The more the idea spreads that girls must be given the same educational equipment as boys, the more rapid will be the degeneration of woman. It is a well-known fact in the medical profession that weakly boys are often unable to withstand the strain of school cramming; therefore girls, with their more delicate organization, will suffer proportionately in a greater degree. Physical training, of course, obviates a great deal of this evil. But the same thing is bound to happen in the case of girls as has already been experienced where boys are concerned; that is to say, the most promising intellects will be sacrificed, partly through the ambition of the school authorities, whose principal anxiety is to see their pupils distinguish themselves in examinations, and partly owing to the fact that exceptional ability so often implies a nervous temperament and delicate physique.
Women, it must be acknowledged, by no means use their faculties of thinking and observation to the best advantage. The conclusions at which they arrive are often far too definite, and have been formed in too great haste. So rapid is this operation of thought that it often becomes a mere intuition. Yet the remarkable accuracy of a woman's intuitions is evidence that there underlies them some intellectual process resting on a more solid basis than conjecture or guesswork.
It is the crude and untutored stage of development of the thinking faculty in woman that causes it to work intuitively, instead of by the slower and sounder processes of logic. To neglect a faculty is by no means synonymous with developing it. Hence woman's powers of thought and observation are embryonic rather than matured. The work they perform is not a tithe of what would be accomplished by them under the auspices of judicious encouragement and skilled training. The faculty has neither been destroyed by over-cramming nor fostered by enlightened treatment. It has simply been allowed to lie more or less dormant, according to the natural environment of the individual.
If man, with his superior brain capacity, were encouraged to cultivate the habits of observation at present restricted to woman, and to apply his intelligence to everything, instead of to a few selected objects, the ratio of the world's progress would be enormously increased. Who first started the notion that man is being manufactured into a superior article, and that woman cannot do better than submit herself with all haste to the same process, I do not know. At any rate, it is a disastrous doctrine, and the sooner the fallacy of it is perceived the more chance there will be of saving future generations of women from the blunder that is handicapping the masculine sex at the present moment.