males are as a rule larger and stronger, more
varied in structure, and more highly ornamented and adorned than the
females. And when we rise to the human species these sex differences
persist and are even emphasised, though finding their expression in a
greater number of less strongly marked characters, not on the physical
side alone, but on the mental and psychical. It is difficult to divest
the mind of facts with which it is most familiar. Thus it is easy to
understand the widely-held opinion of the superiority of the male half
of life, and that the female is the sex sacrificed to the reproductive
process.

Now, were this true, the question of woman's place in life would
indeed be settled. There can be no upward change which is not in
accord with the laws of Nature. If the female really started and had
always remained secondary to the male, necessary to continue life, but
otherwise unimportant, in such position she must be content to stay.
Her struggles for advancement may be heroic, yet would they be doomed
to failure, for no individual growth can persist which injures the
growth of the race-life. Well it is for women that there need be no
such fear, even among the most timid-hearted; woman's position and
advancement is sure because it is founded with deepest roots in the
organic scheme of life.

As once more we search backwards, tracing the differences of sex
function to their earliest appearance in the humblest types of life,
we find the exact opposite of this theory of the inferiority of the
female to be true. The female is of more importance than the male from
Nature's point of view. We have seen that life must be regarded as
essentially female, since there is no choice but to look upon asexual
reproduction as a female process; the single-cell being the
mother-cell with the fertilising element of the father or male-cell
wanting. We know further that a similar process, but much more highly
developed, is possible in what is called parthenogenesis, or
virgin-birth, which can only be explained as a survival of the early
form. For long life continued without the assistance of the male-cell,
which, when it did arise, was dependent on the ova, or female-cell,
and was driven by hunger to unite with it in fatigue to continue life.
We are thus forced to regard the male-cell as an auxiliary development
of the female, or as Lester Ward ingenuously puts it, "an
after-thought of Nature devised for the advantage of having a