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The presence of distinct body-cells is not peculiar to mammals, but there is one respect in which these latter are quite different from non-mammals: A mammalian individual, beginning like a non-mammal with a fertilized egg, has a period of intra-maternal development which a non-mammal has not. Here in a nutshell is the biological basis of sex problem in human society.
For example, women are not better "adapted" to furnishing the intra-maternal environment for the young, since men are not adapted to it at all. It is a case of female specialization. Men being neither specialized nor adapted, to any extent whatever, to this particular activity, any attempt at comparison is obviously fruitless, since one term is always zero.
But the female specialization for furnishing the intra-maternal environment makes her share more burdensome. Hence outcrosses are necessary. To intelligibly consider the sex problem in the human species, then, we must always predicate a considerable group of people, with such organization and division of activities as to guarantee that all the processes necessary to survival will be carried on.
One develops the characteristic male primary and secondary sex characters, the other the female. Throughout the embryonic or intra-maternal stage this differentiation goes on, becoming more and more fixed as it expresses itself in physical structures. Childhood is only a continuation of this development physically separate from the mother after the period of lactation.
Since the specialization to furnish the intra-maternal environment for the young makes the female part of the reproductive process essentially and unavoidably more burdensome than the male, it results that an economical division of the extra-reproductive activities of any group must throw an unequal share upon the males.
If the egg which passes from the ovary to the uterus is not fertilized, it is excreted, the uterus goes through another monthly cycle of preparation for the period of intra-maternal environment, and so on indefinitely until the climacteric. This climacteric or decay of sexuality is a rather critical time, especially in women.
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