"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?