Even a pessimist may find cause for rejoicing in this final wording of the “woman question.” Man’s search for the female genius is more consoling than his sorrowful quest for the snows of yesteryear. For snows, like all beauty, have a way of melting with time; a mind ripens and mellows with age. Granted a mind which it is no longer a shame or a battle to develop, women can look upon the passing of the years with at least as great an equanimity as does man. She remains in the picture of life long after the Maker’s paints have begun to dry. And that is good. But as long as the female geniuses remain undiscovered, it must be also a bit insecure. Women may have minds—every average man will now grant that. But (he will quickly ask) have they ever much more than average minds? Look at history, which this time really does prove what you want it to. Every high peak in the historic landscape is masculine. Point them out just as they occur to you: Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Virgil, Horace, Catullus, Plato, Socrates, Newton, Darwin, Pasteur, Watt, Edison, Steinmetz, Heine, Shelley, Keats, Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, Tolstoi....
Where are the female geniuses?
It has really become much more than a question of feminist conversation. Science has attempted to put its seal of approval upon the implied answer to this rhetorical question. It has sought to put the notion that “a woman is only a woman, but a genius is a man,” into impressively scientific lingo. The argument goes something like this: In regard to practically all anatomical, physiological, and psychic characteristics, the male exhibits a greater variability (i.e. a greater range of spreading down from and up above the average) than the female. The male is the agent of variation; the female is the agent of type conservation. This sex difference operates in the realm of mental ability as everywhere. In any comparable group of men and women, the distribution of intelligence will tend to follow the law of chances (Gaussian Curve). But female intelligence will cluster far more about its average than male. There will be more imbeciles and idiots among men, but there will also be more geniuses. It is really very simple, as the following arbitrary example will show. Supposing you take comparable sample groups of 1000 men and 1000 women from a given population. After testing them for grade of intelligence, you classify them according to previously accepted “intelligence classes.” Your results would tend to read a little like this:
| Intelligence Class | Number Men | Number Women |
|---|---|---|
| Idiots | 10 | 3 |
| Inferior | 100 | 50 |
| Slow | 200 | 150 |
| Average | 380 | 595 |
| Able | 200 | 150 |
| Highly Talented | 100 | 52 |
| Geniuses | 10 | .. |
Of course none of the proponents of this theory would state the alleged facts of man’s greater variability in such bald terms. But all of them would agree that men do vary more than women and in some such fashion. In this greater variability they see the explanation of men’s monopoly of genius.
According to Karl Pearson this “law of the greater variability of the male” was first stated by Darwin. Somewhat earlier, the anatomist Meckel had concluded that the female is more variable than the male. It is interesting to note in passing that he consequently judged “variation a sign of inferiority.” By the time Burdach, Darwin, and others had declared the male more variable, however, variation had become an advantage and the basis and hope of all progress. To-day great social significance is attached to the comparative variability of the sexes, especially in its application to the questions of sex differences in mental achievement. Probably the outstanding English-speaking supporters of the theory in its modern form have been Havelock Ellis and Dr. G. Stanley Hall. But even so cautious a student as Dr. E. L. Thorndike has granted it his guarded support. And Dr. James McKeen Cattell has explained the results of his study of 1000 eminent characters of history by means of it. Indeed many others hold the theory in one form or another—e.g. Münsterburg, Patrick. What is most important, of course, is that its supporters do not stop with the mere statement of the theory. They ascribe to it tremendous effects in the past and ask for it a large influence in the shaping of our policies in the present.
For Havelock Ellis, the greater variability of the male “has social and practical consequences of the widest significance. The whole of our human civilization would have been a different thing if in early zoölogical epochs the male had not acquired a greater variational tendency than the female.” (“Man and Woman,” p. 387.) Professor Hall builds up upon it a scheme of gushingly paradisaical (and properly boring) education for the adolescent girl, which “keeps the purely mental back” and develops the soul, the body, and the intuitions. (“The Psychology of Adolescence,” Vol. II, Chap. 17.) Just because Professor Thorndike is so careful in his statements, his practical deductions from the theory are most interesting: “Thus the function of education for women, though not necessarily differentiated by the small differences in average capacity, is differentiated by the difference in range of ability. Not only the probability and desirability of marriage and the training of children as an essential feature of women’s career but also the restriction of women to the mediocre grades of ability and achievement should be reckoned with by our educational systems. The education of women for such professions as administration, statesmanship, philosophy, or scientific research, where a few very gifted individuals are what society requires, is far less needed than education for such professions as nursing, teaching, medicine, or architecture, where the average level is essential. Elementary education is probably an even better investment for the community in the case of girls than in the case of boys; for almost all girls profit by it, whereas the extremely low grade boy may not be up to his school education in zeal or capacity and the extremely high grade boy may get on better without it. So also with high school education. On the other hand, post graduate instruction to which women are flocking in great numbers is, at least in its higher reaches, a far more remunerative social investment in the case of men.” (“Sex in Education,” Bookman, Vol. XXIII, April, 1906, p. 213.)
Before we begin the revision of our educational systems in accordance with this theory, we must make sure that it really explains away the “female geniuses.” For although the theory is still widely held by biologists and psychologists, it requires only a short study to discover how tenuous is the evidence adduced in support of it—in all its phases, but especially in regard to mental traits. Darwin apparently gave no statistical evidence to support “the principle,” as he called it, and those who have followed him have done little to fill the lack. Professor Hall offers evidence that is almost entirely empirical; Havelock Ellis has been attacked by Karl Pearson for doing much “to perpetuate some of the worst of the pseudo-scientific superstitions to which he [Ellis] refers, notably that of the greater variability of the male human being.” Professor Thorndike, in spite of his conclusions, admits that it “is unfortunate that so little information is available for a study of sex differences in the variability of mental traits in the case of individuals over fifteen.” And while the overwhelming majority of Professor Cattell’s 1000 eminent characters are men, he merely states without proving his explanation that “woman departs less from the normal than man.”
Wise feminists to-day are concentrating their forces upon this theory. Women have won the right to an acknowledged mind; they want now the right to draw for genius and high talents in the “curve of chance.” And this is no merely academic question. For while genius may overcome the sternest physical barriers of environment, it is nourished and developed by tolerant expectancy. Men may accomplish anything, popular thought tells them, and so some men do. But if women are scientifically excluded from the popular expectation of big things, if their educations are toned down to preparation for “the average level,” if motherhood remains the only respected career for all women, then the female geniuses will remain few and far between. And, more important still, all thinking women will continue restless over the problem of how to secure the chance to vary in interests and abilities from the average of their sex, and at the same time to be wives and mothers.
In this fight for a full chance to compete, woman may do one (or all) of three things. She may merely ignore the theory and go on “working and living,” trusting that as environmental barriers fall one after the other, this final question, too, will lose its meaning. She can point out in support of this attitude that the past does contain its female geniuses, however few; and certainly if all the barriers that have been set up against woman’s entry into the larger world have not entirely stifled female genius, we may at least look forward hopefully to a kinder future. Something of this attitude, of this demand for free experimentation, must make part of every woman’s armor against the implications of this theory. But taken alone, it becomes more merely defensive than the status of the theory deserves. For it is really the theory that must defend itself. It must not only bring forward more affirmative evidence, but it must also meet the contrary findings of such investigation as has been made. It must, again, prove its title to the cause of the scarcity of female geniuses when so many other more eradicable causes may be at its bottom.