer foolishness. Yet oceans of ink have flowed in attempts to establish one or the other of two equally absurd propositions.

Since the specialization to furnish the intra-maternal environment for the young makes the female part of the reproductive process essentially and unavoidably more burdensome than the male, it results that an economical division of the extra-reproductive activities of any group must throw an unequal share upon the males. This specialization to carry the young during the embryonic period is thus at the base of the division of labour between the sexes. It is the chief factor involved in the problems of sex, and gives rise, directly or indirectly, to most of the others.

But the sex problem as a whole is one of adaptation as well as of specialization. An incident of the female specialization is a type of body on the average smaller, weaker and less well adapted to some other activities than is the male body, even when reproduction is not undertaken. A great complication is added by the fact that some women, and also some men, are better adapted than others to nonreproductive activities. This is another way of saying that the type of body associated with either type of sex glands varies a good deal, for reasons and in respects already pointed out.

The most important fact about this reproductive specialization is that beyond fertilization it is exclusive in the female. Since the males cannot furnish the intra-parental environment for the young, the entire burden must fall on half the group. If this aggregation is to even hold its own numerically, its women must have, on an average, two children each, plus about one more for unavoidable waste—death in infancy or childhood, sterility, obvious unfitness for reproduction, etc., i.e., three in all. If one woman has less than her three children, then another must have more than three, or the group number will decrease. Group survival is the fundamental postulate in a problem of this kind.

The above figure is for civilized society. In primitive groups, the terrific wastage makes a much higher birth-rate necessary, several times as high in many cases. If we suppose such a group, where child mortality, lack of sanitation, etc., necessitates an average of eight children per woman (instead of three), the biological origin of the division of labour between the sexes is much more clearly seen than it is in civilized societies.

If men are better hunters or fighters than women, the latter could nevertheless hunt and fight—it is a question of superior or inferior adaptation to particular activities. But it is more than that. Only the women are biologically specialized to the chief reproductive burden (intra-parental environment and lactation). If half the women should withdraw from child-bearing, the remainder would be obliged to average sixteen apiece. But even this is not all. Unfortunately, the half of the women who would be found best adapted to hunting and fighting would be the more vigorous half. The new generation would thus be born from the leftovers, and would be poor quality. Such a division of labour within a group would be fatally foolish and entirely uncalled for—since there are plenty of men adapted to hunting and fighting, but entirely unspecialized to child-bearing and nursing.

Group survival being the fundamental thing, the group is obliged to develop a division of labour which directs the activities of the individuals composing it to providing for its necessities, regardless of any interference with their own desires. That is, if group survival requires that woman use her specialization to child-bearing instead of any adaptation she may possess in other directions, one of two things inevitably result: (1) Either the group finds or evolves some social control machinery which meets the necessity, or (2) it must give way to some other group which can do so. In either case, the result is a division of labour, which we see more clearly in primitive peoples. The less efficient group is not necessarily exterminated, but if it loses out in the competition until some other group is able to conquer it and impose its division of labour the result is of course the extinction of the conquered group as an integral part of society. This is simply natural selection working on groups. Natural selection works chiefly in this manner on the human species, because that species lives in groups. Such group control of the component individuals as has been described has led to a division of labour between the sexes in every primitive society. All this means is that the group adopting such a division has greater survival value, and hence is more likely to be represented in later ages.

It must not be supposed that such systems of control were always logically thought out or deliberately planned. Even animals which live in herds or colonies have divisions of labour.

Through an infinite slaughter of the least fit, such groups arrive at some kind of instinctive adjustment to produce and protect the young. The crudest human intelligence must have eliminated much of the waste involved, by comprehending obvious cause-and-effect relations which animals have to arrive at through trial and error methods.

For example, an intelligence capable of employing artificial weapons is also able to see that the wielder of these for group defence cannot be encumbered with baggage or children when the group is in movement. Hence women became the burden bearers, and took care of the children, even after the nursing period. War parties could not generally be mixed, for the obvious reasons that such women as did not have young children would be pregnant a good deal of the time, or likely to become so. Moreover, a hunter and fighter must not have his courage, ferocity and physical initiative undermined by unsuitable employments and associations.

