Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/93

 is neither superiority nor inferiority; but it does not therefore follow, as has been hastily assumed, that there is equality. No two things can be pronounced equal or unequal, superior or inferior, unless there is some common standard by which they can be measured. The color blue is not equal nor inferior, nor superior to the color yellow; and the green, which is produced by the mixture of the two, owes no more to one than to the other. In the same way, humanity is perpetuated by the coexistence of male and female; and, if the functions of either one sex or other were radically changed or perverted, humanity itself would cease to exist.

The most vital point in my present argument is that woman must be regarded as woman, not as a nondescript animal, with a greater or less capacity for assimilation to man. The question, regarded from a scientific point of view, is not how far the female intellect can be trained to imitate the male; but what it may be shown to be from observation, or inferred to be from correlations of physical structure. The argument, from observation, which would be considered sufficient by most men of science, is controverted on the ground that human laws have been stronger than the laws of Nature. It is said that man has oppressed woman by his superior muscular power, and has impeded the natural development of her intellect. If this be true, and if mere strength of body can thus get the better of mind, it is certainly strange that horses and elephants have not become the masters of men; and hardly less strange that the stalwart Negro should long have been the slave of the more intellectual, but not more muscular, white man. But, as it is useless to prove the relations which have existed, to those who preach of relations which ought to exist, between the two sexes, it becomes necessary to investigate the matter from the point of view of physical structure and its correlated functions.

Among other and better known features distinguishing the female sex from the male, are the smallness of the brain case, the width of the pelvis, and the tendency to deposit adipose tissue, rather than muscular fibre. To the rule, of course, there are exceptions; there are masculine women just as there are effeminate men, and those exceptions I propose to consider before concluding, but they ought not to affect the broad general treatment of the subject. To these and other differences of structure, correspond numerous differences of function. Both the capacity and the desire for muscular exertion are less in the female than in the male; the strength of the system develops itself in another direction. So also the desire, if not the capacity, for the prolonged study of abstruse subjects, is less in the female than in the male; and mental activity pursues another course. It does not follow that, because a man can lift a greater weight on the average than a woman, he is therefore her superior, any more than that he is her inferior because she can bear children and he cannot. Nor is