Are women more submissive (in all ways, including sexuality), are they more dependent, are they more likely to ‘cling’, are they more likely to ask for help when facing a problem, than men? Do women require more social approval, do they prefer to work with others, rather than working independently, than do men? Do women withdraw from attacks (rather than counter-attacking) more often than men? In a word, are women more passive than men? Helene Deutsch, whose book The Psychology of Women has had a considerable influence on people’s attitudes to women, believes that they are. In 1944 she wrote, ‘The theory I have long supported -according to which femininity is largely associated with passivity and masochism – has been confirmed in the course of years by clinical experience … I venture to say that the fundamental identities “feminine passive” and “masculine active” assert themselves in all known authorities and races.’ Many people would still agree with her.
It is of considerable importance to both men and women to know the truth of this assertion. The evidence is that if women are passive it is because of learned behaviour, judged by society as appropriate for females, rather than due to any innate psychological feminine characteristic. In studies of infants, pre-school children, and schoolchildren, no more passivity has been found in girls than in boys, except in one area. This is that small boys engage in more rough-and-tumble play than do small girls.
It is also true that boys are more aggressive then are girls. By aggression I mean the desire of a person to frighten or to hurt another person, either for its own sake or to control and dominate others. Aggression can take several forms, some of which are not generally perceived as being aggression. Direct aggression, by hostile attacks on others, is obvious. Indirect aggression is less obvious and far more insidious and sophisticated. In this type of aggression the person gets what he or she wants by subtle means -by flattery or bribery or by deception.
Scientists who study animal behaviour have established that aggressive behaviour characterizes males rather than females in most species of mammals. In small mammals, such as rats and mice, and in sheep, the aggressive behaviour is dependent upon the effects of the male sex hormone, testosterone, imprinting on the brain cells, in the period before and just after birth, a receptiveness to specific behaviour. If a newborn male mouse or rat is castrated on the day of birth, its aggressive behaviour, when adult, is markedly reduced, but such behaviour can be restored by injections of testosterone. However, extra injections given to an uncastrated adult male rat do not increase its aggression. This implies that, in rats, testosterone given in the critical period before and just after birth imprints on brain cells a responsiveness to a pattern of behaviour and facilitates its expression in later life; but when given later after birth, the hormone does not increase aggressive behaviour.
Similar findings were obtained from studies on rhesus monkeys. Such studies are important, as monkeys and man are much closer in the evolutionary ladder. In one experiment, female rhesus foetuses were given injections of testosterone. After birth, their behaviour was indistinguishable from that of normal male monkeys, who are more active and play more mock threatening, chasing, and rough-and-tumble games than female young monkeys. In another experiment, male monkeys castrated at birth continued to show male patterns of behaviour in childhood, although they produced very little male sex hormone. These experiments suggest that, in monkeys, pre-natal brain hormonal conditioning is crucial to sex-linked behaviour in the animal’s childhood.
It would be unethical to conduct such experiments on humans, so that the relative importance of pre-natal brain imprinting is difficult to determine. By chance, an opportunity to unravel to what degree the sexual differences in behaviour in humans are due to pre-natal hormones occurred in a rather unfortunate way.
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