In a semi-settled group, the hunter and warrior cannot be relied upon to keep hearth-fires burning or tend crops, even though he may occasionally have time for such activities. These duties are therefore relegated to the women, whose child-bearing functions impose upon them a more sedentary existence. Women must reproduce practically up to their full capacity to fill up the gaps made by war, accident and disease as well as death from old age. To this biological service which they alone can perform are added those which lie nearest it and interfere least with carrying it out.

We must therefore keep in view all the activities of any group in which the sex problem is being studied. There is a certain tendency to disregard the female specialization to child-bearing, and to regard the sex question as one merely of adaptation to extra-biological services. In every group which has survived, some machinery—a "crust of custom," reinforced by more arbitrary laws or regulations—has sought to guarantee reproduction by keeping women out of lines of endeavour which might endanger that fundamental group necessity. Primitive societies which got stabilized within a given territory and found their birth-rate dangerously high could always keep it down by exposing or destroying some of the unfit children, or a certain per cent of the female children, or both.

In primitive groups, the individual was practically nil. But modern civilized society is able to survive without the rigid control of individual activities which the old economy entailed. Man comes to choose more and more for himself individually instead of for the group, uniformity weakens and individualism becomes more pronounced. As control of environment becomes more complete and easy, natural selection grows harder to detect. We turn our interests and activities toward the search for what we want and take survival largely for granted—something the savage cannot do. Natural selection becomes unreal to us, because the things we do to survive are so intricately mixed up with those we do for other reasons. Natural selection in gregarious animals operates upon groups rather than upon individuals. Arrangement of these groups is often very intricate. Some have territorial boundaries and some have not. Often they overlap, identical individuals belonging to several. Hence it is not strange that natural selection phenomena often escape attention.

But this must not lead us to suppose that natural selection is wholly inoperative in civilized society. We see some nations outbreeding others, or dominating them through superior organization. Within nations, some racial and religious groups outbreed others and thus gradually supplant them—for the future is to those who furnish its populations.

From the discussion in the preceding chapter, it becomes apparent that for the half of the female element in a savage society possessing the most vigor and initiative to turn away from reproduction would in the long run be fatal to the group. Yet this is what occurs in large measure in modern civilized society. Reproduction is a biological function. It is non-competitive, as far as the individual is concerned, and offers no material rewards. The breakdown of the group's control over the detailed conduct and behaviour of its members is accompanied by an increasing stress upon material rewards to individuals. So with growing individualism, in the half of the race which can both bear children and compete in the social activities offering rewards, i.e., the women who are specialized to the former and adapted to the latter, there is a growing tendency among the most successful, individualized strains, to choose the social and eschew the biological functions.

Racial degeneration is the result. Recorded history is one succession of barbarous races, under strong, primitive breeding conditions, swamping their more civilized, individualized neighbours, adopting the dysgenic ways of civilization and then being swamped in their turn by barbarians. This is especially pronounced in our own times because popularized biological and medical knowledge makes it possible for a tremendous class of the most successful and enlightened to avoid reproduction without foregoing sex activity.

In primitive groups, a "moral" control which kept all women at reproduction was neither eugenic nor dysgenic unless accompanied by systematic destruction of the least fit children. By "moral" control is meant the use of taboo, prejudice, religious abhorrence for certain acts and the like. The carefully nurtured moral ideas about sex and reproduction simply represent the system of coercion which groups have found most effective in enforcing the division of reproductive and other activities among the individual members. When this social machinery grew up, to regulate sexual activity was in general to regulate reproduction. The natural sex desire proved sufficiently powerful and general to still seek its object, even with the group handicaps and regulations imposed to meet the reproductive necessity. But contraceptive knowledge, etc., has now become so general that to regulate sex activity is no longer to regulate reproduction. The taboo or "moral" method of regulation has become peculiarly degenerating to race quality, because the most intelligent, rationalized individuals are least affected by it.

There is no turning back to control by ignorance. Even theoretically, the only way to stop such a disastrous selection of the unfit would be to rationalize reproduction—so that nobody shall reproduce the species through sheer ignorance of how to evade or avoid it. This done, some type of social control must be found which will enable civilized societies to breed from their best instead of their worst stock. Under the old scheme, already half broken down, natural selection favours primitive rather than civilized societies through decreased birth-rates and survival of the unfit in the latter. Even this is true only where the savage groups are not interfered with by the civilized, a condition rapidly disappearing through modern occidental imperialism and the inoculation of primitive peoples with "civilized" diseases such as syphilis, rum-drinking and rampant individualism.

