Woman in Science / With an Introductory Chapter on Woman's Long Struggle for Things of the Mind

by J. A. Zahm

CHAPTER XII

THE FUTURE OF WOMEN IN SCIENCE:

SUMMARY AND EPILOGUE

Saint-Evremond, the first great master of the genteel style in French literature, who was equally noted as a brilliant courtier, a graceful wit, a professed Epicurean, and who exerted so marked an influence on the writings of Voltaire and the essayists of Queen Anne's time, gives us in one of his desultory productions an entertaining disquisition on La femme qui ne se trouve point et ne se trouvera jamais—the woman who is not and never will be found. The caption of this singular essay admirably expresses the idea that the majority of mankind has, even until the present day, held respecting woman in science. For them she was non-existent. Nature, in their view, had disqualified her for serious and, above all, for abstract science. Never, therefore, in the opinion of these solemn wiseacres, had been found or could be found a woman who had achieved distinction in science.

The foregoing chapters show how ill-founded is such a view regarding woman in times past. For that half of humanity which has produced such scientific luminaries as Aspasia, Laura Bassi, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Sophie Germain, Mary Somerville, Caroline Herschel, Sónya Kovalévsky, Agnes S. Lewis, Margaret Dunlop Gibson, Eleanor Ormerod and Mme. Curie—to mention no others—is far from exhibiting any evidence of intellectual disqualification and still farther from warranting any one from declaring that the successful pursuit of science is entirely beyond the mental powers of womankind.

The preceding pages, likewise, afford an answer to those who insist on woman's incapacity for scientific pursuits, and point to the small number of those that have attained eminence in any of the branches of science; who continue to assert that the women named are but exceptions to the rule of the hopeless inferiority of their sex, and that no conclusions can be deduced from the paucity of women who have risen above the intellectual level of their less fortunate or less highly dowered sisters. They further show that, until the last few decades, woman's environment was rarely if ever favorable to her pursuit of science. From the days of Aspasia until the latter half of the nineteenth century she was discriminated against by law, custom and public opinion. Save only in Italy, she was excluded from the universities and from learned societies in which she might have had an opportunity of developing her intellect. In other countries her social ostracism in all that pertained to mental development was so complete and universal that she rarely had an opportunity of making a trial of her powers or exhibiting her innate capacity. The consequence was that her mind remained in a condition of comparative atrophy—a condition that gave rise to that long prevalent belief in woman's intellectual inferiority to man and her natural incapacity for everything that is not light or frivolous.

Practically all that women have achieved in science, until very recent years, has been accomplished in defiance of that conventional code which compelled them to confine their activities to the ordinary duties of the household. The lives and achievements of the eminent mathematicians, Sophie Germain and Mary Somerville, are good illustrations of the truth of this assertion. It was only their persistence in the study of their favorite branch of science, in spite of the opposition of their family and friends, and in spite of what was considered taboo for their sex by the usages and ordinances of society, that they were able to attain that eminence in the most abstruse of the sciences which won for them the plaudits of the world. Both were virtually self-made women. Deprived of the advantages of a college or university education, and denied the stimulus afforded by membership in learned scientific associations, they nevertheless succeeded by their own unaided efforts in winning a place of highest honor in the Walhalla of men of science.

M. Alphonse de Candolle, in his great work, Histoire des Sciences et des Savants depuis Deux Siècles, devotes only two pages to the consideration of woman in science. She is, to him, a negligible quantity. And, although a professed man of science, he repeats, without any scientific warrant whatever, all the gratuitous statements of his predecessors regarding the superficial character of the female mind, "a mind," he will have it, which "takes pleasure in ideas that are readily seized by a kind of intuition;" a mind "to which the slow methods of observation and calculation by which truth is surely arrived at are not pleasing. Truths themselves," the Swiss savant continues, "independent of their nature and possible consequences—especially general truths which have no relation to a particular person—are of small moment to most women. Add to this a feeble independence of opinion, a reasoning faculty less intense than in man, and, finally, the horror of doubt, that is, a state of mind in which all research in the sciences of observation must begin and often end. These reasons are," according to de Candolle, "more than sufficient to explain the position of women in scientific pursuits."[256]

