In view of the widespread veneration of a peculiar psychic quality of woman, a power of prophecy and a property of divinity which has made her an object of fear and worship, it may be well to review the modern explanations of the origin of this unique feminine power.  Herbert Spencer was of the opinion that feminine penetration was an ability to distinguish quickly the passing feelings of those around and was the result of long ages of barbarism during which woman as the weaker sex was obliged to resort to the arts of divination and to cunning to make up for her lack of physical force and to protect herself and her offspring.[11] In like vein Kaethe Schirmacher, a German feminist, says:  “The celebrated intuition of woman is nothing but an astonishing refinement of the senses through fear....  Waiting in fear was made the life task of the sex."[12]

Lester F. Ward had a somewhat different view.[13] He thought that woman’s psychic power came from the sympathy based on the maternal instinct, which “though in itself an entirely different faculty, early blended with or helped to create, the derivative reason-born faculty of altruism.”  With Ward’s view Olive Schreiner agrees, saying:  “We have no certain proof that it is so at present, but woman’s long years of servitude and physical subjection, and her experience as childbearer and protector of infancy, may be found in the future to have endowed her ... with an exceptional width of human sympathy and instinctive comprehension."[14]

In all probability Lombroso came nearer to the truth in his explanation of feminine penetration.  “That woman is more subject to hysteria is a known fact,” he says, “but few know how liable she is to hypnotic phenomena, which easily opens up the unfoldment of spiritual faculties....  The history of observation proves that hysteria and hypnotism take the form of magic, sorcery, and divination or prophecy, among savage peoples.  ‘Women,’ say the Pishawar peoples, ’are all witches; for several reasons they may not exert their inborn powers.’ ...  In the Slave Coast hysterical women are believed to be possessed with spirits.  The Fuegians believed that there had been a time when women wielded the empire through her possession of the secrets of sorcery."[8, pp.85f.]

The history of modern spiritualism has so well confirmed this view of Lombroso’s that we are safe in accepting it as the partial explanation of the attribute of a mysterious and uncanny power which man has always given to the feminine nature.  The power of prophecy and divination which was possessed by women at the dawn of history and for some time thereafter was probably not different in its essentials from the manifestations of hysterical girls who have puzzled the wisest physicians or the strange phenomena of those spiritualistic mediums who have been the subject of research well into our own times.[15]