Women -- Social and moral questions; Women's rights
woman of talent. They are all of a kind which fits them for practice,
and makes them tend towards it. What is meant by a woman's capacity
of intuitive perception? It means, a rapid and correct insight into
present fact. It has nothing to do with general principles. Nobody
ever perceived a scientific law of nature by intuition, nor arrived
at a general rule of duty or prudence by it. These are results of
slow and careful collection and comparison of experience; and neither
the men nor the women of intuition usually shine in this department,
unless, indeed, the experience necessary is such as they can acquire
by themselves. For what is called their intuitive sagacity makes them
peculiarly apt in gathering such general truths as can be collected
from their individual means of observation. When, consequently, they
chance to be as well provided as men are with the results of other
people's experience, by reading and education, (I use the word chance
advisedly, for, in respect to the knowledge that tends to fit them
for the greater concerns of life, the only educated women are the
self-educated) they are better furnished than men in general with the
essential requisites of skilful and successful practice. Men who have
been much taught, are apt to be deficient in the sense of present
fact; they do not see, in the facts which they are called upon to
deal with, what is really there, but what they have been taught to
expect. This is seldom the case with women of any ability. Their
capacity of “intuition” preserves them from it. With equality of
experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more
than a man of what is immediately before her. Now this sensibility to
the present, is the main quality on which the capacity for practice,
as distinguished from theory, depends. To discover general
principles, belongs to the speculative faculty: to discern and
discriminate the particular cases in which they are and are not
applicable, constitutes practical talent: and for this, women as they
now are have a peculiar aptitude. I admit that there can be no good
practice without principles, and that the predominant place which
quickness of observation holds among a woman's faculties, makes her
particularly apt to build over-hasty generalizations upon her own
observation; though at the same time no less ready in rectifying
those generalizations, as her observation takes a wider range. But
the corrective to this defect, is access to the experience of the
human race; general knowledge--exactly the thing which education can
best supply. A woman's mistakes are specifically those of a clever
self-educated man, who often sees what men trained in routine do not
see, but falls into errors for want of knowing things which have long
been known. Of course he has acquired much of the pre-existing
knowledge, or he could not have got on at all; but what he knows of
it he has picked up in fragments and at random, as women do.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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