On the moral side, as Professor Thomas has so admirably pointed out,[15] women have evolved a morality of the person and of the family, while men have evolved a morality of the group and of property.  Since men have had a monopoly of property and of law-making they have shaped laws mainly for the protection of property, and in a secondary degree for the protection of the person.  Under these laws a man who beats another nearly to death is less severely punished than one who signs the wrong name to a check for five dollars.  Man’s katabolic nature and his greater freedom have given him almost a monopoly of crime under these laws which he has made.  Offences against the coming generation, against health, social efficiency and good taste have until recently been left to the tribunal of public opinion as expressed in social usage; and here, as we have seen, women are generally the judges and executioners.  In this, her own field of moral judgment, woman is idealistic and uncompromising.  If one of her sisters falls from virtue she will often pursue her unmercifully.  If a man, on the other hand, commits a burglary or forgery her sympathy and mercy may make her a very lenient judge.

[15] WILLIAM I. THOMAS, Sex and Society, p. 149.  University of Chicago Press, 1907.  ELLEN KEY, in Love and Marriage, G.P.  Putnam’s Sons, 1911, traces the same lines of growth.

In aesthetics, the differences follow the same general law.  Women express beauty in themselves; jewels are for their ornament; and rooms are furnished as a setting for themselves.  The lives of millions of workers go to the adornment of women.  In painting they sometimes excel, but a Madame Le Brun does her best work when she paints herself and her child, and when Angelica Kauffmann would paint a vestal virgin, she drapes a veil over her own head and transfers her features to the canvas.  Sculpture and architecture are too impersonal and abstract to attract much attention from women at present.  Even a sculptor like Mrs. Bessie Potter Vonnoh finds her truest theme in statuettes of mothers with their children about them.

During the past few years psychologists have paid great attention to secondary sex characteristics of the mind, and doubtless many qualities of the thought and feeling of men and women owe their origin to the same source as brilliant plumage, antlers, combs and wattles.  Thus the shy, retiring, reticent, self-effacing, languishing, adoring excesses of maidenhood and the peculiar psychological manifestations of the late forties must probably be understood from this point of view.  So, also, must the bold, swaggering, assertive, compelling bearing of youth be interpreted.  The shy or modish, dandified, lackadaisical cane-carrying youth is naturally disliked as a sexual perversion.

Women alone, whether individually or in groups, tend to develop certain hard, dry, arid qualities of mind and heart, or they become emotional and unbalanced.  Losing a sense of large significances, they become overcareful, saving, sometimes penurious, while in matters of feeling they lavish sentiment and sympathy on unimportant pets and movements.