The Mind of Woman

I

THE question of the mental characteristics of women, while it still retains psychological interest and practical importance, has been much narrowed down in recent times. Of old there were always champions of the intellectual excellence of women (usually masculine champions), but they appeared to be maintaining a brilliant paradox. Most people, whether men or women, seem to have felt that women had little use for mind; it was their husbands’ business to furnish that; their part was to seek knowledge, as they were taught to seek God, through men. The sphere of women was generally held to be — as it still is commonly held to be in Germany, though to-day no country is so actively engaged in disproving this statement—children, church, cooking. It had not apparently become clear that there is no sphere more important, and none in which the exercise of intellect is more supremely desirable. Popular theories received a rude blow from that great eighteenth-century movement of thought, culminating in the French Revolution, which taught that all human beings are born equal and that differences are due merely to environmental conditions, to social inequalities. Useful as this movement in practice was, the notion itself, though it still has its belated survivors among ourselves, was crude and simple-minded as a complete account of the matter. The more searching biological method of the nineteenth century arose, and led to a reaction which at first fostered new superstitions on a pseudo-scientific basis; for it was widely asserted that women, even by the anatomical conformation of their brains, are intellectually inferior. Now that view also possesses only historical interest. It is almost undisputed that a species like our own, which has reached so high a degree of success, could have progressed only through the possession of a marked superiority in both sexes.

The question has thus lost something of the interest which it may have possessed when it was a kind of game of sex-rivalry; to-day, when we see a sex animus of this kind introduced into the question, we know at once that the discussion has been placed on an antiquated and unprofitable foundation. Yet the problem of the varying mental characteristics of men and women still possesses a very real interest; for we know that sexual differences are consistent with sexual equality, and we know, moreover, that psychic sexual differences are inevitable so long as there are physical sexual differences; for since body and mind are linked at every point, like minds in unlike bodies are unthinkable.

One of the most interesting and most discussed aspects of this question is the sexual distribution of genius. It is by no means a matter of primary practical importance, for genius is always a rare and incalculable element in human life. But it is so often dragged to the front in the consideration of the question before us, that it is necessary that we should know how to deal with it as against those who have too summarily settled its significance, in the light of their own prejudices, whether on one side or the other.

Genius, as roughly distinguished from talent,—which simply means the ability to do better what others do well, — is the far rarer ability to do something which others have hitherto been unable to do. Such ability involves a radically abnormal temperament, for it means seeing the world from a different angle from other people and feeling it with a different sensibility. Such a person is necessarily solitary, a rebel at heart, and highly charged with an energy which manifests itself in play, or in work which has the characteristics, and the zest, of play. This energy is derived from a reservoir which, it is sometimes held, normally yields the energy of sex or the energy of war, and is in genius diverted into a new channel. Among people with much sexual energy or much fighting energy — as was notably the case among the Greeks — we should thus expect to find genius more than usually abundant.

Now, if— striving to put aside anything we may have heard regarding the sexual distribution of genius — we ask ourselves which sex in the human species is the more apt to be abnormal, solitary, rebellious, playful, with the greater reserves of sexual energy and fighting energy behind it, most people, it is probable, would find themselves in agreement. As a matter of fact, genius, as generally recognizable, is incomparably more often met with in men than in women. There is no doubt on this point. Among British persons of genius, placing the question on an objective basis, I found that only 5.3 per cent were women, while, in history generally, Professor Cattell finds it is 3.2 per cent. Dr. Cora Castle, in a more special and comprehensive study of eminent women, found, a little to her dismay, that from the dawn of history to the present day only 868 women have ‘accomplished anything that history has recorded as worth while.’ Moreover, the eminence thus attained has by no means always been due to ability, but often to quite other qualities and even to the accident of position. By Dr. Castle’s objective method, Mary Queen of Scots comes out as the most eminent woman of history; and while she was doubtless one who would have attracted attention in whatever social circle she had been born, she was not a woman of genius and very dubiously even a woman of talent.

