FEMININE INFERIORITY
Why are women so mysterious, so inscrutable? Cynics say because you cannot calculate what they will do, as they have no fixed compass by which they steer, i.e. no character. But Heine takes up their defence. Far from having no character, he says, they have a new one every day.
The world’s opinion of women is best revealed in the crystallised wisdom, based on experience, called proverbs. It will soothe the wounded lover’s heart to note the unanimity with which woman’s foibles are dwelt on in the proverbs of all nations from ancient Greece to modern China and France. To give only three instances of a thousand that may be found in any collection of proverbs: “Women,” says a French proverb, “have quicksilver in the brain, wax in the heart.” The old Greek poet Xenarchus sang, “Happy the cicadas live, since they all have voiceless wives.” “There is no such poison in the green snake’s mouth or in the hornet’s sting as in a woman’s heart,” says a Chinese maxim.
But it is not necessary to rely on such anonymous collections of wisdom as proverbs to convince a man of the folly of linking himself for life with such a miserable inferior being as a woman. From Plato to Darwin there is a consensus of opinion as to woman’s vast inferiority to man.
According to Plato, says Mr. Grote, “men are superior to women in everything; in one occupation as well as in another.” Cookery and weaving having been named as two apparent exceptions, Plato denies woman’s superiority even in these.
“The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes,” says Darwin, “is shown by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music (inclusive both of composition and performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half a dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison.”
“I found, as a rule,” says Mr. Galton, "that men have more delicate powers of discrimination than women, and the business of life seems to confirm this view. The tuners of pianofortes are men, and so, I understand, are the tasters of tea and wine, the sorters of wool, and the like. These latter occupations are well salaried, because it is of the first moment to the merchant that he should be rightly advised on the real value of what he is about to purchase or to sell. If the sensitivity of women were superior to that of men, the self-interest of merchants would lead to their being always employed; but as the reverse is the case, the opposite supposition is likely to be the true one.
“Ladies rarely distinguish the merits of wine at the dinner-table, and though custom allows them to preside at the breakfast-table, men think them, on the whole, to be far from successful makers of tea and coffee.”
This disposes of the old myth that women are more sensitive than men. And De Quincy, in his essay on False Distinctions, refutes the equally absurd notion that “women have more imagination than men.” He comes to the conclusion that, “as to poetry in its highest form, I never yet knew a woman, nor yet will believe that any has existed, who could rise to an entire sympathy with what is most excellent in that art.”
One proof of this statement lies in the fact that as a rule men of genius have been refused by the women they loved most deeply.
Regarding the emotional sphere, we have seen that it is only in parental and conjugal feeling that woman surpasses man. In Romantic Love, in all the impersonal feelings for art and nature, she is vastly his inferior. Her superficial education gives her no intellectual interests, and that is the reason why so many married men prefer the club and friendship to home and conjugal devotion—even as did the ancient Greeks.
It is in the seventh book of the Laws, p. 806, that Plato remarks: “The legislator ought not to let the female sex live softly and waste money and have no order of life, while he takes the utmost care of the male sex, and leaves half of life only blest with happiness, when he might have made the whole state happy.”
Is it not humiliating to man, who loves to call himself a “reasoning animal,” to find that, after so many centuries, one of our greatest and most liberal thinkers, Professor Huxley, is obliged to write in this same Platonic tone that “the present system of female education stands self-condemned, as inherently absurd,” because it fosters and exaggerates instead of removing woman’s natural disadvantages? “With few insignificant exceptions,” Professor Huxley continues, “girls have been educated either to be drudges or toys beneath man, or a sort of angels above him; the highest ideal aimed at oscillating between Clärchen and Beatrice. The possibility that the ideal of womanhood lies neither in the fair saint nor in the fair sinner; that women are meant neither to be men’s guides nor their playthings, but their comrades, their fellows, and their equals, so far as Nature puts no bar to their equality, does not seem to have entered into the minds of those who have had the conduct of the education of girls” (Lay Sermons, p. 25).
Woman, in short, is a failure; and let any disappointed lover ask himself, Is it businesslike to begin life with a failure?