that--our chief
distinction is that of race, our humanness.

Male characteristics we share with all males, bird and beast; female
characteristics we share with all females, similarly; but human
characteristics belong to _genus homo_ alone; and are possessed by both
sexes. A female horse is just as much a horse as a male of her species;
a female human being is just as human as the male of her species--or
ought to be!

In the special functions and relations of sex there is no contest, no
possible rivalry or confusion; but in the general functions of humanity
there is great misunderstanding.

Our trouble is that we have not recognized these human functions as
such; but supposed them to be exclusively masculine; and, acting under
that idea, strove to prevent women from an unnatural imitation of men.

Hence this minor theory of the limitations of the "female mind."

The mind is pre-eminently human. That degree of brain development which
distinguishes our species, is a human, not a sex characteristic.

There may be, has been, and still is, a vast difference in our treatment
of the minds of the two sexes. We have given them a different education,
different exercises, different conditions in all ways. But all these
differences are external, and their effect disappears with them.

The "female mind" has proven its identical capacity with the "male
mind," _in so far as it has been given identical conditions._ It will
take a long time, however, before conditions are so identical, for
successive generations, as to give the "female mind" a fair chance.

In the meantime, considering its traditional, educational and
associative drawbacks, the "female mind" has made a remarkably good
showing.

The field of politics is an unfortunate one in which to urge this
alleged limitation; because politics is one of the few fields in which
some women have been reared and exercised under equal conditions with
men.

We have had queens as long as we have had kings, perhaps longer; and
history does not show the male mind, in kings, to have manifested a
numerically proportionate superiority over the female mind, in queens.
There have been more kings than queens, but have there been more good
and great ones, in proportion?

Even one practical and efficient queen is proof enough that being a
woman does not preclude political capacity. Since England has had such
an able queen for so long, and that within Mrs. Humphry Ward's personal
memory, h