I imagine that the idea that women do so control their lives must have had its origin in the fact that men and women usually turn their mental energy into entirely different channels. On subjects that are familiar to us we think quickly, and acquire a mental dexterity akin to the manual dexterity of a skilled artisan. But the subjects upon which women exercise this mental dexterity are not, as a rule, the same as those upon which men exercise theirs; the latter have usually left narrow social and domestic matters alone, and it is in narrow social and domestic matters that we are accustomed to think quickly. We are swifter than they are, of course, at drawing the small inferences from which we judge what a man will like or dislike; but then, for generations the business of our lives has been to find out what a man will like or dislike, and it would be rather extraordinary if we had not, in the course of ages, acquired in it a measure of that rapid skill which in any other business would be called mechanical, but in ours is called intuitive.
This theory of intuition or instinct, then, I take, as I have already said, to be in the nature of a subterfuge on the part of the male—a sop to his conscience, and a plausible excuse for assuming that we have not the intelligence which (if it were once admitted that we possessed it) we should have the right to cultivate by independent thinking. But to admit the right of a human being to independent thinking is also to admit something else far more important and unpleasant—his right to sit in judgment upon you. That right every despotism that ever existed has steadily denied to its subjects; therefore, there is nothing extraordinary in the fact that man has steadily denied it to woman. He has always preferred that she should be too ignorant to sit in judgment upon him, punishing her with ostracism if she was rash enough to attempt to dispel her own ignorance. One of her highest virtues, in his eyes, was a childish and undeveloped quality about which he threw a halo of romance when he called it by the name of innocence. So far has this insistence on ignorance or innocence in a wife been carried, that even in these days many women who marry young have but a very vague idea of what they are doing; while certain risks attaching to the estate of marriage are, in some ranks of life at any rate, sedulously concealed from them as things which it is unfit for them to know.