Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/56

 It seems doubtful whether, among races where women have the same physical discipline as men, they are any less enduring of fatigue, and there are some hardships, such as shortage of food, broken nights and severe pain, which women seem better adapted to bear than men. Again, of men and women engaged in the same employment, such as the teaching profession—in which no one can say that women have the lighter task, for which women are much less highly paid, and which very rarely represents the whole of the work the woman teacher is expected to get through in the day—the women live longer than the men. The superiority of the male over the female in size, weight and muscle seems the only one established beyond doubt, and as this superiority is seen in most of the animals, there is a strong presumption that it is not entirely due to artificial conditions of feeding, exercise and so forth. The extraordinary increase in the average size of British girls during the last hundred or even fifty years shows, however, that semi-starvation, lack of exercise and of the nervous energy which comes from hope and a purpose in life, were the purely artificial causes of the extreme weakness of the weaker sex during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The experiments that have been made in the reaction-time and relative sensibility of boys and girls, suffer from the circumstance that the subjects experimented upon could not be scientifically treated, and all that the experiments prove is that boys, often fed and always reared