WHERE ARE THE FEMALE GENIUSES?
WHERE ARE THE FEMALE GENIUSES?
BY SYLVIA KOPALD
Many years ago, Voltaire was initiated into the mysteries of Newton byMme.du Châtelet. Finishing her translation and her rich commentary upon thePrinciples, in a glow he extended to her the greatest tribute which man has yet found for exceptional women. He said, “A woman who has translated and illuminated Newton is, in short, a very great man.” Genius has long been a masculine characteristic, although some more generous authors admit its possession by certain “depraved” women. Only the courtesans of classical antiquity could be women and individuals at once, and, therefore, Jean Finot found it necessary to remind us emphatically even in 1913 that “women of genius and talent are not necessarily depraved.” Not necessarily, mind you. No, the great woman may be, in short, a great man, but she is not necessarily depraved.
As the twentieth century progresses and women capture the outposts of individuality one after the other, the old questions lose much of their old malignancy. Women battle with the problem of how to combine a home and a career and men become less sure (especially in these days of high living costs) that woman’s place is in the home. As women enter the trades and the arts and the professions, men begin to discover comrades where there were only girls and wives and mothers before. It is an exciting century, this women’s century, and even though prejudices crumble slowly, they crumble. Yet one of the old questions remains, stalwart and unyielding as ever: Where are the female geniuses?
Even a pessimist may find cause for rejoicing in this final wording of the “woman question.” Man’s search for the female genius is more consoling than his sorrowful quest for the snows of yesteryear. For snows, like all beauty, have a way of melting with time; a mind ripens and mellows with age. Granted a mind which it is no longer a shame or a battle to develop, women can look upon the passing of the years with at least as great an equanimity as does man. Sheremains in the picture of life long after the Maker’s paints have begun to dry. And that is good. But as long as the female geniuses remain undiscovered, it must be also a bit insecure. Women may have minds—every average man will now grant that. But (he will quickly ask) have they ever much more than average minds? Look at history, which this time really does prove what you want it to. Every high peak in the historic landscape is masculine. Point them out just as they occur to you: Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Virgil, Horace, Catullus, Plato, Socrates, Newton, Darwin, Pasteur, Watt, Edison, Steinmetz, Heine, Shelley, Keats, Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, Tolstoi....
Where are thefemalegeniuses?
It has really become much more than a question of feminist conversation. Science has attempted to put its seal of approval upon the implied answer to this rhetorical question. It has sought to put the notion that “a woman is only a woman, but a genius is a man,” into impressively scientific lingo. The argument goes something like this: In regard to practically all anatomical, physiological, and psychic characteristics, themale exhibits a greater variability (i.e. a greater range of spreading down from and up above the average) than the female. The male is the agent of variation; the female is the agent of type conservation. This sex difference operates in the realm of mental ability as everywhere. In any comparable group of men and women, the distribution of intelligence will tend to follow the law of chances (Gaussian Curve). But female intelligence will cluster far more about its average than male. There will be more imbeciles and idiots among men, but there will also be more geniuses. It is really very simple, as the following arbitrary example will show. Supposing you take comparable sample groups of 1000 men and 1000 women from a given population. After testing them for grade of intelligence, you classify them according to previously accepted “intelligence classes.” Your results would tend to read a little like this:
Of course none of the proponents of this theory would state the alleged facts of man’s greater variability in such bald terms. But all of them would agree that men do vary more than women and in some such fashion. In this greater variability they see the explanation of men’s monopoly of genius.
According to Karl Pearson this “law of the greater variability of the male” was first stated by Darwin. Somewhat earlier, the anatomist Meckel had concluded that the female is more variable than the male. It is interesting to note in passing that he consequently judged “variation a sign of inferiority.” By the time Burdach, Darwin, and others had declared the male more variable, however, variation had become an advantage and the basis and hope of all progress. To-day great social significance is attached to the comparative variability of the sexes, especially in its application to the questions of sex differences in mental achievement. Probably the outstanding English-speaking supporters of the theory in its modern form have been Havelock Ellis and Dr. G. Stanley Hall. But even so cautious a student asDr.E. L. Thorndike hasgranted it his guarded support. AndDr.James McKeen Cattell has explained the results of his study of 1000 eminent characters of history by means of it. Indeed many others hold the theory in one form or another—e.g. Münsterburg, Patrick. What is most important, of course, is that its supporters do not stop with the mere statement of the theory. They ascribe to it tremendous effects in the past and ask for it a large influence in the shaping of our policies in the present.