They certainly are more than sufficient to explain their position if we choose to accept the author's method of determining one's attainments in the realm of science. His chief test of one's eminence in science is the number of learned societies to which one belongs. For De Candolle, membership in one or more such bodies is prima facie evidence of special distinction in some branch of science. But "We," he declares, "do not see the name of any woman on the lists of learned men connected with the principal academies. This is not due entirely to the fact that the customs and regulations have made no provision for their admission, for it is easy to assure one's self that no person of the feminine sex has ever produced an original scientific work which has made its mark in any science and commanded the attention of specialists in science. I do not think it has ever been considered desirable to elect a woman a member of any of the great scientific academies with restricted membership."[257]

When De Candolle insisted on membership in learned societies as a necessary indication of scientific eminence, he must have known, what everybody knew, that such exclusive societies as the French Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of Great Britain have always been dead set against the admission of women members. It is difficult to imagine that the learned author of the History of Science and Scientists was entirely ignorant of the exclusion from the French Academy of Maria Gaetana Agnesi solely because she was a woman. And he must have been aware that, had it not been for her sex, Sophie Germain would have been accorded a fauteuil in the same society for her remarkable investigations in one of the difficult departments of mathematical physics. He must likewise have been cognizant of the attitude of such organizations as the Royal Society toward women, no matter how meritorious their achievements in science.

According to De Candolle's criterion, such women as Mme. Curie, Sónya Kovalévsky, Eleanor Ormerod, Agnes S. Lewis, Margaret Dunlop Gibson have accomplished nothing worthy of note because, forsooth, their names are not found on the rolls of membership of the Royal Society or the French Academy of Sciences—associations whose constitutions have been purposely so framed as to exclude women from membership. It would, indeed, be difficult to instance a more unfair or a more unscientific test of woman's eminence in science, and that, too, proposed by one who is supposed to be actuated in his judgments by rigorously scientific methods. Had any of the women named belonged to the male sex, there never would have been any question of their fitness to become members of the societies in question. This is particularly true of Mme. Curie, who, in the estimation of the world, has done more to enhance the prestige of French science than any man of the present generation—a statement that is sufficiently justified by the fact that she is the only one so far who has twice, in competition with the greatest of the world's men of science, succeeded in carrying away the great Nobel prize.[258]

Not only have men, from time immemorial, been wont to point to woman's incapacity for science as evidenced by the small number of those who have achieved distinction in any of its branches, but they have also taken a special pleasure in directing attention to the fact that no woman has ever given to the world any of the great creations of genius, or been the prime-mover in any of the far-reaching discoveries which have so greatly contributed to the weal, the advancement and the happiness of our race.

No one, probably, has expressed himself on this subject in a more positive or characteristic fashion than the noted litterateur and philosopher, Count Joseph de Maistre. Writing from St. Petersburg to his daughter, Constance, he says: "Voltaire, according to what you affirm—for as to me, I know nothing, as I have not read all his works, and have not read a line of them during the last thirty years—says that women are capable of doing all that men do, etc. This is merely a compliment paid to some pretty woman, or, rather, it is one of the hundred thousand and thousand silly things which he said during his lifetime. The very contrary is the truth. Women have produced no chef d'œuvre of any kind whatsoever. They have been the authors neither of the Iliad, nor the Æneid, nor the Jerusalem Delivered, nor Phèdre, nor Athalie nor Rodogune, nor The Misanthrope, nor Tartufe, nor The Joueur, nor The Pantheon, nor The Church of St. Peter's, nor the Venus de' Medici, nor the Apollo Belvidere, nor the Principia, nor the Discourse on Universal History, nor Telemachus. They have invented neither algebra nor the telescope, nor achromatic glasses nor the fire engine, nor hose-machines, etc."[259]

All this is true, but what does it prove? It does not prove, as is so frequently assumed, woman's lesser brain power or inferior intelligence. It does not prove—as the learned Frenchman and those who are similarly minded would have us believe—her incapacity for the highest flights of genius in every sphere of intellectual effort. Such assumptions are entirely negatived by woman's past achievements in all departments of art, literature and science.

