XVI.
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.).