Madame de Krüdener writes in a letter to Bernardin de St. Pierre: “Je
voulais être sentie.” These laconic words of this wise pietist give us
an insight into the significance of emotional life of woman. Man wants
to be understood, woman felt. With this emotion she spoils much that man
might do because of his sense of justice. Indeed, a number of qualities
which the woman uses to make herself noted are bound up with her
emotional life, more or less. Compassion, self-sacrifice, religion,
superstition,--all these depend on the highly developed, almost diseased
formation of her emotional life. Feminine charity, feminine activity as
a nurse, feminine petitions for the pardon of criminals, infinite other
samples of women’s kindly dispositions must convince us that these
activities are an integral part of their emotional life, and that women
perform them only, perhaps, in a kind of dark perception of their own
helplessness. On the one side an unconscious egoism impels them to the
defence of those who find themselves in a _similar_ condition; on the
other side, it is a feminine characteristic to apply anything she is to
judge to herself first, and then to make her choice. That she does this,
rests on the eminent overweight of emotion. So Schopenhauer says: “Women
are very sympathetic, but they are behind man in all matters of justice,
probity, and scrupulous conscientiousness. Injustice is the fundamental
feminine defect.”[278] Schopenhauer should have added, “because they are
too sympathetic, because emotion takes up so much place in their minds
that they have not enough left for justice.” According to Proudhon, “The
conscience of woman is as much weaker than man’s as her intelligence is
smaller. Her morality is of a different sort, her ideas of right and
wrong are different, being always on this or that side of justice, and
never requiring any equivalence between rights and duties which are such
a painful necessity to man.” Spencer says,[279] briefly, that the
feminine mind shows a definite lack with regard to the sense of justice.
These assertions show that women are deficient in justice, but do not
show why. The deficiency is to be explained only in the superabundance
of emotional life. This superabundance clarifies a number of facts of
their daily routine. We have, of course, to make a distinction between
the feeling of a gentlewoman, of a peasant woman, and of the innumerable
grades between the two, but this distinction is not essential. Both
noble and proletarian are equally unjust, but the rich emotion restores
a thousand times what may be missing in justice, and perhaps in many
cases hits better upon what is absolutely right than the bare masculine
sense of justice. We are, of course, frequently mistaken by relying on
the testimony of women, but only when we assume that our rigorously
judicial sentence is the only correct one, and when we do not know how
women judge. Hence, we interpret women’s testimonies with difficulty and
rarely with correctness; we forget that almost every feminine statement
contains in itself much more judgment than the testimony of men; we fail
to examine how much real judgment it contains; and finally, we weigh
this judgment in other scales than those used by the woman. We do best,
therefore, when we take the testimony of man and woman together in order
to find the right average. This is not easy, for we are unable to enter
properly into the emotional life of woman, and can not therefore
discount that tendency of hers to drag the objective truth in some
biased direction. It might be theoretically supposed that a noble,
kindly, feminine feeling would tend to reflect everything as better and
gentler, and would tend to excuse and conceal. If that were so we might
have a definite standard of valuation, and might be able to discount the
feminine bias. But that is so in perhaps no more than half the cases
that come before us. In all others woman has allowed herself to be moved
to displeasure, and appears as the punishing avenger. Hence, she fights
with all her strength on the side that seems to her to be oppressed and
innocently persecuted, irrespective of whether it is the side of the
accused or of his enemy. In consequence, we must first of all, when
judging her statements, determine the direction in which her emotion
impels her, and this can not be done with a mere knowledge of human
nature. Nothing will do except a careful study of the specific feminine
witness at the time she gives her evidence. And this requires the
expenditure of much time, for, to plunge directly into the middle of
things without having any means of comparison or relation, is to make
judgment impossible or very unsafe. If you are to do it at all you must
discuss other things first and even permit yourself the dishonesty of
asking about matters which you already know in order to find some
measure of the degree of feminine obliqueness. Of course, one discovers
here only the degree of obliqueness, not its direction--in the case
selected for comparison the woman might have judged too kindly, in the
case in hand she may just as well be too rigorous. But all things have a
definite limit, and hence, much practice and much goodwill will help us
to discover the direction of obliqueness.
When we inquire into the emotional life of the simple, uneducated women,
we find it to be fundamentally the same as that of women of other
classes, but different in expression, and it is the expression we have
to observe. Its form is often raw, therefore difficult to discover. It
may express itself in cursing and swearing, but it is still an
expression of emotion, just as are the mother’s curses or beatings of
her child because it has fallen and hurt itself. But observe that the
prevalence of emotion is so thoroughly a feminine condition that it is
clearly noticeable only where femininity itself is explicit--therefore,
always weaker among masculine women, and in the single individual most
powerful when femininity is most fully developed. It grows in the child,
remains at a constant level when woman becomes completely woman, and
decreases when, in advanced age, the differences in sex begin to
disappear. Very old men and very old women are also in this matter very
close together.