The Business of Being a WomanTarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
General
The Business of Being a Woman
Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
Women -- Social and moral questions
Her attention, interest, respectfulness, docility, will be ahead of
his. It will at once be apparent that she carries the larger stock of
_untaught_ knowledge. In the classroom she will usually outstep him in
mathematics. It is an ideal subject for her, satisfying her talent
for order, for making things "come out right." Her memory will serve
her better. She can depend upon it to carry more exceptions to rules,
more fantastic irregular verbs, more dates, more lists of kings and
queens, battles and generals, and on the whole she will treat this
sort of impedimenta with more respect. She will know less of abstract
ideas, of philosophies and speculations. They will interest her less.
The chances are that she will be less skillful with microscope and
scalpel, though this is not certain. She will show less enthusiasm for
technical problems, for machinery and engineering; more for social
problems, particularly when it is a question of meeting them with
preventives or remedies. In the first two or three years after
entering college, she will almost invariably appear superior to the
men of her age, more grown up, more interested, surer of herself,
readier. Later you will find her on the whole less inclined to
experiment with her gifts, to feel her wings, to make unexpected
dashes into life. It begins to look as if he were the experimenter,
she the conservator. And by the time she is a senior, look out! The
chances are she will have less interest from now on with man's
business and more with her own! In any case she will rarely develop as
rapidly in his field from this point as he is doing.
He becomes assertive, confident, dominating; the male taking a male's
place. He discovers that his intellectual processes are more
scientific than hers, therefore he concludes they are superior. He
finds he can outargue her, draw logical conclusions as she cannot. He
can do anything with her but convince her, for she jumps the process,
lands on her conclusion, and there she sits. Things are so because
they are so. And the chances are she is right, in spite of the
irregular way she got there. Something superior to reason enters into
her operations--an intuition of truth akin to inspiration. In early
ages women unusually endowed with this quality of perception were
honored as seers. To-day they are recognized as counselors of
prophetic wisdom. "If I had taken my wife's advice!" How often one
hears it!
One most important fact has come out of our great coeducational
experiment: The college cannot entirely rub feminity out and
masculinity into a woman's brain. The woman's mind is still the
woman's mind, although she is usually the last to recognize it. It is
another proof of the eternal fact that Nature looks after her own good
works!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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