eaker than men at the dawn of human
history, and that relative weakness has been progressively augmented in
the interval by the conditions of human life. For one thing, the process
of bringing forth young has become so much more exhausting as refinement
has replaced savage sturdiness and callousness, and the care of them
in infancy has become so much more onerous as the growth of cultural
complexity has made education more intricate, that the two functions now
lay vastly heavier burdens upon the strength and attention of a woman
than they lay upon the strength and attention of any other female.
And for another thing, the consequent disability and need of physical
protection, by feeding and inflaming the already large vanity of man,
have caused him to attach a concept of attractiveness to feminine
weakness, so that he has come to esteem his woman, not in proportion as
she is self-sufficient as a social animal but in proportion as she is
dependent. In this vicious circle of influences women have been caught,
and as a result their chief physical character today is their fragility.
A woman cannot lift as much as a man. She cannot walk as far. She cannot
exert as much mechanical energy in any other way. Even her alleged
superior endurance, as Havelock Ellis has demonstrated in "Man and
Woman," is almost wholly mythical; she cannot, in point of fact, stand
nearly so much hardship as aman can stand, and so the law, usually an
ass, exhibits an unaccustomed accuracy of observation in its assumption
that, whenever husband and wife are exposed alike to fatal suffering,
say in a shipwreck, the wife dies first.

So far we have been among platitudes. There is less of overt platitude
in the doctrine that it is precisely this physical frailty that
has given women their peculiar nimbleness and effectiveness on the
intellectual side. Nevertheless, it is equally true. What they have done
is what every healthy and elastic organism does in like case; they have
sought compensation for their impotence in one field by employing their
resources in another field to the utmost, and out of that constant and
maximum use has come a marked enlargement of those resources. On the
one hand the sum of them present in a given woman has been enormously
increased by natural selection, so that every woman, so to speak,
inherits a certain extra-masculine mental dexterity as a mere function
of her femaleness. And on the other hand every woman, over and above