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Excerpts from the Staats-Lexikon: "Relations between the Sexes" (1845-1848)

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Thus the entire physical nature of the two sexes does in fact already indicate that they are mutually complementary in accordance with the existing disposition. This nature designates the stronger, bolder, freer man as the creative founder, ruler, provider, and protector of the family and drives him out into outside life for external activity and creation, into the struggle by law and arms, to creative new production, to acquisition and defence. It designates the weaker, more dependent, shyer female as the protégée of the man, consigns her to the quieter house, to pregnancy, birth, feeding, and care, to the physical and humane development and upbringing of children, to the domestic feeding and care of the man and the domestic family, to the preservation of the man’s acquisition, the management of the household, and the preservation of the sacred flames of the domestic hearth.

V. Nature, however, as well as the existing disposition, has also established physical or mental and moral peculiarities of the different sexes that are entirely in accord with the above-mentioned chief physical differences regarding procreation, and with the peculiar direction of the shared life’s tasks described above and sanctified by Christian laws.

The following characteristics are predominant among these intellectual peculiarities or within emotional life:

1) In the man, this more active direction towards the new, free generation of individual life, towards free external creation, founding, and giving, towards freer self-activity; in the woman, by contrast, the more passive direction towards more dependent reception and the preservation and maintenance of the species and the internal, shaping activity to that end. Predominant in the man is the creative spirit, reason, with its separation, reflection, and abstraction, its penetration, creative connections, and new outward creation; in the woman, receptive disposition, emotion easily excited by stimuli, reception through the direct perception of things in their wholeness, and inwardness. When it comes to creative philosophical or poetic power, to deep and thorough science, even the most extraordinary of female writers could not surpass the average ones among men. Burdach (p. 176) says: “While woman moves with ease and skill in life, in art, and sometimes even in science, she lacks independent creative activity, originality, and genius. Religion, too, is in her more the object of emotion than intellectual study. Thus her morality is based more in natural feeling, and with such harmony within herself she also demands a greater concordance between external appearance and her inner being, has a greater liking for form, namely the light, delicate, graceful form. She thus strives for recognition not so much of strength and accomplishment as of kindness, in which the intellectual manifests itself in pleasant forms. The more active virtues befit the man, the more passive ones the woman, as a result of which the relationship between the two sexes expresses itself in the contrast between creation and preservation, acquisitiveness and thrift, moderation and frugality, justice and leniency, firmness and obedience, courage and submission, steadfastness and patience.”

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