Part 23
Now it is very possible that a greater _number_ of the actions of women have their ground in unconscious causes than of the actions of men. The subjects upon which action is of vital concern to them have been different subjects, and hence their stored-up stock of knowledge is knowledge about different subjects. To the woman of the past, who was to a great extent confined to her own home, the temper of her house-mates was what her happiness depended upon more than anything else in the world. It was impossible that she should not acquire a keen intelligence in interpreting every slightest shade of expression upon the human face. But this sort of knowledge is always instinctive, whether it is practised by men or by women. If the eyes of the most reasonable man in the world should chance to show him a certain curve of the lip and a certain elevation of the posterior angle of the alæ of the nostrils on the face of the fair lady to whom he was talking, would he try to call to mind the pictures in Sir Charles Bell’s great work on expression and the general theorems in Darwin’s book on the same subject, and piecing this and that laboriously together, would he try to arrive at some just conclusion regarding the contents of the fair lady’s mind? Would he not, rather, instinctively change the subject of conversation, or even discreetly beat a retreat, long before he had time to _think_? Women’s interests have been so exclusively social that they have developed a sense for the physical expression of emotion which makes society for them a matter of complicated relations, of delicate susceptibility to play of feeling, which—except in the hyper-sensitive period of courtship—is not common among men. But there are men who are quite the equals of women in this respect; and if any man is markedly deficient in these qualities, we recognise him as belonging to a low and brutal type which is in process of extinction. If a woman on the other hand, goes into business, she does not fix the prices of her straw hats each morning in accordance with the feelings which straw hats awaken in her when she first looks at them, but in accordance with the fluctuations of the market. The President of a New Hampshire Street Railway did not carry through her improvements by her intuitions, but by a plain, common-sense weighing of reasons. Nor are all masculine occupations under the guidance of the reasoning faculty. If you go to a stove-man and ask him to mend your smoking chimney, does he do it by reason? Not a bit of it! There may be stove-men who have enough knowledge of the laws which regulate the movements of masses of hot air to be able to apply general principles to particular instances, but in the course of a long and checkered experience with stove-men, it has not been my lot to fall in with them. Their knowledge of chimneys, such as it is, is got by experience and applied by intuition, and nothing is farther from their minds than any trace of deductive reasoning. It is not that there are men’s minds and women’s minds, but that there are theoretical subjects and practical subjects, and that knowledge is not the same kind of knowledge in both.
Intuition, in the sense in which it is used when discussing male and female minds, is a word of double meaning: it covers those actions which we go through with by instinct, or inherited experience ingrained from the beginning in our nervous structure, and those which we perform automatically, or by individual experience become so familiar that it can act as a guide without the aid of conscious reflection. The relative distances of objects looked at we know instinctively; the trained musician with mind intent upon expression, reads his notes automatically; the beginner at the piano goes through a painful process of syllogism before each key is struck. All is, at bottom, reason; in one case it is conscious; in another it is unconscious, but can be forced into consciousness; in another, it is unconscious and cannot by any effort be made conscious. Because a woman’s interests lie more than a man’s in regions in which thought is instinctive and automatic, it does not follow that she has developed any peculiar powers of intuition. Nor is there any possibility that mothers should occasionally transmit their powers of intuition to favored sons, as Mr. Grant Allen, in the course of his apotheosis of the uneducated woman, has somewhere suggested; some men have poetic and æsthetic minds, and in regions of poetry and art mental activity is largely of the instinctive kind. It is different with powers of reasoning. Good powers of reasoning may be transmitted from mother to son, but that is merely saying metaphorically that a good firm texture of mind may be transmitted. Hume and James Mill are two men who are supposed to owe much to their mothers, but their peculiar powers are not usually considered to lie in regions of intuition. No mother has ever produced an intuitive mathematician. Nor would any one who knew anything about the higher mathematics for a moment suppose that when a great mathematician leaves out intermediate steps in a printed book, he had jumped at his conclusions by instinct. It is simply that, with his thorough knowledge of this particular subject, the intermediate steps have seemed to him too easy to set down. If his book is hard to read, it is simply because he has assumed a greater amount of learning in his readers than they are in possession of.
The question whether intuition or reason is the nobler faculty is an exceedingly meaningless question. All knowledge which finds frequent occasion to be put in practice has a tendency to become first automatic and then instinctive. Human progress consists in making conscious action automatic as soon as it can be done with safety, and in setting free consciousness to attend to more and more complicated combinations of circumstances. After the musician has learned to read his notes mechanically, shall we urge him to go back to the period of conscious linking of note to key, because reason is a diviner gift than intuition? Is it desirable to turn the act of walking into a conscious fitting of muscular tension to variations in the position of the centre of gravity in order to distinguish ourselves the more effectually from the brutes that perish? Reason is merely intuition in its formative stage, and the sooner all our present reasoned convictions become mechanical, and conscious thought is set free to bring in more and more far reaching considerations to bear upon our actions (including in that term our conclusions), the sooner will a higher form of life be reached.