Far from making the inference that De Maistre wished his daughter to draw from his letter, we should, from what we know of woman's ability as disclosed in the foregoing chapters, hesitate to set a limit to her powers, or to declare apodictically that she could not have been the author of works of as great merit as most of those—if not all of them—mentioned as among men's supreme achievements. The simple fact that Mme. Curie and Sónya Kovalévsky were able, in sciences usually considered beyond female intelligence, to wrest from their male competitors the most coveted prizes within the gift of the Nobel Prize Commission and the French Academy of Sciences, demonstrates completely that woman's assumed incapacity for even the most recondite scientific pursuits is a mere figment of the masculine imagination.

What women have done "that at least, if nothing else," as John Stuart Mill aptly observes, "it is proved they can do. When we consider how sedulously they are all trained away from, instead of being trained toward, any of the occupations or objects reserved for men, it is evident that I am taking very humble ground for them, when I rest their case on what they have actually achieved. For, in this case, negative evidence is worth little, while any positive evidence is conclusive. It cannot be inferred to be impossible that a woman should be a Homer, or an Aristotle, or a Michaelangelo, or a Beethoven, because no woman has yet actually produced works comparable to theirs in any of those lines of excellence. This negative fact at most leaves the question uncertain and open to psychological discussion. But it is quite certain that a woman can be a Queen Elizabeth or a Deborah or a Joan of Arc, since this is not inference but a fact."[260]

In like manner it is quite certain that, in spite of all kinds of disabilities and prejudices and adverse legislation, there have been a large number of women who, in every department of intellectual activity, have achieved marked distinction and won imperishable renown for their proscribed sex. It is a fact, which admits of no question, that, notwithstanding their being debarred from all the educational advantages so generously lavished upon the dominant sex, women have since the days of Sappho and Hypatia shown themselves the equals and often the superiors of men in the highest and noblest spheres of mental achievement.

Such being the case, what, we may ask, would have been the result had women, from that splendid Heroic Period of which Homer sings until the present, enjoyed all the opportunities of mental development of which men have systematically claimed the exclusive privilege?[261] What would now be their condition if, from the days of the Muses—who were but learned women apotheosized—women had never been deprived of their intellectual birthright and had been permitted to continue in the path so auspiciously blazed by Corinna—the victor over Pindar—and Arete, the splendor of Greece and the possessor of the mind of Socrates and the tongue of Homer? What would not now be their intellectual efflorescence, if Plato's dream of twenty-three centuries ago of giving women equal rights with men in all things of the mind could have been realized; if those ardent female disciples of his, who so lovingly followed him through the streets of Athens—"the home of the intellectual and the beautiful"—and hung on his lips during his matchless discourses in the groves of the Academy and on the banks of the Ilyssus, could have continued that race of intellect and genius which was the admiration and the inspiration of all Hellas during the most brilliant period of its marvelous history?

Speculating only on what the gifted daughters of Greece might have achieved, we may easily believe that they would have kept pace with their most highly gifted countrymen, and that, following in the footsteps of Sappho and the other Muses of the "Terrestrial Nine," they would have been worthy rivals of Homer, Pindar and Æschylus, and would have occupied a prominent place in that brilliant galaxy of genius composed of such luminaries as Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Euclid, Archimedes, Theophrastus, Polygnotus, Diophantus, Pausanias and Thucydides.

To those who base their opinions on what so long has been the absurdly anomalous condition of women and who, in formulating their theories of human progress, completely ignore the fundamental laws of heredity, such conjectures will seem extravagant, if not chimerical. But, when one bears in mind the universal fact that offspring, whatever the sex, inherits its characteristics and its powers from both parents alike; that the soul, unlike the body, has no sex, and that, so far as legitimate indications from the teachings of biology and psychology can serve as a guide, there is no valid reason for asserting the mental superiority of man over woman, one will be obliged to confess that these surmises are far from being either fanciful or preposterous.

It is then the veriest sophism to predicate woman's incapacity for science and for intellectual achievements of the highest order on what she has not accomplished in the past, or on the comparatively limited number of her contributions to the advancement of knowledge; for up till the present she has, for the most part, been but a dwarf of the gynæceum,

"Cramp'd under worse than South-sea isle taboo."

Had men been compelled to labor under similar conditions, it is doubtful if they would have accomplished any more than women have now to their credit.

