3.8.3 Environment As A Factor

This has been an extremely difficult question to answer, because of the difficulty encountered in trying to eliminate the influence of environment and training. Boys are what they are because of their original nature plus their surroundings.

Some would claim that if we could give boys and girls the same surroundings, the same social requirements, the same treatment from babyhood, there would be no difference in the resulting natures.

Training undoubtedly accentuates inborn sex differences, and it is true that a reversal of training does lessen this difference; however, the weight of opinion at present is that differences in intellect and character do exist because of differences of sex, but that these have been unduly magnified. H.B. Thompson, in her investigation entitled The Mental Traits of Sex, finds that ‘Motor ability in most of its forms is better developed in men than in women.

In strength, rapidity of movement, and rate of fatigue, they have a very decided advantage, and in precision of movement a slight advantage…. The thresholds are on the whole lower in women, discriminative sensibility is on the whole better in men…. All these differences, however, are slight.

As for the intellectual faculties, women are decidedly superior to men in memory, and possibly more rapid in associative thinking. Men are probably superior in ingenuity…. The data on the life of feeling indicate that there is little, if any, sexual difference in the degree of domination by emotion, and that social consciousness is more prominent in men, and religious consciousness in women.’

“Pearson, in his measurement of traits, not by objective tests but by opinions of people who know the individual, finds that boys are more athletic, noisy, self-assertive, self-conscious; less popular, duller in conscience, quicker-tempered, less sullen, a little duller intellectually and less efficient in penmanship. Heymans and Wiersma, following the same general method as Pearson, state as their general conclusions that the female is more active, more emotional, and more unselfish than the male.

‘They consider women to be more impulsive, less efficient intellectually, and more fickle than men as a result of the first two differences mentioned above; to be gifted in music, acting, conversation and the invention of stories, as a result in part of the second difference; and to think well of people and to be easily reconciled to them as a result of the third.’

Thorndike finds the chief differences to be that the female varies less from the average standard, is more observant of small visual details, less often color-blind, less interested in things and their mechanisms, more interested in people and their feelings, less given to pursuing, capturing and maltreating living things, and more given to nursing, comforting and relieving them than is the male.

H. Ellis considers the chief differences to be the less tendency to variability, the greater affectability, and the greater primitiveness of the female mind, and the less ability shown by women in dealing with the more remote and abstract interests in life.

All the authors emphasize the smallness of the differences; and after all the striking thing is not the differences between the sexes, but the great difference within the same sex in respect to every mental trait tested.

The difference of man from man, and woman from woman, in any trait is almost as great as the differences between the sexes in that trait. Sex can be the cause, then, of only a fraction of the difference between the original nature of individuals.”

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