A history of English sexual morals / by Ivan Bloch ; translated by William H. Forstern.

  • Iwan Bloch
Date:
1936
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A history of English sexual morals / by Ivan Bloch ; translated by William H. Forstern. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    78/700 (page 48)
    customary to say they complete each other. Which is as much as to say that each has something that the other does not possess. But it is certain that these differences are more of a qualitative than of a quantitative kind. It cannot be said woman has less intelligence, is stupider than man, as those opponents of woman's emancipation assert who pride themselves so much upon their male ' superiority'. But one must say woman has a different intelligence from man. Woman is not ' less ' or ' more ' than man, she is merely ' different'. Buckle, in his fine essay on The Influence of Woman on Science, has offered one more convincing proof of his mind's penetrating acuteness. He here investigates these differences of quality in the purely mental sphere, and proceeds to make abundantly clear that it will be as impossible for women to adopt all man's capabilities as it is impossible for man to attain the merits of sheer womanliness. Buckle shows that Nature has made women more deductive and men more inductive. Women judge from the general, men from the particular. Women possess to a greater degree what is called intuition. They do not see so far as men; but what they see they grasp more quickly. Will it be possible for women's emancipation to remove those differences between man and woman which are rooted in their innermost being? Even the most rabid advocates of women's rights must accept the undeniable fact that woman bears children, not man: that woman menstruates, not man1. It remains equally true that these primitive functions will always be a hindrance to complete emancipa- tion, though they do not preclude advance and improvement in the intellectual and social position of women, which every fair-minded man willingly recognises as necessary. 1 Though it has recently been asserted that man experiences ' something like menstruation '. [48]