Sex And Personality Studies In Masculinity And Femininity

SEX AND PERSONALITY Studies in Masculinity and Femininity BY LEWIS M. TERMAN AND CATHARINE COX MILES Assisted by JACK W. DUNLAP E. ALICE MCANULTY HAROLD K. EDGERTON QUINN MCNEMAR E. LOWELL KELLY MAUD A. MERRILL ALBERT D. KURTZ FLOYD L. RUCH HORACE G. WYATT FIRST EDITION McGRAW-HILL BOOK COMPANY, INC NEW YORK AND LONDON 1936 PREFACE Sex differences in personality and temperament are matters of universal human interest. Among all classes of people, from the most ignorant to the most cultivated, they provide an inexhausti ble theme for light conversation and humorous comment. They have always been and perhaps always will be one of the chief concerns of novelists, dramatists, and poets. They are rapidly coming to be recognized as one of the central problems in anthro pology, sociology, and psychology. It is well that they should be so recognized for sex differences are more than a perennial stimulus to idle speculation, wit, and literary art. Mass theories in regard to them are one of the most potent of all the forces that operate in the shaping of human societies, from the most primitive to the most modern. In every culture they help to determine the accepted patterns of family life, of education, of industry, and of political organization. Anthropologists have shown that the standard patterns of male and female behavior present every shade and degree of variety, even to the well-nigh complete reversal of the roles commonly prevalent in Occidental society. Sometimes the male and female patterns are virtually nonoverlapping and arbitrarily enforced sometimes they are less differentiated and less rigidly maintained. Nearly always, however, there is a recognized dichotomy which seems to bebased on the tacit assumption that men and women, by the mere fact of their sex, differ more than they resemble, and that the members of either sex considered alone make up a population which, biologically and psychologically, is relatively homogeneous. Many students of human nature, especially the anthropologist, the psychiatrist, and the psychologist, have questioned this assumption. The anthropologist encounters so many varieties of dichotomy with respect to masculine and feminine behavior that it seems impossible to explain them wholly in terms of vi PREFACE biological factors. The psychiatrist in his clinical practice finds a large proportion of his patients among men and women who, because of either their exceptional nature or their exceptional nurture, have had major difficulties in adjusting to the sexual patterns society has assigned to them. The psychologist of individual differences has so often found his results in opposition to popular views with respect to the existence of human types has so often discovered wide variation within and consequent overlapping of alleged types has become so familiar with the possibilities of psychological conditioning to gradations of behavior, that he, too, views with suspicion the categorical explanation of any aspect of human nature in terms of well defined dichotomies. Unfortunately, investigations of masculinity and femininity have been retarded by lack of definiteness with respect to what these terms should connote. Gross departures from even a vaguely defined norm have of course long been recognized, but in the absence of quantitative methods the less extreme deviations are overlooked or misunderstood. The present situation resemblesthat which obtained a few decades ago with respect to mental deficiency or insanity, when, in default of quantitative concepts, the psychiatrist classified his subjects as normal or feeble minded, normal or insane, etc. Thanks largely to Binet and his successors on the one hand, and to modern psychiatry on the other, no competent investigator in abnormal psychology now regards such classifications as adequate or even possible. No more adequate, we believe, is the classification of subjects as normal or invert with respect to masculinity or femininity...