EQUALITY. AND INEQUALITY IN SEX. 191 



has been brutalized by manual labor and drink. The advocates of 

 Paris who are accustomed to plead for the workmen have remarked 

 that the women are able to put their cases much better than their hus- 

 bands, and often say to the latter, " Send me your wife." 



The biological considerations we have adduced explain to us why 

 the two sexes tend to diverge from each other as we proceed from the 

 lower to the higher classes. Both sexes among peasants and working- 

 people having nearly the same moral and intellectual faculties, they 

 can sympathize with each other, and have no reason for becoming es- 

 tranged. It is different among the intelligent classes, where the two 

 sexes, in consequence of the increasing pre-eminence of man, not hav- 

 ing the same ideas, the same sentiments, nor the same tastes, can not 

 understand each other, and form separate coteries. Moralists have 

 long taken notice of the separation, which is of force in the family and 

 in the meetings of men and of women, which seem to be increasing 

 from year to year. 



According to M. Le Bon's researches, the different social classes 

 should be ranked by their cranial capacity as follows : literary and 

 scientific men, middle-class men {bourgeois), nobles, servants, peas- 

 ants. The separation of which we speak widens as we rise from the 

 peasant to the man of science, passing the servant, the noble, and the 

 middle-class man. It appears, then, like the pre-eminence of man over 

 woman, to be measured proportionately to the cranial capacity and 

 the development of intelligence. 



It might be thought that the physical and intellectual inferiority 

 of woman is a consequence of her muscles and brain being less exer- 

 cised than those of man. This is not correct. As to bodily strength, 

 it readily appears in the circus, where the two sexes receive the same 

 physical education, that the boy is always more vigorous than the girl, 

 and constantly maintains his superiority over her. Some difficult feats 

 which the men perform regularly are forbidden to the women. The 

 view that the intellectual superiority of man and inferiority of woman 

 are due to differences in education is likewise not just. In former 

 ages, when the mass of the people were groping in ignoranc?, neither 

 sex was better instructed than the other ; and now, in the France of 

 to-day, there are still six hundred thousand children of both sexes who 

 never set foot in a school, and receive absolutely no education. We 

 can, then, say with Professor Bischoff, of Munich, that " women have 

 suffered no other hindrances to the exercise and evolution of their 

 brains and their intellect than those that are derived from their con- 

 stitution and their faculties of development." The pretense that 

 woman never receives the same education as man is, moreover, false. 

 Female pupils receive precisely the same musical instruction at the 

 music-schools as male pupils. How comes it then that, although there 

 are incomparably more women than men following music as a pro- 

 fession, women furnish good performers but no composers? The same 