Considering woman's past achievements in science, as well as in other departments of knowledge; considering her present opportunities for developing her long-hampered faculties, and considering, especially, the many new social and economic adjustments which have been made within the last half century, in consequence of the greatly changed conditions of modern life, it requires no prophetic vision to forecast what share the gentler sex will have in the future advancement of science. That it will be far greater than it has been hitherto there can be no reasonable doubt. That the number of savantes of the type of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Sónya Kovalévsky and Mme. Curie will be greatly enlarged there is every reason to believe. That among these coming votaries of science there will be more than one woman who, even in the most abstruse sciences, will stand

"Upon an even pedestal with man,"

seems to be assured by the achievements of many who are now so materially adding to the sum of human knowledge.

Is it probable that the future will bring forth women whose achievements in science will rank with those of Euler, Faraday, Liebig, Leverrier, Champollion and Geoffry Saint-Hillaire? It would be a rash man who would answer in the negative. We cannot, as De Maistre seems to do, reason from what they have not done—when everything was against them—to what they may do when conditions shall, in every way, be as favorable to them as they always have been to the dominant sex.

Still rasher would be the man who would attempt to prove the negative of this question. Mere a priori arguments, based on preconceived bias or on the vague and groundless impression that woman is essentially and hopelessly the intellectual inferior of man, have no more value than gratuitous opinions. The unprejudiced seeker after truth will insist on a demonstration based on incontrovertible facts. He will appeal to history to learn what the sex has already accomplished, and to science to inquire if there be anything in the female brain to differentiate it from that of the male, or to preclude woman from attaining the highest rank in the activities of the intellect.

The result of such an investigation will, I think, cause even the most biased person to suspend judgment, if it does not induce him to align himself with those who, finding no differences in the mental endowments of the sexes, have reached the conclusion that the day will come, and, mayhap, in the near future, when the achievements of women will be on a par with those of man. The facts stated in the preceding chapters seem, not unreasonably, to point to such a conclusion, if, indeed, they do not warrant it as a necessary inference.

A few considerations germane to this discussion will illustrate the danger of forming hasty judgments regarding questions like the one under discussion.

During the last hundred years no country in the world has done more for the education of the masses than the United States. Everything that money could purchase and ingenuity suggest has been adopted to develop the minds and stimulate the latent talents and genius of our youth. From the primary schools to the highest and best equipped universities, a special premium has been put on success in study, and the highest rewards have awaited those who should make any notable contribution towards the advancement of knowledge. But, notwithstanding all the educational advantages our people have enjoyed and all the encouragement they have received to achieve something of supreme excellence, our great country with its teeming millions attracted from the most gifted nations of the Old World has not yet produced a single man who has attained the highest rank in either literature or art or science. Far from having a preëminent master of song like Homer or Dante, we have not even a poet approaching Goethe or Tasso or Camoens. We have no Cervantes, no Milton, no Racine, no Molière. America has produced no Raphael or Michaelangelo; no Mozart or Wagner or Tschaikovsky. Nor has it given us a Descartes, a Leibnitz, a Newton or a Darwin. Would any one, from this complete absence in America of representatives of the highest order in literature, art and science, ever dream of concluding that we shall never have such favorite sons of genius and such giants of intellect? Does our comparative intellectual sterility in the past, and in a country which seemed specially adapted to foster genius and attainments of the highest order, justify any one in inferring that the days of great geniuses, like the days of demigods, are gone never to return?

And yet the number of men in our broad commonwealth who, during the past hundred years, have enjoyed such signal opportunities for attaining distinction in every domain of intellectual effort is incomparably greater than that of all the women so favored since the earliest days of human history. If, from the first flowering of Greek culture to the present day, as many millions of women had enjoyed all the transcendent advantages of education as have been in the United States so lavishly accorded to the same number of millions of men, who will say that very many of them would not have attained a much higher rank in science, as well as in art and literature, than has yet been reached by any man that America has yet produced? Who even, on the evidence now available, would be warranted in denying that at least some of these millions of women might have attained the very highest rank in every department of intellectual achievement?

Gray, in his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, muses on the potential statesmen and the "mute, inglorious Miltons" of those countless multitudes who, for lack of opportunity to develop their inborn gifts, were condemned to pass their lives in obscurity and die, "to Fortune and to Fame unknown." But how much more truthfully could his words have been applied to that much larger number of women of rare mental powers to whose eyes knowledge

"Her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll,"

and whose God-given genius was ruthlessly suppressed from the cradle to the grave?