There is no doubt about the fact; but when the question is thus placed upon a foundation much broader than that of genius in the narrow sense of the term, it is easy to see that, up to a certain point, the fact has no significance. Women have not so often been eminent as men for the very good reason that they have not so often had occasion to be eminent. Even as queens, though they have shone on the throne, women have had less occasion for eminence than men because they have not always been eligible as monarchs. In the learned professions, where talent so easily leads to success and fame, women have been more decisively shut out from eminence; for, save very occasionally, these have been absolutely closed to women until yesterday, and are to some extent closed still. That is a completely adequate reason why in the list of eminent women great lawyers, great preachers, great politicians, who so abound among eminent men, have no existence. For the display of talent, even for the exhibition of notoriety, opportunity is necessary, and such opportunity has not been accorded in the same measure to women as to men; in some countries and at some periods, indeed, it has not been accorded at all.

But it is another matter when, as in the past so often happened, ‘ lack of opportunity’ was invoked to explain the deficiency of women of genius in the narrow and special sense. A little consideration would soon have shown the emptiness of that unintelligent parrot cry. Even the very fact that opportunity is so essential for the attainment of success in the ordinary social and competive fields of accepted ability, might have suggested a doubt whether opportunity is of much value in the development of genius, which is necessarily novel and solitary, a revolt against the abilities of the ordinary social and competitive fields, and perhaps a lifelong object of hatred, contempt, or, at the best, indifference, to t he community in which the unhappy genius-possessed victim lives. The world has never offered opportunities to genius in men, and it might, even be said that, for the sake of a little charm or a touch of piquancy, it is readier to condone genius in women than in the other sex. As a matter of fact, however, women of genius have had just the same difficulties to overcome as men of genius, and they have overcome them exactly as men have overcome them, single-handed, and in the end triumphant. This has been so even on the stage, where one might imagine that a woman’s path is easy. It is true that some great actresses, and also some great actors, have been born to the stage, being themselves the children of actors. But many actresses —a far larger proportion than have enjoyed the advantages of respectable middle-class birth — have sprung out of the gutter, slowly and painfully to attain success and fame.

One of the greatest of actresses, Mademoiselle Clairon, left an autobiography which supplies a highly instructive picture of the thorny path of genius in women. A seven-months child, weak and small, harshly brought up by a superstitious and violent mother, in ignorance of all the refinements of life, and knowing nothing up to the age of eleven but how to read a prayer-book, she yet rebelled against the career of work-girl for which she was intended. It so happened that she was often shut up, alone and without occupation, in a room from which, by standing on a chair, she was able to look across the street into the room opposite, where, by a strange chance, lived a popular young soubrette actress; and here she could see the actress taking her dancing lessons. That vision decided Clairon’s career, but she was still only at the beginning of a long series of difficulties which, with infinite patience and skill, she finally overcame.

How little all that we understand by opportunity — social equality, educational facilities, open professional careers — counts for in the development of genius in woman, is shown by the remarkable fact, brought out by Dr. Castle, that, in the most recent historical period, eminence has been attained by a proportionately smaller number of women than was the case in the eighteenth century. This is so as regards England, France, and Germany, as well as America; Italy is, in a small degree, an exception; but, on the other hand, Italy in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries was more prolific in eminent women than in either the eighteenth or the nineteenth. Even within the ordinary range of ability it would appear that opportunity, as tested by that college training which is usually held to mean so much for men, plays but a very small part. A few years ago, Amanda Northrop investigated the 977 successful women of America on the basis of Who’s Who in America and found that only 15.5 per cent of them had received a college training. Moreover, the college played a decreasing part, and the percentage of successful American women who had been college-bred was less for those born between 1860 and 1870 than for any preceding period.

The fact is that all that we conventionally term ‘opportunity’ is wasted on genius, worse than wasted, for in the midst of such opportunity genius runs the risk of being stifled. Genius is more likely to be at home in the gutter or in the desert, and it is out of such soils that the most exquisite genius has sometimes grown. During the Middle Ages, women in the cloister enjoyed just the same opportunities as men for the development of genius, but the one woman of literary genius who arose in the cloister during all those ages, Hroswitha, wrote plays which are in violent and startling contrast to the cloistered life. If genius is less often manifested in women than in men, the cause is not to be found in environment. but within; it is an intimate secret of structure and mechanism. We find genius more often in men, just as we find transposed viscera or twelve-toed feet more often in men; just as we also find that even the papillary ridges of the fingers show greater polymorphism and asymmetry in men than in women. For the cultivation of such anomalies all the opportunities of the world are offered in vain.

