CAPACITY FOR SCIENTIFIC PURSUITS 109 



tellectual advantages as men was as strongly denied as it 

 had been before she had so valiantly championed their 

 cause, and denied, too, on the assumed ground of their 

 innate incapacity. 



It mattered not that during the succeeding centuries 

 other women took up the cause for which the author of 

 La Cite des Dames had so nobly battled; it mattered not 

 that countless women in every civilized country of the 

 globe distinguished themselves by their achievements in 

 every department of science and gave evidence of talent 

 and genius of the highest order ; it mattered not that chiv- 

 alrous representatives of the sterner sex, like John Stuart 

 Mill, came forward to plead the case of that half of human- 

 ity which had so long been held in cruel subjection. The 

 attitude of the world toward the intellectually disfran- 

 chised sex remained unchanged almost until our own time. 



But, although women now enjoy advantages in the pur- 

 suit of science which were undreamed of only a generation 

 ago, the age-old prejudices respecting woman's mental 

 powers and her capacity for the more abstract branches of 

 science still prevail. It is useless to cite instances of 

 women who have attained eminence in astronomy, mathe- 

 matics, archaeology, or in any other science whatever. Such 

 instances, we are assured, are only exceptions and prove 

 nothing. Men like Lombroso are willing to admit the 

 existence of an occasional woman of talent, but they deny 

 the existence of genius in one who is truly a womanly 

 woman. 1 For, with Goncourt, they flippantly assert, II n'y 

 a pas de femmes de genie: lorsqu'elles sont des genies, 

 elles sont des hommes there are no women of genius; 

 when they have genius they are men. 



The reasons that now influence men for affirming the 

 intellectual disparity of the sexes are, it must be observed, 



1 Quando la genialita compare nella donna & sempre associata a 

 grand! anomalie: e la piu grande e la somiglianza coi maschi la 

 virilita. L'Uomo di Genio, sesta edizione, p. 261, Torino, 1894. 



