When human development began, new paths were open to mother-love--new tasks to maternal energy. The human mother not only nursed and guarded the child, but exercised her dawning ingenuity in adding to its comfort by making things.
The constructive tendency is essentially feminine; the destructive masculine. Male energy tends to scatter and destroy, female to gather and construct. So human labour comes by nature from the woman, was hers entirely for countless ages, while the man could only hunt and fight, or prance and prophesy as "medicine man"; and this is still so in those races which remain savage. Even in so advanced a savage race as the Zulus, the women do the work; and our own country has plenty of similar examples near at hand.
As human civilisation is entirely dependent on progressive industry, while hunting and fighting are faculties we share with the whole carnivora, it is easy to see that during all those ages of savagery the woman was the leader. She represented the higher grade of life; and carried it far enough to bring to birth many of the great arts as well as the humbler ones, especially the invaluable art of language.[1]
[1] See Otis Mason, "Woman's Share in Primitive Culture."
But maternal energy has its limits. What those limits are may be best studied in an ant's nest or a beehive. These marvellous insects, perfected types of industry and of maternity, have succeeded in _organising motherhood_. Most creatures reproduce individually, these collectively--all personal life absolutely lost in the group life. Moved by an instinct coincident with its existence, the new-hatched ant, still weak and wet from the pupa, staggers to the nearest yet unborn to care for it, and cares for it devotedly to the end of life.
One bee group-mother, crawling from cell to cell, lays eggs unnumbered for the common care; the other group-mothers, their own egg-laying capacity in abeyance, labour unceasingly in the interests of those common eggs; and the delicate perfection of provision and service thus attained results in--what? In a marvellous motherhood and a futile fatherhood; the predominant female, the almost negligible male--a temporary fertilising agent merely; in infinite reproduction, and that is all; in more bees, and more ants, more and more for ever, like the sands of the sea. They would cover the earth like a blanket but for merciful appetites of other creatures. But this is only multiplication--not improvement. Nature has one more law to govern life besides self-preservation and reproduction--progress. To be, to re-be, and to be better is the law. It is not enough to keep one's self alive, it is not enough to keep one's kind alive, we must improve. This law of growth, which is the grand underlying one that moves the universe, acts on living species mainly through the male. He is progressive where the female is conservative by nature. He is a variant where she is the race type. This tendency to vary is one of the most beneficent in nature. Through it comes change, and, through change, improvement. The unbridled flow of maternal energy is capable of producing an exquisite apparatus for child-rearing, and no more. The masculine energy is needed also, for the highest evolution.