Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/52

 shrug, the moral superiority of women, and one is left wondering whether this admission shows the greater contempt for women or for morality. But a few thinkers, more robust and far more logical (for a fine morality is not separable from intellectual force) go the whole way and assert that women as a whole are morally inferior to men as a whole. They say women are notoriously less brave and less truthful than men; their unselfishness is weakness or slavishness, their continence is due to coldness or compulsion. I propose to deal with the physical superiority of men in the next chapter. With regard to their mental and moral superiority, it is an interminable discussion, which is mostly conducted entirely by the light of one's predispositions, and which leads nowhere. There does not seem much that can be profitably said about it except this: that until the incubus of brute force is removed from those who have a smaller share of it, we shall never know what other force they may have. Some of the faults attributed to women are manifestly the faults encouraged by subjection. Men's standards have been applied to women, and it may be that they do not suit women. As barriers have been removed, so many of the old confident assertions about women have evaporated that the scientific mind will suspend judgment for a while. It is quite true that in music, painting, sculpture, poetry, no woman has ever yet attained to the highest that men have attained. It may be that women's lack of genius in the arts is due to some