much and is likely to owe far more to high Platonic friendships of this kind.
These women are often in every way magnificent, only they are not mothers, and
sometimes have very little wifehood in them, and to attempt to marry them to
develop these functions is one of the unique and too frequent tragedies of
modern life and literature. Some, though by no means all, of them are
functionally castrated; some actively deplore the necessity of child-bearing, and
perhaps are parturition phobiacs, and abhor the limitations of married life; they
are incensed whenever attention is called to the functions peculiar to their sex,
and the careful consideration of problems of the monthly rest are thought "not fit
for cultivated women."
The slow evolution of this type is probably inevitable as civilization advances,
and their training is a noble function. Already it has produced minds of the
greatest acumen who have made very valuable contributions to science, and far
more is to be expected of them in the future. Indeed, it may be their noble
function to lead their sex out into the higher, larger life, and the deeper sense of
its true position and function, for which I plead. Hitherto woman has not been
able to solve her own problems. While she has been more religious than man,
there have been few great women preachers; while she has excelled in teaching
young children, there have been few Pestalozzis, or even Froebels; while her
invalidism is a complex problem, she has turned to man in her diseases. This is
due to the very intuitiveness and naïveté of her nature. But now that her world is
so rapidly widening, she is in danger of losing her cue. She must be studied
objectively and laboriously as we study children, and partly by men, because
their sex must of necessity always remain objective and incommensurate with
regard to woman, and therefore more or less theoretical. Again, in these days of
intense new interest in feelings, emotions, and sentiments, when many a
psychologist now envies and, like Schleiermacher, devoutly wishes he could
become a woman, he can never really understand das Ewig-Weibliche, [The
eternal womanly] one of the two supreme oracles of guidance in life, because he
is a man; and here the cultivated woman must explore the nature of her sex as
man can not, and become its mouthpiece. In many of the new fields opening in
biology since Darwin, in embryology, botany, the study of children, animals,
savages (witness Miss Fletcher), sociological investigation, to say nothing of all
the vast body of work that requires painstaking detail, perseverance, and
conscience, woman has superior ability, or her very sex gives her peculiar
advantages where she is to lead and achieve great things in enlarging the
kingdom of man. Perhaps, too, the present training of women may in the end
develop those who shall one day attain a true self-knowledge and lead n the next