were to be at the cost of a physical beating. It was all very puzzling, and led to a great deal of wondering.
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As an only child, and rather lonely, I felt uncomfortable, even unwelcome, an intruder in the family, as if I were living in a strange country in which people behaved in inexplicably bizarre ways and had no understanding of children whatever. It was clear to me, from their behavior toward children, that adults could never themselves have been children. And yet they often said things like, ''When I was a boy . ." And then there were photographs of them as children. So something must have occurred between the time when they were childrenif they ever wereand the time they became adults, to cause them to forget what it was like to be a child.
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And so I became deeply interested in discovering how adults came to be the way they were. It seemed to me a topsy-turvy world, in which children, given the chance, could certainly make better parents than adults, and where women, being so much kinder than men, ought to have been treated more humanely, and given more power in defense of children.
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Books offered an answer. A prize book set me off in the right direction. By the time I was fourteen I had read books on anatomy, physiology, neurology, and psychology, but it was not until I had gone to university in 1922, at age seventeen, that I came upon Havelock Ellis's
Man and Woman: A Study of Human Secondary Sexual Characters
that I began to discover the clues for which I had been searching. The book was first published in 1894. It was probably the fifth revised edition issued in 1914 that I read. My major reading at this time was biology, cultural and physical anthropology, logic, philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis. The work of Ellis and Freud gave me a compass to steer by; as a result I was able to find my way into all sorts of fascinating subjects in which I read widely.
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In 1924-25 I wrote a little book, in which I set out my ideas on the nature of the sexes, showing that the traditionally accepted views concerning that subject were quite unsound, and that, in fact, the differences, significant as they were, were much less than was generally believed. I entitled the book
Androgyne: Or the Future of the Sexes,
and sent it to C. K. Ogden, the editor of
The Today and Tomorrow
series, of which T. S. Eliot wrote, "We are able to peer into the future by means of that brilliant series [which] will constitute a precious document upon the present time." Alas, Ogden returned my
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