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,