The Subjection of Women
exceptional state, become the type with which he compares, and by
which he estimates, his sentiments and proceedings at other times:
and his habitual purposes assume a character moulded by and
assimilated to the moments of lofty excitement, although those, from
the physical nature of a human being, can only be transient.
Experience of races, as well as of individuals, does not show those
of excitable temperament to be less fit, on the average, either for
speculation or practice, than the more unexcitable. The French, and
the Italians, are undoubtedly by nature more nervously excitable than
the Teutonic races, and, compared at least with the English, they
have a much greater habitual and daily emotional life: but have they
been less great in science, in public business, in legal and judicial
eminence, or in war? There is abundant evidence that the Greeks were
of old, as their descendants and successors still are, one of the
most excitable of the races of mankind. It is superfluous to ask,
what among the achievements of men they did not excel in. The Romans,
probably, as an equally southern people, had the same original
temperament: but the stern character of their national discipline,
like that of the Spartans, made them an example of the opposite type
of national character; the greater strength of their natural feelings
being chiefly apparent in the intensity which the same original
temperament made it possible to give to the artificial. If these
cases exemplify what a naturally excitable people may be made, the
Irish Celts afford one of the aptest examples of what they are when
left to themselves; (if those can be said to be left to themselves
who have been for centuries under the indirect influence of bad
government, and the direct training of a Catholic hierarchy and of a
sincere belief in the Catholic religion.) The Irish character must be
considered, therefore, as an unfavourable case: yet, whenever the
circumstances of the individual have been at all favourable, what
people have shown greater capacity for the most varied and
multifarious individual eminence? Like the French compared with the
English, the Irish with the Swiss, the Greeks or Italians compared
with the German races, so women compared with men may be found, on
the average, to do the same things with some variety in the
particular kind of excellence. But, that they would do them fully as
well on the whole, if their education and cultivation were adapted to
correcting instead of aggravating the infirmities incident to their
temperament, I see not the smallest reason to doubt.
Supposing it, however, to be true that women's minds are by nature
more mobile than those of men, less capable of persisting long in the
same continuous effort, more fitted for dividing their faculties
among many things than for travelling in any one path to the highest
point which can be reached by it: this may be true of women as they
now are (though not without great and numerous exceptions), and may
account for their having remained behind the highest order of men in
precisely the things in which this absorption of the whole mind in
one set of ideas and occupations may seem to be most requisite.
Still, this difference is one which can only affect the kind of
excellence, not the excellence itself, or its practical worth: and it
remains to be shown whether this exclusive working of a part of the
mind, this absorption of the whole thinking faculty in a single
subject, and concentration of it on a single work, is the normal and
healthful condition of the human faculties, even for speculative
uses. I believe that what is gained in special development by this
concentration, is lost in the capacity of the mind for the other
purposes of life; and even in abstract thought, it is my decided
opinion that the mind does more by frequently returning to a
difficult problem, than by sticking to it without interruption. For
the purposes, at all events, of practice, from its highest to its
humblest departments, the capacity of passing promptly from one
subject of consideration to another, without letting the active
spring of the intellect run down between the two, is a power far more
valuable; and this power women pre-eminently possess, by virtue of
the very mobility of which they are accused. They perhaps have it
from nature, but they certainly have it by training and education;
for nearly the whole of the occupations of women consist in the
management of small but multitudinous details, on each of which the
mind cannot dwell even for a minute, but must pass on to other
things, and if anything requires longer thought, must steal time at
odd moments for thinking of it. The capacity indeed which women show
for doing their thinking in circumstances and at times which almost
any man would make an excuse to himself for not attempting it, has
often been noticed: and a woman's mind, though it may be occupied
only with small things, can hardly ever permit itself to be vacant,
as a man's so often is when not engaged in what he chooses to
consider the business of his life. The business of a woman's ordinary
life is things in general, and can as little cease to go on as the
world to go round.
