FOOTNOTES[1]An excellent passage on this part of the subject, from one of Sydney Smith’s contributions to theEdinburgh Review, we will not refrain from quoting: “A great deal has been said of the original difference of capacity between men and women as if women were more quick and men more judicious; as if women were more remarkable for delicacy of association, and men for stronger powers of attention. All this, we confess, appears to us very fanciful. That there is a difference in the understandings of the men and the women we every day meet with, everybody, we suppose, must perceive; but there is none, surely, which may not be accounted for by the difference of circumstances in which they have been placed, without referring to any conjectural difference of original conformation of mind. As long as boys and girls run about in the dirt, and trundle hoops together, they are both precisely alike. If you catch up one half of these creatures, and train them to a particular set of actions and opinions, and the other half to a perfectly opposite set, of course their understandings will differ, as one or the other sort of occupations has called this or that talent into action. There is surely no occasion to go into any deeper or more abstruse reasoning, in order to explain so very simple a phenomenon.”—Sydney Smith’s Works, vol. i., p. 200.[2]The truly horrible effects of the present state of the law among the lowest of the working population is exhibited in those cases of hideous mal-treatment of their wives by working men, with which every newspaper, every police report, teems. Wretches unfit to have the smallest authority over any living thing have a helpless woman for their household slave. These excesses could not exist if women both earned and had the right to possess a part of the income of the family.
[1]An excellent passage on this part of the subject, from one of Sydney Smith’s contributions to theEdinburgh Review, we will not refrain from quoting: “A great deal has been said of the original difference of capacity between men and women as if women were more quick and men more judicious; as if women were more remarkable for delicacy of association, and men for stronger powers of attention. All this, we confess, appears to us very fanciful. That there is a difference in the understandings of the men and the women we every day meet with, everybody, we suppose, must perceive; but there is none, surely, which may not be accounted for by the difference of circumstances in which they have been placed, without referring to any conjectural difference of original conformation of mind. As long as boys and girls run about in the dirt, and trundle hoops together, they are both precisely alike. If you catch up one half of these creatures, and train them to a particular set of actions and opinions, and the other half to a perfectly opposite set, of course their understandings will differ, as one or the other sort of occupations has called this or that talent into action. There is surely no occasion to go into any deeper or more abstruse reasoning, in order to explain so very simple a phenomenon.”—Sydney Smith’s Works, vol. i., p. 200.
[2]The truly horrible effects of the present state of the law among the lowest of the working population is exhibited in those cases of hideous mal-treatment of their wives by working men, with which every newspaper, every police report, teems. Wretches unfit to have the smallest authority over any living thing have a helpless woman for their household slave. These excesses could not exist if women both earned and had the right to possess a part of the income of the family.