4.—“... _single basis_ ...”
First written “disproportioned basis,” but altered, with good reason, in
the face of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s arrogant male thesis:—“Only that
mental energy is normally feminine which can co-exist with the
production and nursing of the due (!) number of healthy
children.”—(“Study of Sociology,” Chap. XV., note 5.)
But Professor Huxley speaks, more humanly, of “... such a peasant woman
as one sees in the Alps, striding ever upward, heavily burdened, and
with mind bent only on her home; but yet, without effort and without
thought, knitting for her children. Now stockings are good and
comfortable things, and the children will undoubtedly be much the better
for them, but surely it would be short-sighted, to say the least of it,
to depreciate this toiling mother as a mere stocking-machine—a mere
provider of physical comforts.”—(“On Improving Natural Knowledge.”)
Yet, if it be—as truly it is—a senseless and disgraceful depreciation of
woman to look upon her as “a mere machine for the making of stockings,”
is it not equally unworthy and unwise to consider her as—primarily and
essentially—a mere machine for the making of a “due” number of
stocking-wearers?
5.—“... _quicker fire_.”
In even so sedate and usually dispassionate a physiologist and
philosopher as Charles Darwin, the masculine sex-bias is so ingrained
and so ingenuous that he strives to disparage and contemn the notorious
mental quickness or intuition of woman by saying:—“It is generally
admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception,
and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but
some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower
races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation.”—(“The
Descent of Man,” Chap. XIX.).
His unconscious sex-bias apparently overlooked the pregnant and very
pertinent caution which he had himself uttered in a previous
work:—“Useful organs, however little they may be developed, unless we
have reason to suppose that they were formerly more highly developed,
ought not to be considered as rudimentary. They may be in a nascent
condition, and in progress towards further development. Rudimentary
organs, on the other hand, are either quite useless, such as teeth which
never cut through the gums, or, almost useless, such as the wings of an
ostrich, which serve merely as sails.... It is, however, often difficult
to distinguish between rudimentary and nascent organs, for we can judge
only by analogy whether a part is capable of further development, in
which case alone it deserves to be called nascent.”—(“Origin of
Species,” Chap. XIV.).
But surely Darwin would admit that experiment in capacity of education
and development was as worthy evidence as “analogy,” and would further
acknowledge how little effort in this direction had ever been made with
woman. Buckle would seem to be far nearer the truth in ascribing to
woman an unconscious deductive form of reasoning, as against the slow
and studied inductive process to which man is so generally trained to be
a slave.—(See Buckle’s Essay on the “Influence of Women on the Progress
of Knowledge,” as quoted from in Note XIII., 8.)
7.—“... _one permitted end_ ...”
“The function of child-bearing has been exaggerated to an utterly
disproportionate degree in her life; it has been made her almost sole
claim to existence. Yet it is not the true purpose of any intellectual
organism to live solely to give birth to succeeding organisms; its duty
is also to live for its own happiness and well-being.”—Ben Elmy
(“Studies in Materialism,” Chap. III.).
_Id._ ... “... not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another’s gain.”
—Tennyson (“In Memoriam,” LIV.).