But (it is said) there is anatomical evidence of the superior mental
capacity of men compared with women: they have a larger brain. I
reply, that in the first place the fact itself is doubtful. It is by
no means established that the brain of a woman is smaller than that
of a man. If it is inferred merely because a woman's bodily frame
generally is of less dimensions than a man's, this criterion would
lead to strange consequences. A tall and large-boned man must on this
showing be wonderfully superior in intelligence to a small man, and
an elephant or a whale must prodigiously excel mankind. The size of
the brain in human beings, anatomists say, varies much less than the
size of the body, or even of the head, and the one cannot be at all
inferred from the other. It is certain that some women have as large
a brain as any man. It is within my knowledge that a man who had
weighed many human brains, said that the heaviest he knew of, heavier
even than Cuvier's (the heaviest previously recorded,) was that of a
woman. Next, I must observe that the precise relation which exists
between the brain and the intellectual powers is not yet well
understood, but is a subject of great dispute. That there is a very
close relation we cannot doubt. The brain is certainly the material
organ of thought and feeling: and (making abstraction of the great
unsettled controversy respecting the appropriation of different parts
of the brain to different mental faculties) I admit that it would be
an anomaly, and an exception to all we know of the general laws of
life and organization, if the size of the organ were wholly
indifferent to the function; if no accession of power were derived
from the greater magnitude of the instrument. But the exception and
the anomaly would be fully as great if the organ exercised influence
by its magnitude _only_. In all the more delicate operations of
nature--of which those of the animated creation are the most
delicate, and those of the nervous system by far the most delicate of
these--differences in the effect depend as much on differences of
quality in the physical agents, as on their quantity: and if the
quality of an instrument is to be tested by the nicety and delicacy
of the work it can do, the indications point to a greater average
fineness of quality in the brain and nervous system of women than of
men. Dismissing abstract difference of quality, a thing difficult to
verify, the efficiency of an organ is known to depend not solely on
its size but on its activity: and of this we have an approximate
measure in the energy with which the blood circulates through it,
both the stimulus and the reparative force being mainly dependent on
the circulation. It would not be surprising--it is indeed an
hypothesis which accords well with the differences actually observed
between the mental operations of the two sexes--if men on the average
should have the advantage in the size of the brain, and women in
activity of cerebral circulation. The results which conjecture,
founded on analogy, would lead us to expect from this difference of
organization, would correspond to some of those which we most
commonly see. In the first place, the mental operations of men might
be expected to be slower. They would neither be so prompt as women in
thinking, nor so quick to feel. Large bodies take more time to get
into full action. On the other hand, when once got thoroughly into
play, men's brain would bear more work. It would be more persistent
in the line first taken; it would have more difficulty in changing
from one mode of action to another, but, in the one thing it was
doing, it could go on longer without loss of power or sense of
fatigue. And do we not find that the things in which men most excel
women are those which require most plodding and long hammering at a
single thought, while women do best what must be done rapidly? A
woman's brain is sooner fatigued, sooner exhausted; but given the
degree of exhaustion, we should expect to find that it would recover
itself sooner. I repeat that this speculation is entirely
hypothetical; it pretends to no more than to suggest a line of
enquiry. I have before repudiated the notion of its being yet
certainly known that there is any natural difference at all in the
average strength or direction of the mental capacities of the two
sexes, much less what that difference is. Nor is it possible that
this should be known, so long as the psychological laws of the
formation of character have been so little studied, even in a general
way, and in the particular case never scientifically applied at all;
so long as the most obvious external causes of difference of
character are habitually disregarded--left unnoticed by the observer,
and looked down upon with a kind of supercilious contempt by the
prevalent schools both of natural history and of mental philosophy:
who, whether they look for the source of what mainly distinguishes
human beings from one another, in the world of matter or in that of
spirit, agree in running down those who prefer to explain these
differences by the different relations of human beings to society and
life.
To so ridiculous an extent are the notions formed of the nature of
women, mere empirical generalizations, framed, without philosophy or
analysis, upon the first instances which present themselves, that the
popular idea of it is different in different countries, according as
the opinions and social circumstances of the country have given to
the women living in it any speciality of development or
non-development. An Oriental thinks that women are by nature
peculiarly voluptuous; see the violent abuse of them on this ground
in Hindoo writings. An Englishman usually thinks that they are by
nature cold. The sayings about women's fickleness are mostly of
French origin; from the famous distich of Francis the First, upward
and downward. In England it is a common remark, how much more
constant women are than men. Inconstancy has been longer reckoned
discreditable to a woman, in England than in France; and Englishwomen
are besides, in their inmost nature, much more subdued to opinion. It
may be remarked by the way, that Englishmen are in peculiarly
unfavourable circumstances for attempting to judge what is or is not
natural, not merely to women, but to men, or to human beings
altogether, at least if they have only English experience to go upon:
because there is no place where human nature shows so little of its
original lineaments. Both in a good and a bad sense, the English are
farther from a state of nature than any other modern people. They