Note 91 — Chapter VI · RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG WOMEN.

As a general rule, Darwin says, men go farther than women, whether the matter be one of profound meditation, of reason, or imagination, or simply of the use of the senses or even of the hands. According to certain statistical investigations it appears that the modern female brain has remained almost stationary, while the male brain has developed notably. The brain of a Parisian woman is no larger than that of a Chinese woman, and the Parisian woman labours under the additional disadvantage of possessing a larger foot.

Admitting these facts one may still refuse to infer from them the existence of a congenital incapacity, for the way in which women have always been treated by men and the education that they have received may well have left results which have become hereditary. The education of women has in all times been less strenuous than that of men; and their mind, perhaps naturally less scientific, has never been developed by direct contact with the external world. In the Orient and in Greece, among the nations from whom we derive our civilization, women (at least in families in easy circumstances) were always restricted to a subordinate rôle, confined to woman’s quarters, or withdrawn from all direct contact with the real world. Thence arose a sort of tradition of ignorance and intellectual abasement which has been handed down to us. There is nothing like the brain of a young girl reared at home for gathering to itself completely, and without loss, the whole residue of middle-class silliness, of naïve and self-satisfied prejudice, of strutting ignorance that does not see itself as others see it, of superstition transformed into a rule of conduct. But change the education and you will in a great measure change these results. Even according to Darwin’s own theory, education and heredity can in the long run undo anything that they have done. Even if there should remain a certain balance of intelligence in favor of the male, even if the female should prove to be in the end, as Darwin says, incapable of pushing invention as far in advance as man, it would not follow that her heart and intelligence should be filled with another order of ideas and sentiments than those which are beneficial to men. It is one thing to invent and to widen the domain of science, and another thing to assimilate the knowledge already acquired; it is one thing to widen the intellectual horizon, and another thing to adapt one’s eyes and heart to this more open habitat.