Woman in Science Part 34

Such being the case, what, we may ask, would have been the result had women, from that splendid Heroic Period of which Homer sings until the present, enjoyed all the opportunities of mental development of which men have systematically claimed the exclusive privilege?[261] What would now be their condition if, from the days of the Muses--who were but learned women apotheosized--women had never been deprived of their intellectual birthright and had been permitted to continue in the path so auspiciously blazed by Corinna--the victor over Pindar--and Arete, the splendor of Greece and the possessor of the mind of Socrates and the tongue of Homer? What would not now be their intellectual efflorescence, if Plato's dream of twenty-three centuries ago of giving women equal rights with men in all things of the mind could have been realized; if those ardent female disciples of his, who so lovingly followed him through the streets of Athens--"the home of the intellectual and the beautiful"--and hung on his lips during his matchless discourses in the groves of the Academy and on the banks of the Ilyssus, could have continued that race of intellect and genius which was the admiration and the inspiration of all h.e.l.las during the most brilliant period of its marvelous history?

Speculating only on what the gifted daughters of Greece might have achieved, we may easily believe that they would have kept pace with their most highly gifted countrymen, and that, following in the footsteps of Sappho and the other Muses of the "Terrestrial Nine," they would have been worthy rivals of Homer, Pindar and aeschylus, and would have occupied a prominent place in that brilliant galaxy of genius composed of such luminaries as Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Euclid, Archimedes, Theophrastus, Polygnotus, Diophantus, Pausanias and Thucydides.

To those who base their opinions on what so long has been the absurdly anomalous condition of women and who, in formulating their theories of human progress, completely ignore the fundamental laws of heredity, such conjectures will seem extravagant, if not chimerical. But, when one bears in mind the universal fact that offspring, whatever the s.e.x, inherits its characteristics and its powers from both parents alike; that the soul, unlike the body, has no s.e.x, and that, so far as legitimate indications from the teachings of biology and psychology can serve as a guide, there is no valid reason for a.s.serting the mental superiority of man over woman, one will be obliged to confess that these surmises are far from being either fanciful or preposterous.

It is then the veriest sophism to predicate woman's incapacity for science and for intellectual achievements of the highest order on what she has not accomplished in the past, or on the comparatively limited number of her contributions to the advancement of knowledge; for up till the present she has, for the most part, been but a dwarf of the gynaeceum,

"Cramp'd under worse than South-sea isle taboo."

Had men been compelled to labor under similar conditions, it is doubtful if they would have accomplished any more than women have now to their credit.

Considering woman's past achievements in science, as well as in other departments of knowledge; considering her present opportunities for developing her long-hampered faculties, and considering, especially, the many new social and economic adjustments which have been made within the last half century, in consequence of the greatly changed conditions of modern life, it requires no prophetic vision to forecast what share the gentler s.e.x will have in the future advancement of science. That it will be far greater than it has been hitherto there can be no reasonable doubt. That the number of savantes of the type of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Sonya Kovalevsky and Mme. Curie will be greatly enlarged there is every reason to believe. That among these coming votaries of science there will be more than one woman who, even in the most abstruse sciences, will stand

"Upon an even pedestal with man,"

seems to be a.s.sured by the achievements of many who are now so materially adding to the sum of human knowledge.

Is it probable that the future will bring forth women whose achievements in science will rank with those of Euler, Faraday, Liebig, Leverrier, Champollion and Geoffry Saint-Hillaire? It would be a rash man who would answer in the negative. We cannot, as De Maistre seems to do, reason from what they have not done--when everything was against them--to what they may do when conditions shall, in every way, be as favorable to them as they always have been to the dominant s.e.x.

Still rasher would be the man who would attempt to prove the negative of this question. Mere _a priori_ arguments, based on preconceived bias or on the vague and groundless impression that woman is essentially and hopelessly the intellectual inferior of man, have no more value than gratuitous opinions. The unprejudiced seeker after truth will insist on a demonstration based on incontrovertible facts. He will appeal to history to learn what the s.e.x has already accomplished, and to science to inquire if there be anything in the female brain to differentiate it from that of the male, or to preclude woman from attaining the highest rank in the activities of the intellect.