For Havelock Ellis, the greater variability of the male “has social and practical consequences of the widest significance. The whole of our human civilization would have been a different thing if in early zoölogical epochs the male had not acquired a greater variational tendency than the female.” (“Man and Woman,” p. 387.) Professor Hall builds up upon it a scheme of gushingly paradisaical (and properly boring) education for the adolescent girl, which “keeps the purely mental back” and develops the soul, the body, and the intuitions. (“The Psychology of Adolescence,”Vol.II,Chap.17.) Just because Professor Thorndike is so careful in his statements,his practical deductions from the theory are most interesting: “Thus the function of education for women, though not necessarily differentiated by the small differences in average capacity, is differentiated by the difference in range of ability. Not only the probability and desirability of marriage and the training of children as an essential feature of women’s career but also the restriction of women to the mediocre grades of ability and achievement should be reckoned with by our educational systems. The education of women for such professions as administration, statesmanship, philosophy, or scientific research, where a few very gifted individuals are what society requires, is far less needed than education for such professions as nursing, teaching, medicine, or architecture, where the average level is essential. Elementary education is probably an even better investment for the community in the case of girls than in the case of boys; for almost all girls profit by it, whereas the extremely low grade boy may not be up to his school education in zeal or capacity and the extremely high grade boy may get on better without it. So also with high school education.On the other hand, post graduate instruction to which women are flocking in great numbers is, at least in its higher reaches, a far more remunerative social investment in the case of men.” (“Sex in Education,”Bookman,Vol.XXIII, April, 1906, p. 213.)
Before we begin the revision of our educational systems in accordance with this theory, we must make sure that it really explains away the “female geniuses.” For although the theory is still widely held by biologists and psychologists, it requires only a short study to discover how tenuous is the evidence adduced in support of it—in all its phases, but especially in regard to mental traits. Darwin apparently gave no statistical evidence to support “the principle,” as he called it, and those who have followed him have done little to fill the lack. Professor Hall offers evidence that is almost entirely empirical; Havelock Ellis has been attacked by Karl Pearson for doing much “to perpetuate some of the worst of the pseudo-scientific superstitions to which he [Ellis] refers, notably that of the greater variability of the male human being.” Professor Thorndike, in spite of his conclusions,admits that it “is unfortunate that so little information is available for a study of sex differences in the variability of mental traits in the case of individuals over fifteen.” And while the overwhelming majority of Professor Cattell’s 1000 eminent characters are men, he merely states without proving his explanation that “woman departs less from the normal than man.”
Wise feminists to-day are concentrating their forces upon this theory. Women have won the right to an acknowledged mind; they want now the right to draw for genius and high talents in the “curve of chance.” And this is no merely academic question. For while genius may overcome the sternest physical barriers of environment, it is nourished and developed by tolerant expectancy. Men may accomplish anything, popular thought tells them, and so some men do. But if women are scientifically excluded from the popular expectation of big things, if their educations are toned down to preparation for “the average level,” if motherhood remains theonlyrespected career forallwomen, then the female geniuses will remain few and far between. And, more important still, all thinking womenwill continue restless over the problem of how to secure the chance to vary in interests and abilities from the average of their sex, and at the same time to be wives and mothers.
In this fight for a full chance to compete, woman may do one (or all) of three things. She may merely ignore the theory and go on “working and living,” trusting that as environmental barriers fall one after the other, this final question, too, will lose its meaning. She can point out in support of this attitude that the past does contain its female geniuses, however few; and certainly if all the barriers that have been set up against woman’s entry into the larger world have not entirely stifled female genius, we may at least look forward hopefully to a kinder future. Something of this attitude, of this demand for free experimentation, must make part of every woman’s armor against the implications of this theory. But taken alone, it becomes more merely defensive than the status of the theory deserves. For it is really the theory that must defend itself. It must not only bring forward more affirmative evidence, but it must also meet the contrary findings of such investigation as hasbeen made. It must, again, prove its title tothe causeof the scarcity of female geniuses when so many other more eradicable causes may be at its bottom.