We are still in ignorance as to many of the conditions which are essential to the development of genius and which contribute to its loftiest flights. We have yet to learn how far the efflorescence of the human mind is aided and modified by heredity, environment, atmosphere, as well as by education, encouragement and other stimuli equally potent.

But we do know that Germany, in spite of its famed universities and its feverish intellectual activity in many departments of knowledge, had to wait many long dreary centuries before it could point to a Goethe, a Schiller, a Humboldt, a Bach, or a Beethoven. We know that France—so long the reputed center of culture—has so far produced no great epic poet, no Cervantes, no Murillo. But shall we affirm that she will never give to the world imperishable works like Paradise Lost, Don Quixote or the Immaculate Conception? We know that Athens, which during the most brilliant period of its history counted only fifty-four hundred free-born citizens—less than the population of a small modern town—was able to produce within a very brief epoch more men of supreme distinction than all the rest of Europe from the Age of Pericles until the dawn of the Renaissance. Hers is still the art of the world, the literature of the world, the philosophy of the world, the culture of the world. For twenty-five centuries her canons of taste and beauty have guided poets, orators, artists; and her matchless productions have been the inspiration, as they have been the despair, of the greatest geniuses of our modern world.

Had the women of Greece not been put under constraint just as they were beginning to exhibit the splendid results of their intellectual activities; had they been encouraged to develop to the utmost their richly-dowered minds, as were the men, a far larger number of them, no doubt, would have been as successful in carrying off coveted prizes in the intellectual arena as was Corinna in her contests with Pindar. And they would, likewise, as we may easily conceive, have greatly added to the number of masterpieces of Greek intellect in science as well as in art and letters.

But the opportunity for women to test their powers, which was so wantonly snatched from their sisters in the Hellenic world, seems again to be offered to their sex. This opportunity, as has been stated, is due chiefly to their persistence in claiming the same right as men to intellectual development as well as to the countless proofs they have given that their demands are founded on reason and justice. What shall be the outcome of the new opportunity for woman to prove her capacity as compared with man's in things of the intellect remains to be seen, but, from indications she has during recent years given of her powers in every branch of scientific inquiry, there can be little doubt that it will be of such character as to place woman on a higher intellectual plane than she has yet occupied. In physical strength and in the rougher conflicts with the world she will doubtless always remain "the lesser man," but, once she feels in full possession of liberty

"To burgeon out of all
Within her,"

she will duly justify her advocates who throughout the centuries have been

"Maintaining that with equal husbandry
The woman were an equal to the man."

Not the least of the contributing factors to woman's intellectual growth, and especially to her future achievements in science, are the recent adjustments for women in social and economical conditions brought about chiefly by far-reaching changes in the industrial world. Even so late as the last half of the nineteenth century the energies of women, when they were not engaged in the kitchen or the nursery, were spent on the domestic loom, spinning wheel and the knitting needle. All the various processes from carding the wool to making it into clothing for all the members of the family were in the hands of the housewife. Ready-made clothing was far from being as common and inexpensive as it is now. Canned foods and cereals, which do away with so much of the drudgery of the kitchen, were unknown. Electricity, which has proved to be such a remarkable aid in every modern home, was little more than a mysterious force that was utilized in the electric telegraph. Most of the domestic labor-saving machines were still in their infancy and possessed by but few people. Large fortunes were confined to only a favored few in our great metropolises. The mass of the people was preoccupied with the struggle for existence.

But science, the spirit of invention and the advent of the age of machinery have completely changed the conditions of life which obtained but a generation ago. They have not only opened up for women countless occupations that were undreamed of in their mother's time, but have also given to tens of thousands of them the necessary means and leisure to indulge their tastes for study and research and enabled an ever increasing number of them to realize their aspirations for achieving distinction in the divers departments of scientific research.

As an instance of this marked change in the intellectual activity of women, we need only consider what an important part they now take in our present prodigious literary output, as compared with their share in similar work but a few decades ago. As authors, as writers and readers in the editorial rooms of our leading periodicals, as contributors to learned journals and reviews dealing with every branch of science, even the most abstruse, they now occupy a conspicuous place and are doing work that is quite as creditable as that of men.

