This classification, which would be very imperfect and insufficient, were this a treatise on social organization, being all that is needed for the use that we have to make of it, we shall adhere to it in this place.
Men, and women after them, have deemed proper hitherto to class man and woman separately; to define each type, and to deduce from this ideal the functions suited to each sex. Neither have chosen to see that numerous facts contradict their classification.
What! exclaims the classifiers, do you deny that the sexes differ? Do you deny that, if they differ, they should have different functions?
If our classification does not seem good to you, criticise it, we ask nothing more; but replace it by a better one.
To criticise your classification, ladies and gentlemen, is what I intend to do; but if the elements are wanting to establish a better, can you, ought you even to require me to present you one.
Do you think me a man, that you exact of me abuse of the à priora, and a startling arbitrary course of reasoning. "Proudhon is right," murmur these gentlemen; "woman is incapable of abstract reasoning, of generalizing, of knowing herself"....
Really, gentlemen, do you think that it is through incapacity that I am unwilling to present to you a classification of the sexes, a theory of the nature of woman?... Let us hasten then to prove the contrary: instead of one theory, we will give you four. Man and woman form a series only with respect to the reproduction of the species: all the other characteristics by which it has been attempted to make a distinction between them are only generalities contradicted by a multitude of facts; now, as a generality is not a law, nothing can be therefore concluded from these, nothing absolute deduced from them in a functional point of view.
On the other hand, the greatest radical difference of zoological species lies in the nervous system, especially in the greater or lesser bulk and complexity of the encephalus; now, Anatomy admits, after numerous experiments, that, in proportion to the whole size of the body, the brain of woman equals in volume that of man; that the composition of both is the same, and Phrenology adds that the organs of the brain are the same in both sexes.
Lastly, it is a biological principle that organs are developed by exercise and atrophied by continued repose; now, man and woman do not exercise their encephalic organs in the same manner; educational training, manners, prejudice, enforced habits tend to develop in the masculine what becomes atrophied in the feminine head; whence it follows that the differences empirically established are by no means the result of Nature, but of the accidental causes by which they have been produced.
Conclusion: the two sexes therefore, when reared alike become developed alike, and are fit for the same functions, except those which concern the reproduction of the species.