“I have always had and am adhering to the idea of leaving the bulk of my property in England for charitable and educational purposes in favour of women. Theirs is, to my mind, the great influence of the future. Education and culture and responsibility in more than one direction, including that of politics, will gradually fit them for the exercise of every power that could possibly work towards the regeneration of mankind. It is women who have hitherto had the worst of life, but their interest, and with their interest that of humanity, is secured, and I therefore am determined to help them to the best of my ability and means.”—Manchester Guardian, June 7th, 1892.
“Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckaback, why it does not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical discovery from that jobber. Ask the digger in the ditch to explain Newton’s laws; the fine organs of his brain have been pinched by overwork and squalid poverty from father to son, for a hundred years. When each comes forth from his mother’s womb, the gate of gifts closes behind him. Let him value his hands and feet, he has but one pair. So he has but one future, and that is already predetermined in his lobes, and described in that little fatty face, pig-eye, and squat form.”—Emerson (Essay on Fate).
Id.... “The British race cannot afford to dispense with all the advantage that may be in embryo in the future female intellect, because men and some women are found who declare that women are intellectually inferior.... No amount of prayers and wishes and submitting to God’s will are of any avail. You must use the organs of the intellect in order, not only to increase their efficiency, but to prevent their going from bad to worse. It might here be noted, that because the British people might choose to be satisfied with atrophy of the intellect lobes in their mothers, it will not at all follow that other nations will do so also. If such things as nations exist, there will always be rivalry and competition, and depend upon it those will be first whose mothers generally possess the most efficient intellect lobes.... Fortunately we have learnt another great lesson, evolved by Charles Darwin’s frontal lobes, and that is, that there is no such thing as a fixed and unalterable tissue or organism anywhere. All organisms and parts of organisms are changeable. Everything—organ and organism—has changed in the past, is changing in the present, and will change in the future in accordance with the conditions that surround it. Women’s frontal lobes and grey matter will certainly be no exception to the rule. Emancipation, keeping her eyes open, and thinking for herself are the three main things she has to keep hammering at, until the lords of creation see that they are the right things to do, to save future generations from universal imbecility.”—E. Bonavia, M.D. (“Woman’s Frontal Lobes”).
2.—“Their stalwart body and their spacious mind;”
“If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
How shall men grow?”
—Tennyson (“The Princess,” Canto 7).
XLIII.
8.—“Where lies her richest gift, ...”
“As I have already said more than once, I consider it presumption in anyone to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot be by natural constitution. They have always hitherto been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a state, that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised, and no one can safely pronounce that if women’s nature were left to choose its direction as freely as men’s, and if no artificial bent were attempted to be given to it except that required by the conditions of human society, and given to both sexes alike, there would be any material difference, or perhaps any difference at all, in the character and capacities which would unfold themselves.”—J. S. Mill (“The Subjection of Women,” p. 104).