And it is no longer necessary, in deference to public sentiment, for them to write under a pseudonym, for it is no longer considered unfeminine, as it was in the time of the Brontë sisters, for women to acknowledge themselves the authors of books or of articles in magazines. If they elect to devote their lives to literary or scientific work, they will not be deterred from so doing by what Mrs. Grundy may say, or by the fear that some feeble imitator of Molière may dub them as Précieuses Ridicules. The value of their productions, like those of men, is gauged solely by merit and not by any narrow-minded considerations of the author's sex.

So also will it be in all other occupations where women choose to gain their livelihood by devoting themselves to scientific pursuits rather than to manual labor or to secretarial work in the counting-room. There are positions open for them in colleges, universities and the government service where, as professors or experts in every branch of science, their talents have full liberty of action and where they have the same opportunity of achieving distinction in their chosen life-work as have their male colleagues.

In Germany there are to-day a million more women than men. It is the same in England. In France the number of women who are widows or unmarried or divorcées or mothers with full-grown children aggregates no less than four and a half millions. A similar condition obtains in other parts of Europe. A large percentage of this number is without home ties and, as the old fields of labor are no longer open to women, they are forced to find new ones. They naturally demand the privilege of exercising their talents in occupations which are most congenial to them. Many have no inclination for any of the avocations in the industrial or commercial world, but have a very decided inclination as well as talent for scientific pursuits. Hence the ever-increasing number of women who seek employment in chemical and biological laboratories, in museums and astronomical observatories, as well as aspire to professorships of science in schools and colleges. From this large number of votaries of science some are sure to achieve distinction in their calling and to contribute materially to the advancement of knowledge. In the course of time the number of those, like Mme. Curie, Mme. Coudreau, Mary Kingsley, Sónya Kovalévsky, Eleanor Ormerod, Caroline Herschel, Zelia Nuttall, Harriet Boyd Hawes, Donna Eersilia Bovatillo, Sophie Pereyaslawewa—to name only a few—who will become prominent as chemists, explorers, naturalists, mathematicians, entomologists, astronomers, archæologists, biologists will be vastly increased, for women will find a greater stimulus for such work and more numerous demands for their service in the constantly expanding sphere of scientific research.

Many women will, doubtless, become specialists in some specific branch of science, particularly if they have a genuine love for it, or be fired by an ambition to achieve fame as discoverers. But it is not probable that they will ever specialize to the same extent as men do. For men scientific work has to a large extent become a métier, and success, as in industry, depends on a division of labor. Hence it is that their field of investigation is daily becoming more and more circumscribed. This is observable in all the sciences, but especially in such all-embracing sciences as chemistry, biology, and archæology. A man now does well if he master a single branch of any of these sciences, and is hailed as exceptionally fortunate if he succeed in making some notable discovery in his limited field of research. So great, indeed, has been the activity of scientific men in every department of science during the last half century, and so thoroughly have they explored the most hidden recesses of nature, that it, at times, seems as if there were but little left to discover. A prominent scientist recently well expressed the difficulty of making any striking additions to our knowledge of nature by asserting that all great discoveries would hereafter be made in the sixth place of decimals. This statement is well illustrated by the delicate experiments that were required to isolate such rare elements as radium, polonium, helium and neon, which occur only in infinitesimal quantities.

While men of science will be forced to continue as specialists as long as the love of fame, to consider no other motives of research, continues to be a potent influence in their investigations, it is probable that women will have less love for the long and tedious processes involved in the more difficult kinds of specialization. They will, it seems likely, be more inclined to acquire a general knowledge of the whole circle of the sciences—a knowledge that will enable them to take a comprehensive survey of nature. And it will be fortunate for themselves, as well as for the men who must perforce remain specialists, if they elect to do so. For nothing gives falser views of nature as a whole, nothing more unfits the mind for a proper apprehension of higher and more important truths, nothing more incapacitates one for the enjoyment of the masterpieces of literature or the sweeter amenities of life, than the narrow occupation of a specialist who sees nothing in the universe but electrons, microbes and protozoa.

