Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
But because her Intelligent Consciousness is not inherent in her own
brain-half, but is supplied by her borrowed masculine brain-half, her
intelligence is more superficial, is weaker and less deep and strong of
grip than is his. And when the gap between her upper and her lower
registers is not duly bridged and stabilised by an efficient
middle-register of male-intelligence, she tends toward two extremes of
mentality, both of which are emotional. Thus she lives on the plane of
her highest emotional impulses. Or she lives on the plane of her senses.
Some women act and re-act perpetually between these two extremes.
In her highest _Supra_-reaches, she is athrill with Supra-faculties. In
her lowest _Sub_-register, she is instinct and palpitant with the
colour, the magnetic vibrations and the blind forces of Matter, which
her vital processes are evolving into Life.
Extremes which are shown, at the one end, in the reasonless animal
emotionalism of hysteria, with its abandon of control, its
inco-ordinated muscular movements, its senseless weepings, cries and
laughter; at the other end, in catalepsy, in which she exists detached
from earth and its material needs and consciousness, subsisting, it may
be for weeks together, without food or drink, withdrawn into the Inner,
and potential, zones of Life and Mind. So that, no longer subject to
limitations of Matter, she perceives without aid of the senses,
apprehends without aid of intelligence, discerns without help of the
eyes, hears without instrumentality of ears. And Time and Space no
longer circumscribing her essential faculties, she visions happenings at
the Antipodes, overhears whispers across a Continent, recalls The Past,
foretells The Future.
It is because of the potence of the Subconscious medium in her,
instinct with the magnetic forces of Evolving Matter, that, in her
intelligence, she shows as more materialistic than man is, although
warmer and more quickened in her feelings.
Living personalities and issues mean to her more than intellectual
abstractions do. She is more materialistic because she cares more for
the things that matter! The puddings which in her children's young
bodies will be transmuted into living flesh and function, are to her of
more significance than the Isosceles Triangle is.
(All that is true of the Woman brain-half must be true of the Woman
brain-half in man. In him, however, his own hemisphere dominates the
bent and faculty of its female counterpart.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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