A Woman's Philosophy of Woman; or, Woman affranchised.: An answer to Michelet, Proudhon, Girardin, Legouvé, Comte, and other modern innovatorsHéricourt, Madame d'
Philosophy
A Woman's Philosophy of Woman; or, Woman affranchised.: An answer to Michelet, Proudhon, Girardin, Legouvé, Comte, and other modern innovators
Héricourt, Madame d'
Women's rights -- France
In fact, there are brains of men in heads of women, and _vice versa_.
Men mobile and impressionable; women firm and insensible.
Women large, strong and muscular, lifting a man like a feather; men
small, frail, and of extreme delicacy of constitution.
Women with a stentorian voice and abrupt manners; men with a soft voice
and graceful manners.
Women with short, harsh hair, bearded, with rough skin and angular
figures; men with long, silky hair without beard, round and portly.
Women with an energetic circulation of blood; men in whose veins it
courses feebly and slowly.
Women frank, inconsiderate and daring; men strategic, dissembling and
timid.
Women violent, loving strife, war and contention, and wont to storm on
every occasion; men gentle, patient, dreading strife, and exceedingly
timid.
Women loving abstract reasoning, generalizing and synthetizing much, and
without intuition of any sort; men intuitive, acute observers, good
analysts, incapable of generalizing.... I know many such.
Women insensible to works of art, and without the sentiment of the
beautiful; men full of enthusiasm for both.
Women immoral, immodest, respecting nothing or no one; men moral, chaste
and reverential.
Women extravagant and disorderly; men economical and parsimonious to
avarice.
Women thoroughly selfish, rigid, disposed to take advantage of the
weakness, kindness, folly or misery of others; men full of generosity,
mansuetude, and self-sacrifice.
What follows from these undeniable facts? that the law of sexual
differences is not manifested through the several characteristics which
have been laid down.
That these characteristics may be only the result of education, of the
difference of prejudices, of that of occupations, etc.
That, as these generalities may be the fruit of the difference of
training and surroundings, nothing can be legitimately deduced from them
as to the functions of woman; would it not be absurd, in fact, to pretend
that a woman who is organized for philosophy and the sciences _can not_,
ought not to occupy herself with them because she is a woman, while a
man, who is incapable of them but foolish and vain enough to be ignorant
of his incapacity, can and ought to engage in them because he is a man?
Functions belong to those who prove their aptitude for them, and not to
an abstraction called sex, for, definitively, every function is
individual in its aggregate or in its elements.
VII.
We have explained why we reject the theories that we have sketched; we
will now explain why we neither give nor wish to give a classification of
the sexes.
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