Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/227

Rh possesses in a higher degree than man the fundamental property of all nervous tissue, irritability, or response to any stimulus. The vasomotor system is particularly excitable, and this fact is in immediate connection with her emotional life. That woman is more emotional than man is only another way of stating the same fact. Various expressions and bodily changes which are really the ground of emotions, such, for instance, as laughing, crying, blushing, quickening of the heart-beat, are more common in woman, and in general her face is more mobile and witnesses more to her mental states. Various forms of abnormal mental conditions, closely connected with the emotions, such as hysteria, are more frequent among women. Women are more easily influenced by suggestion than men, and a larger percentage of them may be hypnotized. Trance mediums are usually women. The word witch has been narrowed almost wholly to the female, and this may be explained by the fact that various forms of mental disturbance connected with superstitious notions are more frequently manifested in women. Sympathy, pity, and charity are stronger in woman, and she is more prominent in works that spring from these sentiments, such as philanthropy and humane and charitable movements. Woman is more generous than man. Her maternal instincts lead her to lend her sympathy to the weak and helpless. She cares for the sick and protects the friendless, and, seeing present rather than remote consequences, she feeds the pauper and pardons the criminal.

In morals a few distinctions between the sexes are well determined. Male criminals outnumber female criminals about six to one. Woman's sympathy and love, her physical weakness and timid nature, her domestic and quiet habits, ill adapt her to the criminal life. Morally bad women too usually find other more attractive fields open to them. Some forms of crime, indeed, such as murder by poisoning, domestic theft, and infanticide, are much more common among women. When women do become criminals their crimes are often marked by greater heinousness, cruelty, and depravity. It is said by Lombroso and his school that in respect to cruelty in general woman surpasses man, particularly in her conduct to her own sex. Woman's appetites are not so strong and her passions are less intense. She is freer from intemperance and related forms of vice. The most marked moral superiority of woman appears in her altruism; her greatest moral defect in her untruthfulness. In her altruistic life of love and self-sacrifice woman shows herself the leader in the supreme virtue of Christian civilization. As far as she leads in this, so far does she fall behind in veracity. She has not the same conception of abstract truth as man, but thinks more of the good to be attained. Deception and ruse in woman, far more than in man, have become a habit of