To continually encourage the racially most desirable women to disregard their sexual specialization and exploit their social-competitive adaptation must, obviously destroy the group which pursues such a policy. The only way to make such a course democratic is to carefully instruct all women, rich and poor, wise and ignorant, in the methods of avoiding reproduction and to inject the virus of individualism in all alike. Then the group can get its population supply only by a new system of control. To remove any economic handicaps to child-bearing is certainly not out of harmony with our ideas of justice.

In removing the economic handicaps at present connected with the reproductive function in women, care must also be taken that the very measures which insure this do not themselves become dysgenic influences. Such schemes as maternity insurance, pensions for mothers, and most of the propositions along this line, may offer an inducement to women of the poorer classes to assume the burdens connected with their specialization for child-bearing. But their more fortunate sisters, who find themselves so well adapted to modern conditions that they are even moderately successful in the competition for material rewards, will hardly find recompense thus for turning from their social to their biological functions. To these highly individualized modern women must be presented more cogent reasons for taking upon themselves the burden of reproducing the group.

It is obvious that from just this energetic female stock we should obtain a large part of the next generation if we are at all concerned over the welfare of the group and its chances of survival. One suggestion is that we may be able to turn their very individualism to account and use it as a potent factor in the social control of their reproductive activities. If we can demonstrate on the basis of sound biological data that the bearing of children is necessary for the full and complete development of the individual woman, physically and mentally, we shall have gone a long way toward securing voluntary motherhood. Only such argument will induce the highly individualized, who may also be the most vital, woman to turn of her own accord from competitive social activities to the performance of the biological function for which she is specialized. This is especially true, as has been intimated above, since contraceptive knowledge now permits the exercise of sexual functions without the natural consequences, and the avoidance of motherhood no longer involves the denial of expression to the sexual urge.

Even if we are able to utilize this method of control, it will not obtain the requisite number of offspring to maintain the eugenic quality of the group, since the bearing of one or two children would be all that individual development would require. If the group must have on the average three children from each of its women in order to replace itself, the larger part of the reproductive activities will still be confined to the more ignorant, or if they also make use of contraceptive knowledge, the group will simply die out from the effects of its own democratic enlightenment. Thus it becomes apparent that we must find some more potent force than this narrow form of self-interest to accomplish the social purposes of reproduction. When reproduction is generally understood to be as thoroughly a matter of group survival as for example the defensive side in a war of extermination, the same sentiment of group loyalty which now takes such forms as patriotism can be appealed to. If the human race is unsocial it will perish anyway. If it has not become unsocial—and it does not display any such tendency, but only the use of such impulses in mistaken directions—then a group necessity like reproduction can be met. Whatever is required of the individual will become "moral" and "patriotic"—i.e., it will be wreathed in the imperishable sentiments which group themselves around socially necessary and hence socially approved acts everywhere and always.

In whatever races finally survive, the women of good stock as well as poor—perhaps eventually the good even more than the poor—will reproduce themselves. Because of our ideals of individual liberty, this may not be achieved by taboo, ignorance or conscription for motherhood. But when it is found to be the personal interest to bear children, both as a means of complete physical and mental development and as a way of winning social approval and esteem, it will become as imperative for woman to fulfil the biological function to which she is specialized as it was under the old system of moral and taboo control. The increasing emphasis on the necessity of motherhood for the maintenance of a normal, health personality, and the growing tendency to look upon this function as the greatest service which woman can render to society, are manifest signs that this time is approaching. There is little doubt that woman will be as amenable to these newer and more rationalized mores as human nature has always been to the irrationally formed customs and traditions of the past.

To ignore the female specialization involved in furnishing the intramaternal environment for three children, on an average, to the group, is simply foolish. If undertaken at maturity—say from twenty-two to twenty-five years of age—and a two-year interval left between the three in the interest of both mother and children, it puts woman in an entirely different relation toward extra-reproductive activities than man. It does imply a division of labour.

In general, it would seem socially expedient to encourage each woman to have her own three children, instead of shifting the burden upon the shoulders of some other. If such activities of nursing and caring for the very young can be pooled, so much the better. Doubtless some women who find them distasteful would be much more useful to society at other work. But let us not disregard fundamentals. It is obviously advantageous for children of normal, able parents to be cared for in the home environment. In a biologically healthy society the presumption must be that the average woman has some three children of her own. Since this obviously includes nurses and governesses, we see at once the futility of the oft-proposed class solution of hiring single women to care for the children of the fortunate. If such a servant is undesirable, she is not hired; if normal, in a biologically healthy society she would have her own children.