The actual evidence that has been gathered on this question is still uncertain and fragmentary. While it does not yet establish anything definitely, it points to rather surprising conclusions. In all cases investigated the discovered differences in variability have been very slight, and if they balance either way tend to prove a greater variability among women. Neither sex need have a monopoly of either imbeciles or geniuses, but women may yet be found to be slightly more favored with both!
The first painstaking investigation in this field was made byDr.Karl Pearson who published his interesting results as one essay in hisChances of Death and Other Studies in Evolutionin 1897. Under the heading “Variation in Man and Woman” (Vol.I, pp. 256-377), written as a polemical attack upon Havelock Ellis’s stand in this theory, he set forth results of measurements upon men and women in seventeen anatomical characteristics. He obtained his data from statisticsalready collected, from measurements of living men and women, and from post-mortem and archeological examinations. Female variability (coefficients of variation) proved greater in eleven of these seventeen characteristics, male in six. He concluded among other things that “there is ... no evidence of greater male variability, but rather of a slightly greater female variability. Accordingly the principle that man is more variable than woman must be put on one side as a pseudo-scientific superstition until it has been demonstrated in a more scientific manner than has hitherto been attempted.”
To round out this evidence Doctors Leta Hollingworth and Helen Montague measured 20,000 infants at their birth in the maternity wards of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. They sought to discover whether environmental influences played any determining rôle in producing the results obtained by Pearson from measurements upon adults. From the ten anatomical measurements made upon these babies they found that “in all cases the differences in variability are very slight. In only two cases does the percentile variation differ in thefirst decimal place. In these two cases the variability is once greater for males and once greater for females.” (“The Comparative Variability of the Sexes at Birth,”American Journal of Sociology,Vol.XX, 1914-1915, pp. 335-370.)
The findings on anatomical variability do not, of course, necessarily prove anything about differences in the range of mental ability. They do, however, suggest the probability of parallel results and such studies as have been made tend, on the whole, to bear this out. All the recent work in this field (and it is still fragmentary) seems to point at least to equal mental variability among men and women. In 1917, Terman and others in their “Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale for Measuring Intelligence” investigated this problem among school children from five to fourteen years old. They obtained the Intelligence Quotients of 457 boys and 448 girls and compared these I.Q.’s with teachers’ estimates and judgments of intelligence and work and with the age grade distribution of the sexes for the ages of 7 to 14. After making all necessary qualifications, they concluded that the tests revealed a small superiority in the intelligence ofthe girls that “probably rests upon a real superiority in intelligence, age for age.” But “apart from the small superiority of the girls, the distribution of intelligence shows no significant differences in the sexes. The data offer no support to the wide-spread belief that girls group themselves more closely about the median or that extremes of intelligence are more common among boys” (p. 83).
Dr.Hollingworth, again, has made a study of mental differences for adults. She has summarized the results of recent studies in sex differences in mental variability and in tastes, perceptions, interests, etc. Her conclusions on this score are interesting: “(1) The greater variability of males in anatomical traits is not established, but is debated by authorities of perhaps equal competence. (2) But even if it were established, it would only suggest, not prove, that men are more variable in mental traits also. The empirical data at present available on this point are inadequate and contradictory, and if they point either way, actually indicate greater female variability....” (“Variability as Related to Sex Differencesin Achievement,”American Journal of Sociology,Vol.XIX, pp. 510-530, Jan., 1914.)
It seems hardly safe scientifically, therefore, to restrict women to the average levels in education and work and profession on the ground that eminence is beyond their range. But if the female geniuses have not been cut off by a comparatively narrowed range of mental ability, where are they? Certainly history does not reveal them in anything like satisfactory number. And it is now that women may bring forward their third weapon of attack. The female geniuses may have been missing not because of an inherent lack in the make-up of the sex, but because of the oppressive, restrictive cultural conditions under which women have been forced to live.
