The notion that women are by nature mentally inferior to men, is
primarily due to the fact that their enforced ignorance made them
appear inferior. This is one of the strongest superstitions concerning
women, as it is also one of the oldest. It has been much weakened
by modern experience, but it has by no means disappeared. Indeed,
it has stood in the way of dispassionate scientific study of the
relative mental capacity of the sexes. Havelock Ellis, in his “Man and
Woman,” says that “the history of opinion regarding cerebral sexual
difference forms a painful page in scientific annals. It is full of
prejudices, assumptions, fallacies, over-hasty generalizations. The
unscientific have a predilection for this subject; and men of science
seem to have lost the scientific spirit when they approached the study
of its seat.... It is only of recent years that a comparatively calm
and disinterested study of the brain has become in any degree common;
and even today the fairly well ascertained facts concerning sexual
differences may be easily summed up.” He then proceeds to show that
those differences are few. It might be remarked here that such actual
differences as appear are differences between man and woman as they
now are, and can not be taken as final. If brain-mass, for example,
depends to some extent on physical size and strength, the mass of
woman’s brain should tend to increase as she abandons her unnatural
seclusion, engages in exacting occupations and indulges in vigorous
physical exercise. Already there has been an astonishing change in the
female figure. An interesting indication of this is a recent dispatch
from Germany stating that according to the shoe-manufacturers of that
country the average German woman of today wears a shoe two sizes larger
than the woman of a century ago. If woman’s body tends thus to enlarge
with proper use, so in all likelihood will her brain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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