Judging the respective characteristics of the sexes by their widely-differing rôles in the most important of their co-operative living functions, the parental one--the sole function wherein the sexes of lower organisation co-operate, indeed--the respective attributes of Dominance and Recessiveness manifest clearly in these. The province of the male being to fight for mate and young, providing food, defending life--in order to fit him for this struggle for racial survival, his traits of strength and stature remain long paramount, alike in development and function, over those of the female, as regards his own organisation and that of his offspring, both male and female. The province of the female being to surrender her powers to the nurture of offspring before birth, and, after birth, mildly to suckle and to tend its helplessness, Nature equips her to these ends; inhibiting, or negativing, strength and fierceness in her by the traits of Recessiveness.
Tigress or savage woman, her struggle with the rough conditions of primal existence is only less fierce and less strenuous than her mate's. It demands the positive male-qualities (which manifest first in stature, strength and pugnacity) only less in degree than does his, therefore. The negative female qualities which, manifesting first in passivity and surrender, detract from her fierceness and activity, would have made for extinction of species had they not been defended by those of her fighting mate, as too by the male-traits she herself had inherited from her fighting father. They could only evolve, accordingly, precisely in proportion as they were sheltered behind the male dominant powers. The tiger shelters his tigress only during her maternal phases, however. Her cubs brought forth, suckled, reared, and thrust into the jungle to fend for themselves, she must fight her own battles for food and existence. And her brief maternal phases being all too short for more than the scantest development of female traits--which derive their fullest impulse in their exercise as mother-traits--she remains a tigress merely, and produces tiger offspring merely, because only tigerishness secures survival in her domain of life and attribute.