So far as I can make out by experiments on laboratory animals and by
such discreet vivisections as are possible under our laws, there is no
biological necessity for the superior acumen and circumspection of
women. That is to say, it does not lie in any anatomical or
physiological advantage. The essential feminine machine is no better
than the essential masculine machine; both are monuments to the
maladroitness of a much over-praised Creator. Women, it would seem,
actually have smaller brains than men, though perhaps not in proportion
to weight. Their nervous responses, if anything, are a bit duller than
those of men; their muscular coordinations are surely no prompter. One
finds quite as many obvious botches among them; they have as many
bodily blemishes; they are infested by the same microscopic parasites;
their senses are as obtuse; their ears stand out as absurdly. Even
assuming that their special malaises are wholly offset by the effects
of alcoholism in the male, they suffer patently from the same adenoids,
gastritis, cholelithiasis, nephritis, tuberculosis, carcinoma,
arthritis and so on—in short, from the same disturbances of colloidal
equilibrium that produce religion, delusions of grandeur, democracy,
pyaemia, night sweats, the yearning to save humanity, and all other
such distempers in men. They have, at bottom, the same weaknesses and
appetites. They react in substantially the same way to all chemical and
mechanical agents. A dose of hydrocyanic acid, administered _per ora_
to the most sagacious woman imaginable, affects her just as swiftly and
just as deleteriously as it affects a tragedian, a crossing-sweeper, or
an ambassador to the Court of St. James. And once a bottle of Cote
Rotie or Scharlachberger is in her, even the least emotional woman
shows the same complex of sentimentalities that a man shows, and is as
maudlin and idiotic as he is.
Nay; the superior acumen and self-possession of women is not inherent
in any peculiarity of their constitutions, and above all, not in any
advantage of a purely physical character. Its springs are rather to be
sought in a physical disadvantage—that is, in the mechanical
inferiority of their frames, their relative lack of tractive capacity,
their deficiency as brute engines. That deficiency, as every one knows,
is partly a direct heritage from those females of the Pongo pygmaeus
who were their probable fore-runners in the world; the same thing is to
be observed in the females of almost all other species of mammals. But
it is also partly due to the effects of use under civilization, and,
above all, to what evolutionists call sexual selection. In other words,
women were already measurably weaker than men at the dawn of human
history, and that relative weakness has been progressively augmented in
the interval by the conditions of human life. For one thing, the
process of bringing forth young has become so much more exhausting as
refinement has replaced savage sturdiness and callousness, and the care
of them in infancy has become so much more onerous as the growth of
cultural complexity has made education more intricate, that the two
functions now lay vastly heavier burdens upon the strength and
attention of a woman than they lay upon the strength and attention of
any other female. And for another thing, the consequent disability and
need of physical protection, by feeding and inflaming the already large
vanity of man, have caused him to attach a concept of attractiveness to
feminine weakness, so that he has come to esteem his woman, not in
proportion as she is self-sufficient as a social animal but in
proportion as she is dependent. In this vicious circle of influences
women have been caught, and as a result their chief physical character
today is their fragility. A woman cannot lift as much as a man. She
cannot walk as far. She cannot exert as much mechanical energy in any
other way. Even her alleged superior endurance, as Havelock Ellis has
demonstrated in “Man and Woman,” is almost wholly mythical; she cannot,
in point of fact, stand nearly so much hardship as a man can stand, and
so the law, usually an ass, exhibits an unaccustomed accuracy of
observation in its assumption that, whenever husband and wife are
exposed alike to fatal suffering, say in a shipwreck, the wife dies
first.
So far we have been among platitudes. There is less of overt platitude
in the doctrine that it is precisely this physical frailty that has
given women their peculiar nimbleness and effectiveness on the
intellectual side. Nevertheless, it is equally true. What they have
done is what every healthy and elastic organism does in like case; they
have sought compensation for their impotence in one field by employing
their resources in another field to the utmost, and out of that
constant and maximum use has come a marked enlargement of those
resources. On the one hand the sum of them present in a given woman has
been enormously increased by natural selection, so that every woman, so
to speak, inherits a certain extra-masculine mental dexterity as a mere
function of her femaleness. And on the other hand every woman, over and
above this almost unescapable legacy from her actual grandmothers, also
inherits admission to that traditional wisdom which constitutes the
esoteric philosophy of woman as a whole. The virgin at adolescence is
thus in the position of an unusually fortunate apprentice, for she is
not only naturally gifted but also apprenticed to extraordinarily
competent masters. While a boy at the same period is learning from his
elders little more than a few empty technical tricks, a few paltry
vices and a few degrading enthusiasms, his sister is under instruction
in all those higher exercises of the wits that her special deficiencies
make necessary to her security, and in particular in all those
exercises which aim at overcoming the physical, and hence social and
economic superiority of man by attacks upon his inferior capacity for
clear reasoning, uncorrupted by illusion and sentimentality.