Wundt’s students have made some experiments in his laboratory in the last two or three years, which throw a great deal of light upon this question,—they have caught automatism in the very act of formation. It has been noticed that different observers differed very much in the reaction time which they assigned to the several senses,—that is, the time required, for instance, to hear the tap of a bell, and to press a button in response. Wundt’s students found that there are two different reaction times,—in one, time is taken to bring the tap of the bell into the focus of consciousness and to decide consciously what to do in response; in the other, the process is unconscious. The first is nearly twice as long as the second, and both are very constant quantities, for the same sense. The exact figures are, in seconds:
FULL. SHORT. Sound .216 .127 N. Lange ” .235 .121 Belkin ” .230 .124 L. Lange Light .290 .172 L. Lange ” .291 .182 Martius
It may be inferred from this that, even in the simplest matters intuition is very nearly twice as valuable a “faculty” as reason, as far as economy of time is concerned. (It would be interesting to determine the difference in fatigue.) But the interesting point is that the experimenter can teach himself to give either reaction time at his pleasure. If he thinks of his ears, he has a feeling of strain in them, and a long reaction time; if he directs his attention to his fingers (or if he thinks of indifferent matters) he is unconscious of what is going on, and his reaction time is short. It is plain that the more of these educated brain-reflexes we can produce, the fuller and more complicated lives we shall be capable of carrying on. It may also be assumed that the ideal human being is the one who has many brain-reflexes, but who is capable of bringing them all into consciousness upon occasion. Connections that we cannot make conscious are a frequent source of illusion. When we move the eye-ball about by the will, objects seem to remain stationary; but when, putting the finger on the under eyelid, we push the eye-ball up and down in the socket, we cannot help _perceiving_ that objects are moving up and down. Prof. William James suggests as a good experiment that some one who has eyes that he is not afraid of injuring should do this pushing several hours a day, and see if he cannot force conscious reason to do her work and to make him _see_ that the objects are not moving.
For perfectly regular circumstances,—that is, for the world of nature or of human character so far as is governed by fixed laws,—reflex action presents an immense economy of time and work. To provide against extraordinary emergencies, it would seem to be desirable that we should have the power of interposing consciousness in the chain which begins with stimulus and ends in action. Whenever a large number of considerations, or considerations of an abstract character, have to be weighed and balanced, then reason is the only sufficient guide.
That women have no deficiency in the power of putting this and that together, when _this_ and _that_ are pieces of knowledge which are in their possession, is absolutely proved by a single circumstance. Geometry is a branch of learning which is entirely built up out of abstract reason, pure and undefiled. Geometry is studied, in the United States, in high schools, and it must not be forgotten that there are in this country (according to the Report of the Bureau of Education) _three times_ as many girls as boys who take the high school course. It cannot be said, therefore, (as is said of girls who go to college) that the girls who go to the high school are a selected lot; they are the very bone and fibre of the women who make up the country. Now if women could not reason, we ought to hear a great hue and cry from the teachers of the geometry classes about the difficulty of teaching that subject to girls, and the girls ought to lament and moan over the impossibility of getting safely through with their demonstrations. Is this the case? I have never met with a teacher of geometry who thought his boys did better than his girls,—I have met with several who thought the reverse. As long ago as 1865, Her Majesty’s Inspector of schools, after travelling through this country, said: “The teachers all tell me that the girls do fully as well as the boys in mathematics,—fully.” Nor are any sad effects noticeable upon health or spirits. Day after day an army of girls goes smiling into the class-room and comes smiling out, utterly unaware that an unnatural wrench has been given to their delicate minds, and that they are being rapidly transformed into monstrous products of over-reason.
If girls show no defect in reason in the class-room, neither do boys show any defect in intuition,—in fact, their intuition about stretched strings and lines on balls are usually better than those of girls. I have kept a record for many years of errors committed by boys and by girls, and I have not been able to detect any difference in their character. It is true that it was a boy who once failed to get a problem in trigonometry for a week, because it was not expressly stated in the book that the milestones to which the problem related were a mile apart. My intimate acquaintance with the character of his mind prevented me, however, from attributing this failure in intuition to his superior reasoning powers.
