Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/101

Rh from Nature, to interpret the works of the greatest musical composers, to act with taste and discrimination—all these, and a thousand similar accomplishments, each requiring an effort of intellect, are now within the range of women who are no more exceptional than the front rank of men in every generation. Such distinctions may be attained by women who lose none of the charms of womanhood; and even a knowledge of the latest discoveries in science is in no way incompatible with any of the feminine graces. But a little consideration will lead to the conclusion that all this mental activity is but the evidence of human progress in general, and that its root, as well as its most perfect development, is to be found in the domestic life. Long before the invention of printing, mothers amused their children with nursery-tales, lulled them to sleep with songs, and imparted to them the rudiments of such knowledge as the world possessed; maidens and wives could act well enough to deceive husbands or attract lovers in the days of Homer or even of the patriarchs. And many of those beautiful poetical stories which constitute the mythology of all imperfectly civilized nations bear the stamp of woman's imagination, and have often been narrated to excite or to soothe the terrors of the young.

Women, however, with intellects truly masculine, are, and have always been, even more rare than women with a masculine development of muscles. There are few, if any, distinctively masculine pursuits in which any women have ever succeeded; there is no great law of Nature, no great mechanical invention, no great legal code, nor even any great metaphysical system, of which any woman can say, "Of this the world owes the knowledge to me." A reason for this fact is to be discovered not in the inferior quality of the feminine mind, but in the character of the objects to which woman's physical organization naturally directs her attention. The practice of medicine, which is now becoming recognized as a feminine occupation in America, suggests at once that instinct for nursing, which every one admits to be the special gift of woman, and which is, in fact, a correlate of her power to become a mother. In short, if there be any truth in science, the intellect of woman not only has, but must have, a certain relation to her structure; and, if it could be shown that there exists no difference between the male and female minds, there would be an end of anthropology. But the directions in which clever women have developed their mental activity afford the best possible illustrations of the scientific view of woman's position, and show how the long-inherited instinct matures itself according to the truly feminine type. All the different lines, when traced back, converge through the nurse upon the mother.

It should not, however, be forgotten that there may be individual peculiarities of structure, caused by circumstances either antecedent or subsequent to birth, that the constitution of society may