The result of such an investigation will, I think, cause even the most biased person to suspend judgment, if it does not induce him to align himself with those who, finding no differences in the mental endowments of the s.e.xes, have reached the conclusion that the day will come, and, mayhap, in the near future, when the achievements of women will be on a par with those of man. The facts stated in the preceding chapters seem, not unreasonably, to point to such a conclusion, if, indeed, they do not warrant it as a necessary inference.

A few considerations germane to this discussion will ill.u.s.trate the danger of forming hasty judgments regarding questions like the one under discussion.

During the last hundred years no country in the world has done more for the education of the ma.s.ses than the United States. Everything that money could purchase and ingenuity suggest has been adopted to develop the minds and stimulate the latent talents and genius of our youth. From the primary schools to the highest and best equipped universities, a special premium has been put on success in study, and the highest rewards have awaited those who should make any notable contribution towards the advancement of knowledge. But, notwithstanding all the educational advantages our people have enjoyed and all the encouragement they have received to achieve something of supreme excellence, our great country with its teeming millions attracted from the most gifted nations of the Old World has not yet produced a single man who has attained the highest rank in either literature or art or science. Far from having a preeminent master of song like Homer or Dante, we have not even a poet approaching Goethe or Ta.s.so or Camoens. We have no Cervantes, no Milton, no Racine, no Moliere. America has produced no Raphael or Michaelangelo; no Mozart or Wagner or Tschaikovsky. Nor has it given us a Descartes, a Leibnitz, a Newton or a Darwin. Would any one, from this complete absence in America of representatives of the highest order in literature, art and science, ever dream of concluding that we shall never have such favorite sons of genius and such giants of intellect?

Does our comparative intellectual sterility in the past, and in a country which seemed specially adapted to foster genius and attainments of the highest order, justify any one in inferring that the days of great geniuses, like the days of demiG.o.ds, are gone never to return?

And yet the number of men in our broad commonwealth who, during the past hundred years, have enjoyed such signal opportunities for attaining distinction in every domain of intellectual effort is incomparably greater than that of all the women so favored since the earliest days of human history. If, from the first flowering of Greek culture to the present day, as many millions of women had enjoyed all the transcendent advantages of education as have been in the United States so lavishly accorded to the same number of millions of men, who will say that very many of them would not have attained a much higher rank in science, as well as in art and literature, than has yet been reached by any man that America has yet produced? Who even, on the evidence now available, would be warranted in denying that at least some of these millions of women might have attained the very highest rank in every department of intellectual achievement?

Gray, in his _Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard_, muses on the potential statesmen and the "mute, inglorious Miltons" of those countless mult.i.tudes who, for lack of opportunity to develop their inborn gifts, were condemned to pa.s.s their lives in obscurity and die, "to Fortune and to Fame unknown." But how much more truthfully could his words have been applied to that much larger number of women of rare mental powers to whose eyes knowledge

"Her ample page Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll,"

and whose G.o.d-given genius was ruthlessly suppressed from the cradle to the grave?

We are still in ignorance as to many of the conditions which are essential to the development of genius and which contribute to its loftiest flights. We have yet to learn how far the efflorescence of the human mind is aided and modified by heredity, environment, atmosphere, as well as by education, encouragement and other stimuli equally potent.

But we do know that Germany, in spite of its famed universities and its feverish intellectual activity in many departments of knowledge, had to wait many long dreary centuries before it could point to a Goethe, a Schiller, a Humboldt, a Bach, or a Beethoven. We know that France--so long the reputed center of culture--has so far produced no great epic poet, no Cervantes, no Murillo. But shall we affirm that she will never give to the world imperishable works like _Paradise Lost_, _Don Quixote_ or the _Immaculate Conception_? We know that Athens, which during the most brilliant period of its history counted only fifty-four hundred free-born citizens--less than the population of a small modern town--was able to produce within a very brief epoch more men of supreme distinction than all the rest of Europe from the Age of Pericles until the dawn of the Renaissance. Hers is still the art of the world, the literature of the world, the philosophy of the world, the culture of the world. For twenty-five centuries her canons of taste and beauty have guided poets, orators, artists; and her matchless productions have been the inspiration, as they have been the despair, of the greatest geniuses of our modern world.