The simple matter is that a good _mind_ has good reasons and good intuitions both. Both qualities are summed up in the expressive popular phrase, “having your wits about you.” If you are in full possession of your wits, you will trust to your instincts, when you must; to your acquired reflexes, when there is no sign of danger; and to your reason, when the question requires debate. It would be greatly for the good of the race if the common virtues should become more instinctive in men; and if women should be put into a position in which they can reflect more wisely upon the virtues which are only just in process of getting known to be such. The only reason that women do not guide themselves by far-reaching principles in their every-day conduct, is that they have not made themselves acquainted with the doctrines of political economy and of abstract ethics. When women are in full possession of the higher education, there is no danger that they will not put it into practice, so far as it leads to practice. The human mind is so constituted that it cannot help taking account of all its knowledge. Propositions merely learned by rote, or the truth of which it is not absolutely convinced of, it may leave one side, but not what it really _knows_. Nor is there any danger that woman will lose her powers of intuition. The knowledge and skill which she has acquired in social matters will not desert her because she has made herself familiar with the speculations of philosophers, and can turn to them for guidance in the intricate questions of conduct which the complexities of modern life give rise to. So long as a woman’s highest duty was to please her lord and master, her task was simple, but women are now awake to a sense of wider responsibilities. They are now aware that it is their highest duty _to be_ the best possible kind of a human being, and _to do_ whatever lies within their strength towards making the world the best possible kind of a world to live in. For this end they have urgent need of _all_ the gifts that God has given them; and he who would cripple their reason on the ground that intuition is a pleasing and a poetic guide, would do them a grievous wrong.
CHRISTINE LADD FRANKLIN.
CRUELTY AND PITY IN WOMAN.
I.
CRUELTY.
Spencer says[24] that among savage nations the women are as perverse as the men, and that if they do not work so much evil it is because they are less able to do so. This is not entirely true; doubtless women among savages are much more inclined to cruelty than to pity, but, generally speaking, woman even at the very beginnings of human evolution is less cruel than man.
WOMAN AND WAR.
Woman, even among savage nations, is rarely a warrior. In the Antilles, the women watched over the safety of the islands whenever their husbands went to war with the neighboring islands; they were brave, strong, courageous, nearly equalling the men in their cleverness in handling weapons.[25] Amongst the ancient Bretons, armies were always commanded by women. In Dahomey, the élite of the army is composed of a troop of six or seven thousand Amazons, who are very ferocious, particularly in the mutilation of dead bodies; women then become tigers, is a popular saying. Among the ancient Scots, women followed the army, and cruelly mutilated the prisoners. Among the Botocudos, when war breaks out between the tribes, the men fight the men with sticks, and the women fight the women, by scratching and by tearing the _botoques_ (cylinders of wood) from their ears and lips.[26] But these are all exceptional cases. Generally speaking, the savage woman plays a secondary part in war; she acts as an auxiliary, picks up arrows, throws stones from a distance, and carries the provisions etc.
REVENGE.
It is above all in revenge, that feminine cruelty shows itself the most terrible. Man is capable of destroying whole families or nations, to satisfy a particular revenge; but nothing equals the ingenuity of woman, in slowly tormenting her victim, in gloating over his sufferings and lengthening them out in order that her enjoyment of vengeance may endure as long as possible.
In Tasmania, when the _black war_ broke out between the English and the aborigines, the Tasmanian women terribly tortured the prisoners, in order to avenge their companions who had been carried off by the English. We must also attribute to the desire for vengeance, the torments inflicted by the women upon prisoners of war among the Red Indians.
Elizabeth of Russia, betrayed by her lover, obliged him to marry a deformed dwarf, and to pass his wedding night in an ice palace, where the furniture and the bed were all of ice. The next morning, attended by her Court, she went to present the newly wedded pair with a bouquet. She found them, stretched out upon their bed of ice, nearly frozen. She then banished her rival to Siberia first causing her ears and nose to be cut off.
