Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/33

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Racial Betterment
27

nate the protective attitude, are the races which have developed civilization, and which must continue to dominate the world unless civilization is to be abandoned, and the human race plunged downward into bestial degeneracy.

Stature, therefore, except in so far as it may be involved indirectly in some of the factors which I shall yet consider, is not and cannot be a mark of female beauty in a civilized race. On the other hand, by this very fact, the preference for a partner whom he can dominate is allowed full sway in the male. The woman would have the same preference, as I pointed out a moment ago, were it not checked by other factors.

I may digress for a moment, to remind you that in a family one person must control. This is not a theory, but an empirical fact against which argument is futile. Economic conditions which are as yet but dreamed of, especially those conditions which result from the greater and greater use of machinery, may in future change this; but it was the law of the primitive family, and even yet we have not reached a stage of civilization in which a joint legislative authority is possible. In the past it has been, the male who has controlled, but that may be changed in the future. It is true that Bachofen and others have tried to establish the doctrine of the matriarchiate (the rule of women) as the primitive family system, but the confusion