Had the women of Greece not been put under constraint just as they were beginning to exhibit the splendid results of their intellectual activities; had they been encouraged to develop to the utmost their richly-dowered minds, as were the men, a far larger number of them, no doubt, would have been as successful in carrying off coveted prizes in the intellectual arena as was Corinna in her contests with Pindar. And they would, likewise, as we may easily conceive, have greatly added to the number of masterpieces of Greek intellect in science as well as in art and letters.

But the opportunity for women to test their powers, which was so wantonly s.n.a.t.c.hed from their sisters in the h.e.l.lenic world, seems again to be offered to their s.e.x. This opportunity, as has been stated, is due chiefly to their persistence in claiming the same right as men to intellectual development as well as to the countless proofs they have given that their demands are founded on reason and justice. What shall be the outcome of the new opportunity for woman to prove her capacity as compared with man's in things of the intellect remains to be seen, but, from indications she has during recent years given of her powers in every branch of scientific inquiry, there can be little doubt that it will be of such character as to place woman on a higher intellectual plane than she has yet occupied. In physical strength and in the rougher conflicts with the world she will doubtless always remain "the lesser man," but, once she feels in full possession of liberty

"To burgeon out of all Within her,"

she will duly justify her advocates who throughout the centuries have been

"Maintaining that with equal husbandry The woman were an equal to the man."

Not the least of the contributing factors to woman's intellectual growth, and especially to her future achievements in science, are the recent adjustments for women in social and economical conditions brought about chiefly by far-reaching changes in the industrial world. Even so late as the last half of the nineteenth century the energies of women, when they were not engaged in the kitchen or the nursery, were spent on the domestic loom, spinning wheel and the knitting needle. All the various processes from carding the wool to making it into clothing for all the members of the family were in the hands of the housewife.

Ready-made clothing was far from being as common and inexpensive as it is now. Canned foods and cereals, which do away with so much of the drudgery of the kitchen, were unknown. Electricity, which has proved to be such a remarkable aid in every modern home, was little more than a mysterious force that was utilized in the electric telegraph. Most of the domestic labor-saving machines were still in their infancy and possessed by but few people. Large fortunes were confined to only a favored few in our great metropolises. The ma.s.s of the people was preoccupied with the struggle for existence.

But science, the spirit of invention and the advent of the age of machinery have completely changed the conditions of life which obtained but a generation ago. They have not only opened up for women countless occupations that were undreamed of in their mother's time, but have also given to tens of thousands of them the necessary means and leisure to indulge their tastes for study and research and enabled an ever increasing number of them to realize their aspirations for achieving distinction in the divers departments of scientific research.

As an instance of this marked change in the intellectual activity of women, we need only consider what an important part they now take in our present prodigious literary output, as compared with their share in similar work but a few decades ago. As authors, as writers and readers in the editorial rooms of our leading periodicals, as contributors to learned journals and reviews dealing with every branch of science, even the most abstruse, they now occupy a conspicuous place and are doing work that is quite as creditable as that of men.

And it is no longer necessary, in deference to public sentiment, for them to write under a pseudonym, for it is no longer considered unfeminine, as it was in the time of the Bronte sisters, for women to acknowledge themselves the authors of books or of articles in magazines.

If they elect to devote their lives to literary or scientific work, they will not be deterred from so doing by what Mrs. Grundy may say, or by the fear that some feeble imitator of Moliere may dub them as _Precieuses Ridicules_. The value of their productions, like those of men, is gauged solely by merit and not by any narrow-minded considerations of the author's s.e.x.

So also will it be in all other occupations where women choose to gain their livelihood by devoting themselves to scientific pursuits rather than to manual labor or to secretarial work in the counting-room. There are positions open for them in colleges, universities and the government service where, as professors or experts in every branch of science, their talents have full liberty of action and where they have the same opportunity of achieving distinction in their chosen life-work as have their male colleagues.