The female handicap incident to reproduction may be illustrated by the case of Hambletonian 10 mentioned in Chapter II. We saw that a female could not have borne the hundredth part of his colts. This simply means that the effort or individual cost of impressing his characters upon the new generation is less than one one-hundredth that required of a female.

Among domestic animals this is made use of to multiply the better males to the exclusion of the others, a valuable biological expedient which we are denied in human groups because it would upset all our social institutions. So we do the next best thing and make the males do more than half in the extra-biological activities of society, since they are by their structure prevented from having an equal share in the reproductive burden. This is an absolutely necessary equation, and there will always be some sort of division of labour on the basis of it.

Since reproduction is a group, not an individual, necessity, whatever economic burden it entails must eventually be assumed by society and divided up among the individuals, like the cost of war or any other group activity. Ideally, then, from the standpoint of democracy, every individual, male or female, should bear his share as a matter of course. This attitude toward reproduction, as an individual duty but a group economic burden, would lead to the solution of most of the problems involved. Negative eugenics should be an immediate assumption—if the state must pay for offspring, the quality will immediately begin to be considered. A poor race-contribution, not worth paying for, would certainly be prevented as far as possible.

Some well-meaning radical writers mistakenly suppose that the emancipation of women means the withdrawal by the group of any interest in, or any attempt to regulate, such things as the hours and conditions of female labour. That would simply imply that the group takes no interest in reproduction—in its own survival. For if the group does not make some equation for the greater burden of reproduction upon women, the inevitable result will be that that particular service will not be rendered by those most desirable to be preserved.

Given the fundamental assumption that the group is to survive—to be perpetuated by the one possible means—if it withdraws all solicitude about the handicap this entails to women as a whole, introducing a spirit of laissez-faire competition between men and women, the women with sense enough to see the point will not encumber themselves with children. For each one of these who has no children, some other woman must have six instead of three. And some people encourage this in the name of democracy!

The most involved problems must inevitably centre around the women who, to quote Mrs. Hollingworth, "vary from the mode," but are yet functional for sex. Some have no sex desires at all, some no craving for or attachment to children, some neither of these. It is a question still to be solved whether some of them ought, in the interest of the race, to be encouraged to reproduce themselves. In less individualized primitive society, seclusion, taboo and ignorance coerced them into reproduction. Any type of control involving the inculcation of "moral" ideas is open to the objection that it may work on those who should not reproduce themselves as well as those who should.

In a sense, this problem will tend to solve itself. With the substitution of the more rationalized standards of self-interest and group loyalty for the irrational taboo control of reproductive activities, there will be as much freedom for women to choose whether they will accept maternity as there is now, in the period of transition from the old standards to the new. The chief difference will be that many of the artificial forces which are acting as barriers to motherhood at the present time—as for example the economic handicap involved—will be removed, and woman's choice will therefore be more entirely in harmony with her native instinctive tendencies. Thus those women endowed with the most impelling desire for children will, as a rule, have the largest number. In all probability their offspring will inherit the same strong parental instinct. The stocks more poorly endowed with this impulse will tend to die out by the very lack of any tendency to self-perpetuation. It is only logical to conclude, therefore, that as we set up the new forces of social control outlined in this chapter, we are at the same time providing more scope for natural selection, and that the problem of aberrant types consequently becomes only a transitory one.

THE INSTITUTIONALIZED SEX TABOO

BY

IVA LOWTHER PETERS, PH.D.

A study of the elaborate, standardized, and authoritative systems of social control found among all primitive peoples gives a vivid impression of the difficulty of the task of compelling man to die to himself, that is, to become a socius. The rigors and rituals of initiation ceremonies at adolescence impressed the duties of sociality at that impressionable period. The individual who refused to bow his head to the social yoke became a vagabond, an outcast, an excommunicate. In view of the fierceness of the struggle for food and the attitude toward the stranger among all primitives, the outcast's life chances were unenviable. It was preferable to adapt one's self to the social order. "Bad" traits were the more easily suppressed in return for the re-enforcement of power which was the striking feature of group life; power over enemies, power over nature, and a re-enforcement of the emotional life of the individual which became the basis on which were built up the magico-religious ceremonies of institutionalized religion.