It might seem, that where we reject the distinction between masculine and feminine virtues, one and the same type of perfection should suffice for the two sexes; yet it is clear that the moment we come to consider the personality, the same type will not suffice: and it is worth consideration that when we place before us the highest type of manhood, as exemplified in Christ, we do not imagine him as the father, but as the son; and if we think of the most perfect type of womanhood, we never can exclude the mother.
Montaigne deals with the whole question in his own homely straightforward fashion:—
“Je dis que les mâles et les fémelles sont jettés en même moule; sauf l’institution et l’usage la différence n’y est pas grande. Platon appelle indifféremment les uns et les autres à la société de touts études, exercises, charges, et vocations guerrières et paisibles en sa république, et le philosophe Antisthènes ôtait toute distinction entre leur vertu et la nôtre. Il est bien plus aisé d’accuser un sexe que d’excuser l’autre: c’est ce qu’on dit, ‘le fourgon se moque de la poële.’”
Not that I agree with Plato,—rather would leave all the fighting, military and political, if there must be fighting, to the men.
Among the absurdities talked about women, one hears, perhaps, such an aphorism as the following quoted with a sort of ludicrous complacency,—“The woman’s strength consists in her weakness!” as if it were not the weakness of a woman which makes her in her violence at once so aggravating and so contemptible, in her dissimulation at once so shallow and so dangerous, and in her vengeance at once so cowardly and so cruel.
I should not say, from my experience of my own sex, that a woman’s nature is flexible and impressible, though her feelings are. I know very few instances of a very inferior man ruling the mind of a superior woman, whereas I know twenty—fifty—of a very inferior woman ruling a superior man. If he love her, the chances are that she will in the end weaken and demoralise him. If a superior woman marry a vulgar or inferior man he makes her miserable, but he seldom governs her mind, or vulgarises her nature, and if there be love on his side the chances are that in the end she will elevate and refine him.
The most dangerous man to a woman is a man of high intellectual endowments morally perverted; for in a woman’s nature there is such a necessity to approve where she admires, and to believe where she loves,—a devotion compounded of love and faith is so much a part of her being,—that while the instincts remain true and the feelings uncorrupted, the conscience and the will may both be led far astray. Thus fell “our general mother,”—type of her sex,—overpowered, rather than deceived, by the colossal intellect,—half serpent, half angelic.