In Germany there are to-day a million more women than men. It is the same in England. In France the number of women who are widows or unmarried or divorcees or mothers with full-grown children aggregates no less than four and a half millions. A similar condition obtains in other parts of Europe. A large percentage of this number is without home ties and, as the old fields of labor are no longer open to women, they are forced to find new ones. They naturally demand the privilege of exercising their talents in occupations which are most congenial to them. Many have no inclination for any of the avocations in the industrial or commercial world, but have a very decided inclination as well as talent for scientific pursuits. Hence the ever-increasing number of women who seek employment in chemical and biological laboratories, in museums and astronomical observatories, as well as aspire to professorships of science in schools and colleges. From this large number of votaries of science some are sure to achieve distinction in their calling and to contribute materially to the advancement of knowledge. In the course of time the number of those, like Mme. Curie, Mme. Coudreau, Mary Kingsley, Sonya Kovalevsky, Eleanor Ormerod, Caroline Herschel, Zelia Nuttall, Harriet Boyd Hawes, Donna Eersilia Bovatillo, Sophie Pereyaslawewa--to name only a few--who will become prominent as chemists, explorers, naturalists, mathematicians, entomologists, astronomers, archaeologists, biologists will be vastly increased, for women will find a greater stimulus for such work and more numerous demands for their service in the constantly expanding sphere of scientific research.

Many women will, doubtless, become specialists in some specific branch of science, particularly if they have a genuine love for it, or be fired by an ambition to achieve fame as discoverers. But it is not probable that they will ever specialize to the same extent as men do. For men scientific work has to a large extent become a _metier_, and success, as in industry, depends on a division of labor. Hence it is that their field of investigation is daily becoming more and more circ.u.mscribed.

This is observable in all the sciences, but especially in such all-embracing sciences as chemistry, biology, and archaeology. A man now does well if he master a single branch of any of these sciences, and is hailed as exceptionally fortunate if he succeed in making some notable discovery in his limited field of research. So great, indeed, has been the activity of scientific men in every department of science during the last half century, and so thoroughly have they explored the most hidden recesses of nature, that it, at times, seems as if there were but little left to discover. A prominent scientist recently well expressed the difficulty of making any striking additions to our knowledge of nature by a.s.serting that all great discoveries would hereafter be made in the sixth place of decimals. This statement is well ill.u.s.trated by the delicate experiments that were required to isolate such rare elements as radium, polonium, helium and neon, which occur only in infinitesimal quant.i.ties.

While men of science will be forced to continue as specialists as long as the love of fame, to consider no other motives of research, continues to be a potent influence in their investigations, it is probable that women will have less love for the long and tedious processes involved in the more difficult kinds of specialization. They will, it seems likely, be more inclined to acquire a general knowledge of the whole circle of the sciences--a knowledge that will enable them to take a comprehensive survey of nature. And it will be fortunate for themselves, as well as for the men who must perforce remain specialists, if they elect to do so. For nothing gives falser views of nature as a whole, nothing more unfits the mind for a proper apprehension of higher and more important truths, nothing more incapacitates one for the enjoyment of the masterpieces of literature or the sweeter amenities of life, than the narrow occupation of a specialist who sees nothing in the universe but electrons, microbes and protozoa.

But just at the critical moment, when men of science would rather discover a process than a law, when they are so preoccupied with the infinitely little that they lose sight of the cosmos as a whole; when their attention is so riveted on particular phenomena that they will no longer have apt.i.tude for rising from effects to causes; when they cease to have any interest in general ideas and stray away from the guidance of the true philosophic spirit; when, like Plato's cave men, they have so long groped in darkness that their powers of vision are impaired, then it is that woman, "The herald of a brighter race," comes to the rescue and holds up to their astonished gaze the picture of an ideal world whose existence they had almost forgotten. For women, as a rule, love science for its own sake, and, unlike the specialists in question, they are, in its pursuit, rarely actuated by any selfish or mercenary interests, or by the hope of financial reward. Precise and never-ending observations with the microscope and spectroscope, which at best give them but a superficial knowledge of certain details of science, while it leaves them in ignorance of the greater and better part of it, do not appeal to them. They prefer general ideas to particular facts, and love to roam over the whole realm of science rather than confine themselves to one of its isolated corners.