II

When we turn from genius to what, we commonly regard as its opposite, that is to say to idiocy,— although it would really appear that genius and idiocy are more closely related than we usually imagine, — we seem to see a similar preponderance of the male. There is no question that in all institutions for the feeble-minded, idiocy in most of its varying forms and degrees is more prevalent in males. It is true that Miss Leta Hollingworth, on the ground of her experience at the New York Clearing House for Defectives, argues that there is a fallacy in the results presented by institutions. There is not the same amount of social pressure on girls as on boys, she holds, so that the feeblest-minded girls are not so readily driven out of the world by the stress of mental competition. The undoubted fact that girls are more precocious than boys is also a protection to them from this point of view; a female of the mental age of six (as measured by the Binet scale), Miss Hollingworth states, survives in society about as well as a male of the mental age of ten or eleven. Even apart from this, it is much easier for the weakminded woman to obtain employment than for the weakminded man; in her own feminine environment her weakmindedness is much less likely to attract attention than that of the weakminded man in his environment. There may be something in this argument. It falls into line with the conclution of Cyrus Mead in Indiana, that feebleminded girls more nearly approximate to normal girls than feebleminded boys to normal boys. And that conclusion again is but a special example of the wider law of which every student in the great field of sexual differentiation is forever finding confirmation: that the organic characteristics of man vary more widely, more extravagantly, than those of woman, who tends, as it were, to keep closer to her centre of gravity.

Even if we are disposed, with Miss Hollingworth, to regard the greater tendency of the male to idiocy as a mere fallacy, due to women being normally nearer to the threshold of idiocy than men, but able by their precocity and cleverness to disguise the fact, we should still have to recognize that we are in the presence of an exception to a general tendency. For most of the congenital abnormalities to which we may most properly compare idiocy are recognized as more prevalent among males than among females. There is, in other words, a greater variational tendency of the male. A ‘variation,’ as it has always been understood by biologists, who were necessarily the first to be concerned with this phenomenon, is a congenital anomaly due to some early deviation of growth not traceablyof the nature of disease. Color-blindness is a typical variation, and, as is so often the case with variations, it is much more frequent in males than in females. So it is also with left-handedness and albinism and congenital deaf-mutism, as well as with most of the various physical abnormalities.

This tendency was well recognized by Darwin, as by most biologists. Some years ago, however, investigators who were not biologists entered this field and confused the issues by applying statistical methods, which in themselves were undoubtedly sound and accurate, to data which had no connection with the innate variational tendency; so that, notwithstanding all the vaunted virtues of the methods, the results attained could only be unsound and inaccurate. Those methods were specially applied to differences in size, even in the size of adults, — for here was a seductive field for the mathematical statistician, — and conclusions were drawn as to the comparative ‘ variability ’ of the sexes on this basis. It should have been obvious that nothing could thus be learned concerning the comparative incidence of innate variations in males or females. At the best the inquiry would have to be restricted to the time of birth, and even then was liable to be affected by fallacies. This is now, no doubt, generally recognized, and most biologists to-day seem prepared to reaffirm the old doctrine of Darwin that variations are more apt to appear in males than in females.

III

This question of the comparative frequency in men and women of the two extremes of intellect and idiocy is of considerable interest, and so much weight has sometimes been placed upon it that it has been necessary to discuss it with some care. But its practical importance, it must be repeated, is small. The concerns of life are carried on within the ordinary range of intelligence, and sexual differences here, if there are any, produce much more effect than even the most striking differences at either of the two extreme ends. Such ordinary differences in intelligence can be studied either in the school among the young, or among adults in the various vocations which men and women follow together. Precise investigation, however, encounters many difficulties.

There is, for instance, the very fundamental difficulty, as regards adults, that while men and women are employed together in many occupations, it is by no means easy to find them doing exactly the same work together under exactly the same conditions. Nearly always some fairly obvious consideration, such as the undesirability of giving night-work to women, or the impossibility for them of work involving a heavy strain on the muscles, causes a sexual division of labor, and this is fatal to any precise investigation into sexual differences. I encountered this difficulty many years ago when I endeavored to ascertain the experience of the English Post Office, which employs so large a number of both men and women clerks. Although the work of the Post Office clerk, male and female, may seem to the public uniform, yet it was practically impossible to find men and women doing exactly the same work together under exactly the same conditions. It was thus impossible to secure any precise and unimpeachable data revealing sexual differences in intelligence and ability. Nothing was forthcoming but opinions of officials, founded on experience, it is true, but necessarily of a merely general character; and these opinions on the whole fairly balanced each other.

