comes continually uppermost, and that which was dominant becomes
subservient.

It is possible, that women, after countless ages, during which that smaller
relative development in weight and muscularity which is incident to almost
all females which suckle their young, and that lesser desire for pugilism
inherent in almost all females who bear their young alive, rendered her
lacking in the two qualities which made for individual dominance in her
societies, may yet, in the future, discover that those changes in human
conditions, which have done away with the primary necessity for muscular
force and pugilistic arts, have also inverted her place in the scale of
social values.

It is possible, that the human female, like the Jew, the male of that type
farthest removed from the dominant male type of the past, may in the future
find, that, so far from those qualities which, in an earlier condition,
lessened her social value and power of labour, continuing to do so, they
will increase it. That the delicacy of hand, lightness of structure which
were fatal when the dominant labour of life was to wield a battle-axe or
move a weight, may be no restraint but even an assistance in the
intellectual and more delicate mechanical fields of labour; that the
preponderance of nervous and cerebral over muscular material, and the
tendency towards preservative and creative activity over pugilistic and
destructive, so far from shutting her off from the most important fields of
human toil, may increase her fitness for them! We have no certain proof
that it is so at present; but, if woman's long years of servitude and
physical subjection, and her experience as child-bearer and protector of
infancy, should, in any way, be found in the future to have endowed her, as
a kind of secondary sexual characteristic, with any additional strength of
social instinct, with any exceptional width of human sympathy and any