A wealthy Russian Prince, in love with a very beautiful peasant girl of fifteen, took her to live with him for five years; at the end of which time, wishing to contract an alliance, he paid her a sum of money in dower and obliged her to marry a peasant. The young girl made no sign for ten years, until the death of her husband; but after the lapse of that period, a rising having taken place among the peasantry against the nobles, she excited them and led a body of peasants to the castle of her ancient lover, had him taken and dragged into his _izba_, harnessed him to the plough instead of the oxen, and for three days obliged him thus to work, lashing him with the whip each time that he fell to the ground. At night she led him to the stable and made him lie down with the oxen; compelling him to eat fodder with the beasts and making merry over his sorry plight. This amusement lasted for three days, at the end of which time, the man fell dead in one of the furrows he was ploughing.[27]
A Russian, an idle and worthless fellow who had let his wife suffer hunger, proposed to her that she should be sold as a slave to the Sultan. After some hesitation, she accepted and they started off; but when they had gone about half the way, the husband having fallen asleep intoxicated, the idea came into her mind to sell him for a slave, in her place. She then tied him on the horse, started off again on the road and arriving at the place of rendezvous, she delivered her husband to the merchant, and remained to watch the Turk push the half-awakened man into the boat, laughing whilst he showered blows upon him.[28]
A young Russian peasant woman lived with a small land-owner, who betrayed her; at last she took refuge with a band of brigands, who treated her like a queen. One day she caused two of them to capture her old lover, and had him brought to the camp where she used him as a kind of living foot-stool: when she sat down she covered him with a carpet and put her feet upon him, and when she wanted to go out she made him carry her on his shoulders.
CRUELTY TO THE HELPLESS.
Woman sometimes displays the same amount of ingenuity in tormenting the helpless creatures who may be in her power. I do not know, says Bourgavel, any one more perfidious, immoral, or perverse than the New Caledonian woman. In certain portions of Australia women are mortal foes to each other. When the men wish to punish any one of them, they turn her over to her companions, who inflict upon her horrible tortures.[29] Sitting on her body, they cut her flesh with sharpened stones.
In Tasmania, as amongst the ancient Saxons, the unfaithful wife was punished by her companions; she was not killed, but she was tortured for a long time with sharp pointed stones or knives, in all parts of her body.
Women have often been cruel mistresses to their slaves. A lady in Guiana, being envious of a very handsome mulatto slave, had her branded on the mouth, cheeks and forehead. In the case of another slave, who was also very beautiful, she had the tendon of Achilles cut thus causing her to become a deformed and crippled monster.[30]
It is a notorious fact that Roman and Greek ladies often inflicted most terrible punishments on their slaves, and that it was more particularly towards the female slaves, the _ancillæ_, that the cruelty of their mistresses was shown. The Roman ladies, if, while they were having their hair dressed, they were vexed with their attendants, used to thrust pins into their arms and breasts. Darwin relates that at Rio Janeiro, an old lady possessed a kind of thumb screw which she had had made expressly to crush the fingers of her slaves.
EPIDEMIC CRUELTY.
During periods of great national excitement, such as revolutions, feminine cruelty shows how far it can go.
The women, writes M. Du Camp, were the fiercest heroines of the Commune; it was a woman who incited the assassination of the Dominicans. When the hostages were shot, they surpassed the men in cruelty; they taunted them with not knowing how to kill. When employed to seek out the insurgents they were implacable; when acting as infirmarians, they killed the wounded by giving them brandy to drink.
At the time of the French Revolution, on the days of execution, writes M. Legouvé,[31] the front rows nearest the guillotine were reserved for the women of the political clubs. They even hung on to the boards of the scaffold, in order the better to witness the death throes of the condemned, and drowned the cries of the victims by their peals of laughter.
II.
PITY.
But again we find a series of contradictory facts, which bear witness that the sentiment of pity also is much keener in woman than in man.
Even with animals, we observe this phenomenon. Hens often separate two young cocks who are fighting together. Sir George Le Grand Jacob has observed females of the wild goat (Steinbock) raise with their heads he-goats that had been shot, support them and help them to escape. Romanes relates, that sometimes the female gibbon, takes great care of all the members of the troop when they are wounded, even if they are not related.[32]
The savage woman also is very often kind and good. It is notorious that the explorers of savage countries have often escaped serious perils, thanks to the kindness of the native women. Australasian women have often revealed to European travellers the plots laid against them by the men of their tribe: they have even risked their own lives for that purpose.[33] Stanley, at the island of Bambyrch, on the Nyanza, was roughly greeted by the natives, who were desirous of exterminating his expedition; but a woman came to warn him and to advise him to perform a certain ceremony with the King Shekka by which he would acquire his friendship. In Senegambia an old woman, meeting Mungo Park, who was half dead of starvation and had just been despoiled by a negro king, gave him food, and went away without waiting to be thanked. Another time the same traveller, being left with nothing but his saddle, was hospitably entertained by some women, whom he heard chant these words as he fell asleep: “The winds roared and the rain beat, the poor white man came and sat down under our tree, he had no mother to give him milk, no wife to grind him corn. Let us take pity on the white man, he has no mother, etc., etc.”[34] Michelet says that woman was the first physician; and certainly she fulfils the office of infirmarian among many savage peoples, the Esquimaux, the Mincopies, etc. etc.