That seems to be the result nearly always found in the long run in the occupations in which both men and women are employed. Real conflict of opinion occurs only when there is a question of introducing women into an occupation previously exercised by men. Conservative prejudice in such a case induces the belief that women are not fitted for this occupation, and after experiment there may be a reaction to the contrary belief that they are better fitted for it than men. This happened lately in England with regard to fruit-picking. The farmers held that women would not be able to do this work so well as men; but the shortage of men owing to the war made the employment of women necessary, and then the farmers enthusiastically declared that the women excelled the men. It will probably be found in the end that the aptitudes of the sexes for this, as for other occupations, are, taken all round, about equal. Such differences as practical experience reveals generally are not in intelligence, but are merely the results, in skill and aptitude, of fundamental sexual distinctions which are obvious and well recognized. Such are the much greater average muscular development and power of men; the liability of women under ordinary industrial and civilized conditions to suffer physical disturbance; the comparative lack of occupational interest in women, due to the fact that they usually look forward to marriage as their eventual career; and the inevitable reaction on conduct in life of the different nature of the primary sexual activities — the aggressive energy of the male and the maternal protectiveness of the female, qualities which become transformed, in the ordinary course of life, into initiative activity in men and social and philanthropic activity in women. Such differences seem rarely to have any measurable practical influence on intelligence, except in so far as they produce fatigue; and even in aptitude and skill it has been found, at some time or some place, that women have been able to exercise efficiently every occupation, even the most strenuous, exercised by men. The only avocation of men which women have never exercised, save very rarely, and on the smallest scale, is the soldier’s. We may perhaps conclude that fighting is not, in the complete sense, a human vocation.

It is at the same time quite true that attempts have been made, on a more or less scientific basis, to ascertain psychic sexual differences in adults. Perhaps the most notable attempt in recent years is that set forth by Professor Heymans, of the Dutch University of Gromingen, in his very interesting book, Die Psychologie der Frauen. Professor Heymans is a trained scientific psychologist; he is unusually free from bias; and he belongs to a country where women have long enjoyed a considerable degree of equality with men. He employed the enquête method, and sent out detailed questionnaires to Dutch physicians concerning the families they were acquainted with. It is a disputed method, but on this occasion some of its disadvantages were avoided. The physicians were women as well as men, and their answers concerning individuals of each sex, given in percentages, may be compared and any sexual bias, if present, easily be revealed. Heymans concludes that the chief fundamental distinction between men and women is the greater emotionality — or, as I have termed it, affectability — of women. The figures given by the women observers showed this even more clearly than those of the men.

Consequently all the mental, moral, and other characters, desirable or undesirable, which are correlated with emotionality, are especially found in women, and will continue so to be found so long as emotionality is more marked in women than in men. This need not necessarily be forever. Heymans regards it, indeed, as fundamental, and puts aside with contempt the notion of those who imagine that education or even racial experience can have created the characteristics of the sexes; it is much more likely, he declares, following Steinmetz, that sexual differences influenced culture than that culture created sexual differences. But fundamental differences can probably be modified by sexual selection; men mould the women of the future, and women mould the men of the future, by the ideals which affect their choice in marriage. Women are what they are because men have so far chosen them so, and men have likewise been created by women’s choice. In so far as the sexual difference in emotionality is more fundamental than this, Heymans does not attempt to explain it. But it may not be beyond explanation. Though the congenital variational tendency may be more marked in men, the very different quality of variability is more marked in women.

‘ Souvent femme varie’ is a physiological verity. Such variability is inevitable in an organism so largely concerned with reproduction, and may well constitute the physical side of emotionality. So that even the most admired qualities of feminine intelligence, in so far as they are correlated with emotionality, may have a deep physiological root.

IV

On the whole, we are not brought by either experience or science to any precise or detailed knowledge of these minute and subtle mental differences between men and women, which yet, we cannot fail to believe, inevitably exist. We turn more hopefully to the school and the college, where boys and girls are found working in the same way under the same conditions, and have been subjected during recent years to a vast amount of experimentation, especially in America and in Germany. Even here, however, we meet with misleading facts at the outset.