But just at the critical moment, when men of science would rather discover a process than a law, when they are so preoccupied with the infinitely little that they lose sight of the cosmos as a whole; when their attention is so riveted on particular phenomena that they will no longer have aptitude for rising from effects to causes; when they cease to have any interest in general ideas and stray away from the guidance of the true philosophic spirit; when, like Plato's cave men, they have so long groped in darkness that their powers of vision are impaired, then it is that woman, "The herald of a brighter race," comes to the rescue and holds up to their astonished gaze the picture of an ideal world whose existence they had almost forgotten. For women, as a rule, love science for its own sake, and, unlike the specialists in question, they are, in its pursuit, rarely actuated by any selfish or mercenary interests, or by the hope of financial reward. Precise and never-ending observations with the microscope and spectroscope, which at best give them but a superficial knowledge of certain details of science, while it leaves them in ignorance of the greater and better part of it, do not appeal to them. They prefer general ideas to particular facts, and love to roam over the whole realm of science rather than confine themselves to one of its isolated corners.

"Women," writes M. Étienne Lamy, the distinguished French Academician, "group themselves at the center of human knowledge, whereas men disperse themselves towards its outer boundaries. While men are always pushing analysis to its utmost limits, women are seeking a synthesis. While men are becoming more technical, women are becoming more intellectual. They are better placed to observe the correlations of the different sciences, and to subordinate them to the common and unique source of truth from which they all descend. We seem, indeed, to be approaching a time when women will become the conservers of general ideas."[262]

In the preceding chapter reference was made to the fact that women are naturally inclined to adopt the deductive method in their search for truth when men would employ only the inductive method. This disposition of theirs to arrive at conclusions by a kind of intuition, coupled with their more pronounced idealism, is sure to react favorably on men, and prevent them from becoming so involved in mere facts and phenomena as to cause them to forget that it is as important to reason well as to observe well—that the fundamental principles of a true philosophy are quite as necessary for the eminent man of science as they are to the trustworthy historian or commanding statesman.

From what has been said, it is clear that man's ideal of the woman of the future will be quite different from what it was but a little more than a century ago, when Dr. Johnson could say that "any acquaintance with books," among women, "was distinguished only to be censured." It will be quite different from the ideal woman, as portrayed by poets and novelists, for centuries past. For among the thousands of women painted by our leading writers of fiction, poets and dramatists there are few, if any, outside of those sketched by Tennyson in The Princess, who are distinguished for their learning or for their love of intellectual pursuits. Even Portia, Shakespeare's most learned woman, was, according to her own confession, but

"An unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpracticed."

And the heroines of the novelist, far from being women who had a thirst for knowledge, or were eager

"To sound the abyss
Of science and the secrets of the mind,"

were those only whose chief attractions were physical graces and charms, affectionate natures, brilliant wit together with "sweet laughs for bird-notes and blue eyes for a heaven."

Now, however, that women after ages of struggle are beginning to experience a sense of intellectual freedom before unknown, and to exult in the fact that

"Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed";

now that they are, for the first time, beginning, in every civilized nation, to realize their age-long aspirations for unimpeded opportunity in all the activities of the intellect; now that they are no longer

"Dismiss'd in shame to live
No wiser than their mothers, household stuff,
Live chattels, ***
*** laughing-stocks of Time,"

we may expect soon to see a marked change in the character of the ideal woman as depicted in literature and as desired by the intelligent portion of mankind.

What woman's liberation from intellectual bondage and her freedom to devote herself to scientific pursuits mean for the future of humanity it is difficult at present adequately to forecast. That it will contribute immensely to the betterment of social conditions and to the elevation of the masses of humanity, there can be no doubt. Setting free the imprisoned energies of one half of our race, means more than doubling mankind's capacity for advancement. For the failure to utilize woman's vast energies, pining for an outlet, acted as a drag on man's own potentialities, and thus retarded to an untold extent the world's advancement. In times past, as has aptly been said, "an enormous part of the brain power of mankind has been spent or wasted in smiting the Philistines hip and thigh, and an enormous part of the brain power of womankind has been spent in cajoling Sampson."

It will mean that the women of the future will be more suitable companions for the rapidly increasing number of highly educated men of science; that having their intellects developed pari passu with those of men, they will be able to sympathize with the noblest aims of their husbands and assist them in their most important undertakings, as did the wives of Huber, Lavoisier, Pasteur, Huxley, Louis Agassiz and others scarcely less renowned in the annals of science. It will mean that they will not only share in the joys and the sorrows of their life-companions, but that they will also have a part in their thoughts, their studies, their labors, their achievements. For one should bear in mind that the first essential to a perfect union of hearts is a perfect harmony of minds. Where neither husband nor wife is educated, the virtues may suffice for companionship, but where the man is educated and the woman ignorant, there are sooner or later estrangements and the wife becomes little better than an old Japanese conception of her, "a cook without pay," or a pasha's toy for an idle hour. Chrysalde in Molière's L'École des Femmes, declares:

"Qu'il est assez ennuyeux, que je crois,
D'avoir toute sa vie une bête avec soi."

