394 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



not accustomed to the philosophical analysis of facts which argues 

 that the conspicuous absence of women in the field of intellectual work 

 is due to the artificial restraints imposed upon them by all the tradi- 

 tional forms of education ; that if we could suddenly make a leap of 

 progress in this respect, and allow women everywhere to compete on 

 fair and equal terms with men, then, under these altered circumstances 

 of social life, women would prove themselves the intellectual compeers 

 of man. 



But the answer to this argument is almost painfully obvious. Al- 

 though it is usually a matter of much difficulty to distinguish between 

 nature and nurture, or between the results of inborn faculty and those 

 of acquired knowledge, in the present instance no such difficulty ob- 

 tains. Without again recurring to the anatomical and physiological 

 considerations which bar a priori any argument for the natural equality 

 of the sexes, and without remarking that the human female would but 

 illustrate her own deficiency of rational development by supposing that 

 any exception to the general laws of evolution can have been made in 

 her favor without dwelling on any such antecedent considerations, 

 it is enough to repeat that in many departments of intellectual work 

 the field has been open, and equally open, to both sexes. If to this it 

 is answered that the traditional usages of education lead to a higher 

 average of culture among men, thus furnishing them with a better 

 vantage-ground for the origin of individual genius, we have only to 

 add that the strong passion of genius is not to be restrained, by any 

 such minor accidents of environment. Women by tens of thousands 

 have enjoyed better educational as well as better social advantages 

 than a Burns, a Keats, or a Faraday ; and yet we have neither heard 

 their voices nor seen their work. 



If, again, to this it be rejoined that the female mind has been un- 

 justly dealt with in the past, and can not now be expected all at once 

 to throw off the accumulated disabilities of ages that the long course 

 of shameful neglect to which the selfishness of man has subjected the 

 culture of woman, has necessarily left its mark upon the hereditary 

 constitution of her mind if this consideration be adduced, it obviously 

 does not tend to prove the equality of the sexes ; it merely accentuates 

 the fact of inequality by indicating one of its causes. The treatment 

 of women in the past may have been very wrong, very shameful, and 

 very much to be regretted by the present advocates of women's rights; 

 but proof of the ethical quality of this fact does not get rid of the 

 fact itself, any more than a proof of the criminal nature of assassina- 

 tion can avail to restore to life a murdered man. We must look the 

 facts in the face. How long it may take the woman of the future to 

 recover the ground which has been lost in the psychological race by 

 the woman of the past, it is impossible to say ; but we may predict 

 with confidence that, even under the most favorable conditions as to 

 culture, and even supposing the mind of man to remain stationary (and 



