754 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



hood, it is doubtful" whether he would approve of her, although 

 she embodied his theory.* 



Here, also, Mr. Alleu misinterprets the women reformers of 

 England. He states that they " openly refuse and despise mar- 

 riage." Some may ; some write very bitterly of men. But this 

 refusal is for themselves, or for the class to which they belong 

 reformers. In this they do not differ from a large number of 

 religious or political enthusiasts of both sexes, in every age, who 

 claim that their " cause " is superior to individual rights or duties. 

 "Who is the woman in England who maintains such doctrine for 

 the majority of her sex ? One of the ablest advocates for women, 

 Emily Pfeiffer,f writes to her countrymen : 



" You do not well to rest your hope 

 On natures of a narrower scope, 

 And leave the souls which, like your own, 

 Aspire, to find their way alone 

 To go down childless to their graves, 

 The while you get your sons of slaves." 



Though men have greatly outgrown tyranny of thought and 

 action, there is still alive much masculine arrogance. "With many 

 it is entirely unconscious ; it probably is so with Mr. Allen when 

 he calls a literary or scientific education " mannish." I do not 

 know of any purely mannish training except that received by the 

 monks of La Trappe, and that which fits men to be soldiers, sail- 

 ors, blacksmiths, or workmen whose physical force is a necessity 

 to their calling. A college or university education, although in 

 past years given exclusively to men, was never supposed to fit 

 them for any essentially masculine occupation, not even to become 

 the fathers of the future race. It was preliminary to a profes- 

 sional or literary career, and intended to develop the powers of 

 mind. And mind emphasize as we will the physical differences 

 of the body that goes with it has no discoverable gender. The 

 lavish way in which the epithet of " masculine " or " feminine " 

 has been applied to particular minds is utterly destructive of pre- 

 cision of thought. Vigorous minds are called masculine and 

 those of the namby-pamby, sentimental sort are dubbed feminine. 

 This classification may be historically justifiable by the slight 

 appearance women have made in the literary and scientific world, 



* In college days I knew a young lady medical student who illustrated this doctrine. 

 She openly proclaimed that she studied mediciue for the purpose of fittiDg herself to be- 

 come a wife and mother. She enlarged her waist, wore most ungraceful garments, broached 

 her pet idea on social occasions, and was the bete noire of her companions. Perhaps she 

 was Mr. Allen's ideal of an emancipated woman. Her fellow-students thought she had 

 missed the inheritance of womanly instinct, or that some secondary male characteristic 

 had cropped out in her. At last accounts she had not put her precepts into practice. 



f " A Rhyme for the Time," " Contemporary Review." 