A briefer and truer statement of the evils of unequal intellectual mating was never penned.[263] Men of intelligence are no longer, like Rousseau, satisfied with an ignorant domestic for a wife, and still less are they disposed with Schopenhauer to regard woman as an incurable Philistine, and as a mere intermediary between a child and a man. They have learned by sad experience that it is contrary both to justice and public policy to impose artificial restrictions on the acquisition of knowledge by women, or to close to the vigorous and capable representatives of their sex careers which are open to the weakest and most incompetent men. History has taught them that the fall of Greece and Rome was owing to the failure of these nations to make due provision for the mental development of women.

And women know that it was because of the inability of the wives of the Athenians to enter into the thoughts of their highly educated husbands and to sympathize with their aims and appreciate their achievements that caused the men to leave them in their solitude and seek in the companionship of the hetæræ the intellectual atmosphere which was wanting in their own homes. They know, too, that the lack of knowledge in the wife and the absence of virtue in the hetæræ, which brought such disasters on the most learned and most cultured of nations are still evils to be guarded against, and that one of the means over and above moral rule and revealed truth of safe-guarding their own interests and preserving the sanctity of the home is to make themselves by knowledge and culture the intellectual equals of their consorts.

They realize also that if they are to attain the highest measure of success as wives and mothers, a broad and thorough education—a knowledge of science, as well as familiarity with art and literature and the teachings of religion—is essential to them for their children's sake. It is said that

"The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world,"

but how much truer is it that "The domestic hearth is the first of schools, and the best of lecture-rooms; for here the heart will coöperate with the mind, the affections with the reasoning power." It is only when the mothers of this, the woman's century, shall dispute with men the primacy of erudition—when they shall prove their mastery of those newer sciences by which our age sets such great store—when they shall possess

"Seraphic intellect and force
To seize and throw the doubts of man";

that their grown-up sons will have the same confidence in their intelligence as they now have in their hearts. Then only will mothers be properly equipped for developing the character of their children; for inspiring them with a love of the true, the beautiful and the good; for stimulating their talents and aiding them to attain to all the sublimities of knowledge; for assisting them in doubt and despondency and firing them with an ambition to strive for supreme excellence in all that makes for the nobility of manhood and the glory of womanhood; for making them, as Beatrice made Dante after he was renewed and purified in the waters of Eunoe, "fit to mount up to the stars."

"Puro e disposto a salire alle stelle."

The romantic idea of treating woman as a clinging vine, and thus eliminating half the energies of humanity, is rapidly disappearing and giving place to the idea that the strong are for the strong—the intellectually strong; that the evolution of the race will be complete only when men and women shall be associated in perfect unity of purpose, and shall, in fullest sympathy, collaborate for the attainment of the highest and the best. Then, indeed, will man's helpmate become to him and to his children

"More rich than pearls of Ind or gold of Ophir,
And in her sex more wonderful and rare."

Then will men and women for the first time fully supplement each other in their aspirations and endeavors and realize somewhat of that oneness of heart and mind which was so beautifully adumbrated in Plato's androgyn. Then will the world witness the return of another Golden Age—the Golden Age of Science—the Golden Age of cultured, noble, perfect womanhood. Then to all who really think and love will be manifest the clearness and power of vision of England's great poet laureate when in matchless numbers he sings:

"The woman's cause is man's; they rise or sink
Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free.

...*...*...*...*

For woman is not undevelopt man
But diverse: could we make her as the man,
Sweet Love were slain; his dearest bond is this,
Not like to like, but like in difference.
Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;
Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words;
And as these twain, upon the skirts of Time,
Sit side by side, full-summ'd in all their powers,
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,
Self-rev'rent each, and reverencing each,
Distinct in individualities,
But like each other ev'n as those who love,
Then comes the statelier Eden back to men;
Then reign the world's great bridals chaste and calm;
Then springs the crowning race of human-kind.
May these things be!"