The important rôle played by cultural conditions in the cultural achievement of various nations and races has been noted with increasing emphasis by the newer schools of sociology and anthropology. No scholar can now defend unchallenged a thesis of “lower or higher races” by urging the achievements of any race as an index of its range of mental ability. Culture grows by its own laws and the high position of the whiterace may be as much a product of favorable circumstances as of exceptional innate capacities. Similarly the expression taken by the genius of various nations appears to vary strikingly. This is especially impressive in the realm of music. The Anglo-Saxon peoples are singularly lacking in great musical composers. Neither Britain nor America, nor indeed any of the northern countries have contributed one composer worthy of mention beside the Beethovens and Wagners and Chopins of this art. Indeed the great names in music are generally of German, Latin or Slavic origin. Yet no one thinks of urging this fact as evidence of an Anglo-Saxon failure of major creativeness. Instead we point to achievements in other fields or at most attempt to explain this peculiar lack by some external causation. Similarly all our impatience with the un-artistic approaches of the American people does not lead us to frame a theory of their lack of genius. There are many cultural factors to be considered first.
But as soon as we approach the problem of female genius, too many of us are apt to bring forward an entirely different kind of interpretation.We pass over the undoubted female geniuses lightly—granting Sappho and Bonheur and Brunn and Eliot and Brontë and Amster and Madame Curie and Caroline Herschel and perhaps even Chaminade and Clara Schumann and several others. We admit the undoubtedly significant parts women are playing in modern literature. But the question always remains.
Yet in no national or racial group have cultural influences exercised so restrictive an influence as among the entire female sex. Not only has the larger world been closed to them, not only has popular opinion assumed that “no woman has it in her,” but the bearing and rearing of children has carried with it in the past the inescapable drudgery of housework. And this is “a field,” asDr.Hollingworth points out, “where eminence is not possible.”
It was Prudhon who sneered in response to a similar argument that “women could not even invent their distaff.” But we now know enough about the laws of invention to realize how unfair such sneering is. Professor Franz Boas and his school have long demonstrated that cultural achievement and mental ability are not necessarilycorrelated. For material culture, once it begins, tends to grow by accumulation and diffusion. Each generation adds to the existing stock of knowledge, and as the stock grows the harvests necessarily become greater. Modern man need have no greater mental ability than the men of the ice ages to explain why his improvements upon the myriad machines and tools that are his yield so much larger a harvest than the Paleolithic hunters’ improvements upon their few flint weapons and industrial processes. For, as Professor Ogburn has well shown (in “Social Change,” Part III) all invention contains two elements—a growing cultural base and inventive genius to work with the materials it furnishes. The number of new inventions necessarily grows with the cultural base. Even 50 times 100 make only 5000, but 2 times 1,000,000 make 2,000,000. Countless generations have added their share to the total material culture which is ours and which we shall hand down still more enriched to posterity.
It must be at once obvious that there has been no such cultural growth in housework. Housework has long remained an individualized, non-cumulativeindustry, where daughter learns from mother the old ways of doing things. The small improvements and ingenuities which most housewives devise seldom find their way into the whole stream of culture. Thus it is that the recent great inventions which are slowly revolutionizing this last stronghold of petty individualism have come from the man-made world. Workers in electricity could more easily devise the vacuum cleaner than the solitary housewife; the electric washer, parquet floors, the tin can, quantity production of stockings, wool, clothing, bread, butter, and all the other instruments that have really made possible women’s emancipation have naturally come not from women’s minds (any more than from men’s) but from the growth of culture and the minds that utilize that growth for further expansion.
Consequently, as women participate in the work of the world and win the right to acquire the results of past achievement in science and technique and art, we may expect their contributions to the social advance to appear in ever greater numbers. Until we give them this full chance to contribute, we have no right to explainthe paucity of their gifts to society by inherent lacks. And it seems reasonable to expect that such a chance will render the old quest for female geniuses properly old-fashioned. For they will be there, these women—the able and talented and geniuses—working side by side with men, not as “very great men” nor as necessarily “depraved” nor in any way unusual. They will be there as human beings and as women.