"Women," writes M. etienne Lamy, the distinguished French Academician, "group themselves at the center of human knowledge, whereas men disperse themselves towards its outer boundaries. While men are always pushing a.n.a.lysis to its utmost limits, women are seeking a synthesis. While men are becoming more technical, women are becoming more intellectual. They are better placed to observe the correlations of the different sciences, and to subordinate them to the common and unique source of truth from which they all descend. We seem, indeed, to be approaching a time when women will become the conservers of general ideas."[262]

In the preceding chapter reference was made to the fact that women are naturally inclined to adopt the deductive method in their search for truth when men would employ only the inductive method. This disposition of theirs to arrive at conclusions by a kind of intuition, coupled with their more p.r.o.nounced idealism, is sure to react favorably on men, and prevent them from becoming so involved in mere facts and phenomena as to cause them to forget that it is as important to reason well as to observe well--that the fundamental principles of a true philosophy are quite as necessary for the eminent man of science as they are to the trustworthy historian or commanding statesman.

From what has been said, it is clear that man's ideal of the woman of the future will be quite different from what it was but a little more than a century ago, when Dr. Johnson could say that "any acquaintance with books," among women, "was distinguished only to be censured." It will be quite different from the ideal woman, as portrayed by poets and novelists, for centuries past. For among the thousands of women painted by our leading writers of fiction, poets and dramatists there are few, if any, outside of those sketched by Tennyson in _The Princess_, who are distinguished for their learning or for their love of intellectual pursuits. Even Portia, Shakespeare's most learned woman, was, according to her own confession, but

"An unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpracticed."

And the heroines of the novelist, far from being women who had a thirst for knowledge, or were eager

"To sound the abyss Of science and the secrets of the mind,"

were those only whose chief attractions were physical graces and charms, affectionate natures, brilliant wit together with "sweet laughs for bird-notes and blue eyes for a heaven."

Now, however, that women after ages of struggle are beginning to experience a sense of intellectual freedom before unknown, and to exult in the fact that

"Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed";

now that they are, for the first time, beginning, in every civilized nation, to realize their age-long aspirations for unimpeded opportunity in all the activities of the intellect; now that they are no longer

"Dismiss'd in shame to live No wiser than their mothers, household stuff, Live chattels, ***

*** laughing-stocks of Time,"

we may expect soon to see a marked change in the character of the ideal woman as depicted in literature and as desired by the intelligent portion of mankind.

What woman's liberation from intellectual bondage and her freedom to devote herself to scientific pursuits mean for the future of humanity it is difficult at present adequately to forecast. That it will contribute immensely to the betterment of social conditions and to the elevation of the ma.s.ses of humanity, there can be no doubt. Setting free the imprisoned energies of one half of our race, means more than doubling mankind's capacity for advancement. For the failure to utilize woman's vast energies, pining for an outlet, acted as a drag on man's own potentialities, and thus r.e.t.a.r.ded to an untold extent the world's advancement. In times past, as has aptly been said, "an enormous part of the brain power of mankind has been spent or wasted in smiting the Philistines hip and thigh, and an enormous part of the brain power of womankind has been spent in cajoling Sampson."

It will mean that the women of the future will be more suitable companions for the rapidly increasing number of highly educated men of science; that having their intellects developed _pari pa.s.su_ with those of men, they will be able to sympathize with the n.o.blest aims of their husbands and a.s.sist them in their most important undertakings, as did the wives of Huber, Lavoisier, Pasteur, Huxley, Louis Aga.s.siz and others scarcely less renowned in the annals of science. It will mean that they will not only share in the joys and the sorrows of their life-companions, but that they will also have a part in their thoughts, their studies, their labors, their achievements. For one should bear in mind that the first essential to a perfect union of hearts is a perfect harmony of minds. Where neither husband nor wife is educated, the virtues may suffice for companionship, but where the man is educated and the woman ignorant, there are sooner or later estrangements and the wife becomes little better than an old j.a.panese conception of her, "a cook without pay," or a pasha's toy for an idle hour. Chrysalde in Moliere's _L'ecole des Femmes_, declares: