English poetry -- 19th century; Women -- History; Women -- Social conditions; Women -- Suffrage
_Id._... And Lady Florence Dixie has written:—“Nature gives strength and
beauty to man, and Nature gives strength and beauty to woman. In this
latter instance man flies in the face of Nature, and declares that she
must be artificially restrained. Woman must not be allowed to grow up
strong like man, because if she did the fact would establish her
equality with him, and this cannot be tolerated. So the boy and man are
allowed freedom of body, and are trained up to become muscular and
strong, while the woman, by artificial, not natural, laws, is bidden to
remain inactive and passive, and, in consequence, weak and undeveloped.
Mentally it is the same. Nature has unmistakably given to woman a
greater amount of brain power. This is at once perceivable in childhood.
For instance, on the stage, girls are always employed in preference to
boys, for they are considered brighter and sharper in intellect and
brain power. Yet man deliberately sets himself to stunt that early
evidence of mental capacity by laying down the law that woman’s
education shall be on a lower level than that of man’s; that natural
truths, which all women should early learn, should be hidden from her;
and that while men may be taught everything, women must only acquire a
narrow and imperfect knowledge both of life and of Nature’s laws. I
maintain that this procedure is arbitrary and cruel, and false to
Nature. I characterise it by the strong word of infamous. It has been
the means of sending to their graves, unknown, unknelled, and unnamed,
thousands of women whose high intellects have been wasted, and whose
powers for good have been paralysed and undeveloped.”—(“Gloriana: or,
the Revolution of 1900,” p. 130.)
_Id._... Buckle gives numerous instances which support the foregoing
assertions, saying himself on the point:—“That women are more deductive
than men, because they think quicker than men, is a proposition which
some persons will not relish, and yet it may be proved in a variety of
ways. Indeed, nothing could prevent its being universally admitted
except the fact that the remarkable rapidity with which women think is
obscured by that miserable, that contemptible, that preposterous system
called their education, in which valuable things are carefully kept from
them, and trifling things carefully taught to them, until their fine and
nimble minds are irreparably injured.”—(“Miscellaneous Works,” Vol. I.,
p. 8, “On the influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge.”)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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