It would, indeed, be very strange if some incidental harm should not result from the veritable revolution in the condition of American women which little more than a generation has produced. This is the inevitable penalty which social progress has always to pay. Yet in the present case the transitional loss to the family or to the larger social body is exceedingly slight compared even with the immediate gain. This is especially true of woman's new intellectual life with all its manifold activities. It matters not whether she is showing herself mentally man's equal. If any justification of her new rôle were needed it might suffice to affirm that she has precisely the same right as man to free and unhampered self-development in whatever direction and in whatever manner she herself shall find most conducive to her happiness. But it is amply justified by its social results. It cannot be seriously doubted that woman's admission to equal privilege of higher education is enabling her better to share with man in doing the world's work. Besides, in spite of the vain imaginings of misogynistic philosophers,[808] the problem of special sexual function in its relation to mental capacity is being settled in woman's favor. "Science," declares Lourbet, in completing his valuable survey, "is incapable of demonstrating the 'irremediable' mental inferiority of woman.... The pretended antagonism between mental power and sexual power, which does not withstand rigorous analysis, appears definitively to be destroyed by experience, by the tangible facts which incessantly strike the eye."[809] Herbert Spencer reaches the conclusion that "were liberties to be adjusted to abilities, the adjustment, even could we make it, would have to be made irrespective of sex."[810]
[808] According to HARTMANN, _The Sexes Compared_, 3, 6 ff., there is between man and woman a fundamental and irremovable distinction: The woman rules sexually and therefore "we must, by way of compensation, uphold the legal superiority of man." In establishing sexual equality the progress of culture receives a severe blow. More wonderful is the teaching of SCHOPENHAUER. "Women," he says, "are directly adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our childhood, for the simple reason that they themselves are childish, foolish, and short-sighted--in a word are big children all their lives, something intermediate between the child and the man, who is a man in the strict sense of the word."--_On Women_: in DIRCKS'S _Essays of Schopenhauer_, 65; or his _Sämmtliche Werke_, III, 649 ff.