This, as I have explained elsewhere, is the manner in which woman, as a rule, is still regarded—not as a human being with certain physical and mental qualities which enable her to bring children into the world and cook a dinner, but as a breeding-machine and the necessary adjunct to a frying-pan. So regarded, independence of thought and anything beyond a very limited degree of mental cultivation are unnecessary to her, even harmful, since they might possibly result in the acquirement of other attributes quite out of place in the adjunct to a frying-pan.
With the advance of civilization one subject class after another has risen in revolt, more or less violent, more or less peaceful, and asserted its right to inquire, to think in its own way—that is to say, it has asserted its humanity. But it is a proof of my statement that woman has never been regarded as fully human, that the successive classes of men who have, in turn, asserted their own humanity have totally forgotten to assert hers, have left her, whatever her rank, in a class apart, and continued to treat her as a domestic animal whose needs were only the needs of a domestic animal.
The aristocratic instinct is by no means confined to those born in the purple. (Some of the most startlingly aristocratic sentiments I have ever heard came from the lips of persons believed by themselves to entertain ultra-democratic ideas.) The sense of power over others is just as attractive to the many as it is to the few; and thus it has happened that men, in every class, have taken a pleasure in the dependence and subjection of their womenfolk, and, lest their power over them should be undermined, have refused to their womenfolk the right to think for themselves. The essential cruelty of that refusal they disguised from themselves by explaining that women could not think even if they tried. We have all heard the definition of woman—episcopal, I think—as a creature who cannot reason and pokes the fire from the top.
This disbelief in the existence of reasoning powers in woman is still, it seems to me, a very real thing—at least, I have run up against it a good many times in the course of my life, and I do not suppose that I am an exception in that respect. And the really interesting thing about this contemptuous attitude of mind is that it has led to the adoption, by those who maintain it, of a very curious subterfuge. It is, of course, quite impossible to deny that a woman’s mind does go through certain processes which control and inspire her actions and conclusions— sometimes very swiftly and effectively; but to these mental processes, which in men are called reason, they give, in woman, the title of intuition.