One such fact of fundamental importance is the greater precocity, physical and mental, of girls. This is marked even from infancy, and it seems now to be proved that girls walk and talk earlier than boys. The female — it is perhaps a general tendency in Nature — tends to attain complete development earlier than the male. One imagines to one’s self that Nature, aware of the special stress which will be placed upon woman by reason of her preponderant part in reproduction, anxiously hastens woman’s development in preparation for that stress. The result is that the girl tends to be a more capable and intelligent person than the boy of the same age. This is a fact which seems to be unknown to those legislators whose mania it is to make laws for the ‘protection’ of young women. It is also overlooked by those who consider that the comparison of data derived from the examination of school-children is finally decisive for sexual differences. The intellectual tasks of school life are not those of adult life in the world, and even if they were we could by no means be sure that sexual differences would remain the same as in early life. Men apparently often continue to progress after women have ceased to do so, and thus illustrate the old fable of the hare and the tortoise; in one small field, that of drill-work in arithmetic, this seems to have been clearly shown, and the majority of investigators report a better rate of improvement in boys, even though girls may at the outset have been faster. Such investigations have led to the generalization that, while girls are more industrious than boys, the natural limits to which girls can raise themselves by industry are sooner reached than by boys.

It is generally agreed by investigators that boys are superior to girls in judgment and reasoning, in mathematics, and in analytical processes generally, for there is, as Heymans and others have concluded, a deep feminine dislike of analysis, probably connected with the emotionality of women. In most other respects schoolgirls seem to be either equal to schoolboys or superior to them.

The general result is that during school-life girls stand better than boys of the same age in most measures of general intelligence. The girls are decidedly better in the majority of tests of memory, which counts for so much in most branches of school-work, and it is also generally held that they are more impartially industrious. It must at the same time be pointed out that these qualities are by no means necessarily the highest qualifications for success on a wider stage of life. Memory, as Josiah Morse has found, is the chief aptitude in which colored children excel, while they are inferior to white children, as girls are inferior to boys, in judgment and reasoning.

Special aptitude, again, so important for future life, is not correlated — as Ivanoff found at Geneva, notably in regard to drawing — with general intelligence or impartial industry. Here, as ever, we find that advantages are balanced by disadvantages. The student in this field may best prepare himself for the inevitable conclusion by devoutly reading Emerson’s essay on Compensation.

V

It is something even to be able to feel confidence in this conclusion which still remains so vague. Sexual differences in mind arc deeply rooted, even though subtle and elusive, and in their distribution a balancing equivalence prevails. We are still only at the beginning of the inquiry, as all careful investigators insist. That is why so many of the statements reached seem to be contradictory. Frau Rosa Mayreder in her thoughtful Survey of the Woman Problem has brought forward some of these contradictions with gentle ridicule. It must be remembered, however, that a sex which presented no contradiction in its characteristics could scarcely present anything of vital worth; even a nation of any worth presents vital contradictions.

Moreover, seeming contradictions, when really well based, can often be reconciled in a higher unity, even when they are not due mainly to the varying influence of different temperaments or different environments. Some insist on the petty immoralities of women, as shown, for instance, in a predilection for smuggling, and others on their over-conscientiousness as shown by the frequent breakdown in health of workgirls when promoted to the post of manageress or forewoman. It is easy to accept such seemingly opposed conclusions without disputing the truth of either. So with the greater sympathy of women, and at the same time their greater cruelty; these are but two diverse aspects of the same emotionality.

Similarly, the narrow conclusions of the specialist are often misleading, even when just. Dr. Mathilde von Kemmitz, a Munich gynecologist, has lately come to the conclusion that the majority of the intellectual women of to-day are ‘asthenically infantile,’ adding that this cannot be assumed to be either a cause or a result of their intellectual activity, and that we can draw no conclusions from it regarding the women of to-morrow or women in general. This is no doubt an admirably cautious reserve. But if she had possessed a wider outlook, Dr. Mathilde von Kemmitz might have reached a more illuminating conclusion. There is an element of the child in the man of genius; it is not therefore surprising that we should find it also in women of the same temperament; when, moreover, we reflect that it is precisely in the infant that brain and nervous mass are relatively largest, it would be surprising if high intellect were not associated with a tendency to the presence of the infantile type. The facts of the specialist, however carefully wrought, taken separately, tell us nothing. Yet they are the precious fragments of mosaic by which alone we can form any large and harmonious picture of the universe.