A young friend of mine, who was educated at one of the very best schools
for girls in New York city, told me that one day her teacher requested the
older girls to write out a list of virtues suitable to manly character,
which they did. A month or more later, when this occurrence was well
forgotten, the same teacher bade them write out a list of womanly virtues,
she making no reference to the other list. Then she made each girl compare
her lists; and they all found with surprise that there was no substantial
difference between them. The only variation, in most cases, was, that they
had put in a rather vague special virtue of "manliness" in the one case,
and "womanliness" in the other; a sort of miscellaneous department or "odd
drawer," apparently, in which to group all traits not easily analyzed.
The moral is that, as tested by the common sense of these young people,
duty is duty, and the difference between ethics for men and ethics for
women lies simply in practical applications, not in principles.
Who can deny that the philosopher Antisthenes was right when he said, "The
virtues of the man and the woman are the same"? Not the Christian,
certainly; for he accepts as his highest standard the being who in all
history best united the highest qualities of both sexes. Not the
metaphysician; for his analysis deals with the human mind as such, not with
the mind of either sex. Not the evolutionist; for he is accustomed to trace
back qualities to their source, and cannot deny that there is in each sex
at least a "survival" of every good and every bad trait. We may say that
these qualities are, or may be, or ought to be, distributed unequally
between the sexes; but we cannot reasonably deny that each sex possesses a
share of every quality, and that what is good in one sex is also good in
the other. Man may be the braver, and yet courage in a woman may be nobler
than cowardice. Woman may be the purer, and yet purity may be noble in a
man.
So clear is this, that some of the very coarsest writers in all literature,
and those who have been severest upon women, have yet been obliged to
acknowledge it. Take, for instance, Dean Swift, who writes:--
"I am ignorant of any one quality that is amiable in a woman, which
is not equally so in a man. I do not except even modesty and
gentleness of nature; nor do I know one vice or folly which is not
equally detestable in both."
Mrs. Jameson, in her delightful "Commonplace Book," illustrates this
admirably by one or two test cases. She takes, for instance, from one of
Humboldt's letters a much-admired passage on manly character:--
"Masculine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first
requisite for the formation of a character of real manly worth. The
man who allows himself to be deceived and carried away by his own
weakness may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot
be called a good man: such beings should not find favor in the eyes
of a woman, for a truly beautiful and purely feminine nature should
be attracted only by what is highest and noblest in the character of
man."
"Take now this same bit of moral philosophy," she says, "and apply it to
the feminine character, and it reads quite as well:--
"'Feminine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first
requisite for the formation of a character of real feminine worth.
The woman who allows herself to be deceived and carried away by her
own weakness may be a very amiable person in other respects, but
cannot be called a good woman; such beings should not find favor in
the eyes of a man, for a truly beautiful and purely manly nature
should be attracted only by what is highest and noblest in the
character of woman.'"
I have never been able to perceive that there was a quality or grace of
character which really belonged exclusively to either sex, or which failed
to win honor when wisely exercised by either. It is not thought necessary
to have separate editions of books on ethical science, the one for man, the
other for woman, like almanacs calculated for different latitudes. The
books that vary are not the scientific works, but little manuals of
practical application,--"Duties of Men," "Duties of Women." These vary with
times and places: where women do not know how to read, no advice on reading
will be found in the women's manuals; where it is held wrong for women to
uncover the face, it will be laid down in these manuals as a sin. But
ethics are ethics: the great principles of morals, as proclaimed either by
science or by religion, do not fluctuate for sex; their basis is in the
very foundations of right itself.
This grows clearer when we remember that it is equally true in mental
science. There is not one logic for men, and another for women; a separate
syllogism, a separate induction: the moment we begin to state intellectual
principles, that moment we go beyond sex. We deal then with absolute truth.
If an observation is wrong, if a process of reasoning is bad, it makes
no difference who brings it forward. Any list of mental processes, any
inventory of the contents of the mind, would be identical, so far as sex
goes, whether compiled by a woman or a man. These things, like the
circulation of the blood or the digestion of food, belong clearly to the
ground held in common. The London "Spectator" well said some time since,--
"After all, knowledge is knowledge; and there is no more a
specifically feminine way of describing correctly the origin of the
Lollard movement, or the character of Spenser's poetry, than there
is a specifically feminine way of solving a quadratic equation, or
of proving the forty-seventh problem of Euclid's first book."
All we can say in modification of this is, that there is, after all, a
foundation for the rather vague item of "manliness" and "womanliness" in
these schoolgirl lists of duties. There is a difference, after all is said
and done; but it is something that eludes analysis, like the differing
perfume of two flowers of the same genus and even of the same species. The
method of thought must be essentially the same in both sexes; and yet an
average woman will put more flavor of something we call instinct into her
mental action, and the average man something more of what we call logic
into his. Whipple tells us that not a man guessed the plot of Dickens's
"Great Expectations," while many women did; and this certainly indicates
some average difference of quality or method. So the average opinions of a
hundred women, on some question of ethics, might very probably differ from
the average of a hundred men, while it yet remains true that "the virtues
of the man and the woman are the same."