Strangely enough, men who are so sensitive about the moral welfare of women will visit a dance hall where women are degraded nightly, and will allow their daughters to marry “reformed” rakes.  Men will not permit any mention of sexual matters in their homes, and will let their children get their information on the street; and all for the very simple reason that they are afraid the truth will hurt, will make people think.  Men have been remarkably sensitive about having women speak in public for their rights; but they watch with zest a woman screaming nonsense on the stage.

It is quite possible that many women are swayed too easily by their emotions.  We must recollect, however, that for some thousands of years woman has been carefully drilled to believe that she is an emotional creature.  If a dozen people conspire to tell a man that he is looking badly, it is not unlikely that he will feel ill.  Certainly Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton exhibited no lack of firmness on the shambles of battlefields; and there are few men living who cannot recall instances of women who have, in the face of disaster and evil fortune, shown a steady perseverance and will-power in earning a living for themselves and their children that men have not surpassed.

Having in the preceding pages considered the five capital objections to the concession of equal suffrage, I shall now, in accordance with my plan, say something of the much-mooted question of the superiority or inferiority of one sex to the other.  It might be concluded from the foregoing account that I see little difference in the aptitudes and powers of the sexes physically, morally, or intellectually.  That does not necessarily follow.  It is possible to conceive of each sex as the complement of the other; and between complements there can be no question either of superiority or of inferiority.  The great historian of European Morals has analysed the constitutional differences of the sexes as he conceived them; and I may quote his remarks as pertinent to my theme.  Lecky writes as follows[422]: 

“Physically, men have the indisputable superiority in strength, and women in beauty.  Intellectually, a certain inferiority of the female sex can hardly be denied when we remember how almost exclusively the foremost places in every department of science, literature, and art have been occupied by men, how infinitesimally small is the number of women who have shown in any form the very highest order of genius, how many of the greatest men have achieved their greatness in defiance of the most adverse circumstances, and how completely women have failed in obtaining the first position, even in music or painting, for the cultivation of which their circumstances would appear most propitious.  It is as impossible to find a female Raphael, or a female Handel, as a female Shakespeare or Newton.  Women are intellectually more desultory and volatile than men; they are more occupied with particular instances