Our nervous woman is well. Slowly, very slowly, she has won flesh and
color, which means gain in quality and quantity of blood. By degrees,
too, she has been able to return to the habits and endurances of health.
And now she asks that other question, "I have daughters who are yet
young, but how shall I guard them against nervousness?" and again puts
forward this single complex symptom in disregard of the states of body
which usually accompany it, and are to us matters quite as grave. She
knows well that the mass of women are by physiological nature more
liable to be nervous than are men. It is a sad drawback in the face of
the duties of life, that a very little emotional disturbance will
suffice to overcome the woman as it does not do the man, and that the
same disease which makes him irritable makes her nervous. Says Romanes,
in an admirable and impartial article on the mental differences of men
and women, "She is pre-eminent for affection, sympathy, devotion,
self-denial, modesty, long-suffering or patience under pain,
disappointment, and adversity, for reverence, veneration, religious
feeling, and general morality." I accept his statement to add that these
very virtues do many of them lead to the automatic development of
emotion, which, in its excesses and its uncontrolled states, is the
parent of much of the nervousness not due to the enfeeblement of
disease.[5]
[Footnote 5: _Journal of Popular Science_, July, 1887.]
With the intellectual differences between man and woman I have here
little to do. That there is difference, both quantitative and in a
measure qualitative, I believe, nor do I think any educational change in
generations of women will ever set her, as to certain mental and moral
qualifications, as an equal beside the man. It would be as impossible as
to make him morally and physically, by any educational or other
training, what the woman now is, his true superior in much that is as
high, and as valuable as any mental capacities he may possess; nor does
my creed involve for woman any refusal of the loftiest educational
attainments. I would only insist on selection and certain limitations as
to age of training and methods of work, concerning which I shall by and
by have something more to say. Neither would I forbid to her any
profession or mode of livelihood. This is a human right. I do not mean
to discuss it here either as citizen or physician; but, as man, I like
to state for my fellow-man that there are careers now sought and won and
followed by her which for him inevitably lessen her true attractiveness,
and to my mind make her less fit to be the "friendly lover and the
loving friend."[7] AEsthetic and other sacrifices in this direction are,
however, her business, not mine, and do not influence my practical
judgments as to what freedom to act is or should be hers in common with
men. For most men, when she seizes the apple, she drops the rose. I am a
little afraid that Mrs. Lynn Linton is right as to this, but it took
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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