THE CONDITION OF WOMEN 



349 



secret of influence is a vivid appreciation of the established motives 

 and incentives to conduct. 



The relative power of persuasion of the two sexes, then, may be 

 tabulated as follows : 



According to our hypothesis, the first line of the table should give 

 the arrangement in which the difference is greatest. In the next line 

 the difference is less ; still less in the next ; and least of all in the last 

 case. In all cases, however, the superiority of women in this respect 

 should be very marked. 



Since our feelings are necessarily much more numerous than our 

 judgments, we" should expect to find it much more easy to persuade 

 either a man or a woman than to convince ; but, if our theory is cor- 

 rect, the advantage of influence over argument should be much greater 

 when a woman is to be moved than when the effort is directed to a 

 man. 



Another difference between the sexes will at once be seen to follow 

 from the above parallel. Since male character has the variable ele- 

 ment, and may vary toward either good or bad, it follows that the 

 ideally perfect male character will be more hard to define and more sel- 

 dom realized than the ideal female character. It is difficult to prove such 

 a statement as this, for the sentiments upon which individual opinion of 

 the subject is based hardly admit of exact statement, but that there is 

 an accepted standard of female excellence, and that the women who 

 realize it are not rare exceptions, can, I think, be shown by the study 

 of female character as depicted by dramatists, novelists, and poets. 

 An appeal to this test is unfavorable to our hypothesis, for characters 

 are selected for novels or poems on account of their originality ; but I 

 think that any one who will review Shakespeare, Thackeray, or George 

 Eliot with the subject in mind, and who will compare the more impor- 

 tant female characters, will find that they might be transposed from 

 one novel or play to another with much less violence than would at- 

 tend the transposition of the male characters. 



It is hardly necessary to call attention to the obvious fact that our 

 conclusions have a strong leaning to the conservative or old-fashioned 

 view of the subject to what many will call the " male " view of wo- 

 men. The positions which women already occupy in society and the 

 duties which they perform are, in the main, what they should be if our 

 view is correct ; and any attempt to improve the condition of women 

 by ignoring or obliterating the intellectual differences between them 



