Without pausing to inquire why savages and barbarians are capable of
producing college professors, who sneer at the source from which they
sprung, we may accept for the moment the masculine hypothesis of
intellectual superiority. Some women have been heard to say that they
wish they had been born men, but there is no man bold enough to say
that he would like to be a woman.
If woman can produce a reasoning being, it follows that she herself
must be capable of reasoning, since a stream can rise no higher than
its fountain. And yet the bitter truth stares us in the face. We have
no Shakespeare, Michelangelo, or Beethoven; our Darwins, our Schumanns
are mute and inglorious; our Miltons, Raphaels, and Herbert Spencers
have not arrived.
Call the roll of the great and how many women's names will be found
there? Scarcely enough to enable you to call the company mixed.
No woman in her senses wishes to be merely the female of man. She
aspires to be distinctly different--to exercise her varied powers in
wholly different ways. Ex-President Roosevelt said: "Equality does not
imply identity of function." We do not care to put in telephones or to
collect fares on a street-car.
Primitive man set forth from his cave to kill an animal or two, then
repaired to a secluded nook in the jungle, with other primitive men,
to discuss the beginnings of politics. Primitive woman in the cave
not only dressed his game, but she cooked the animal for food,
made clothing of its skin, necklaces and bracelets of its teeth,
passementerie of its claws, and needles of its sharper bones. What
wonder that she had no time for an afternoon tea?
The man of the twentieth century has progressed immeasurably beyond
this, but his wife, industrially speaking, has not gone half so far.
Is she not still in some cases a cave-dweller, while he roams the
highways of the world?
If a woman mends men's socks, should he not darn her lisle-thread
hosiery, and run a line of machine stitching around the middle of the
hem to prevent a disastrous run from a broken stitch? If she presses
his ties, why should he not learn to iron her bits of fine lace?