[Footnote 1: Thorndike: _loc. cit._, pp. 48-49.]
Ordinary observation reveals, as literature has in general recorded, what Havelock Ellis has called the "greater affectability of the female mind." There is evidenced in many women a singular and immediate responsiveness to other people's emotions, a quick intuition, a precise though non-logical discrimination, which, though shared to some extent by all individuals gifted with sympathy and affection, is a peculiarly feminine quality. Indeed when a man possesses it, it is common to speak of him as possessing "almost a woman's intuition." Such emotional susceptibility is manifested in the higher frequency of emotional instability and emotional outbreaks among women than among men, and the decreased power of inhibition which women have over instinctive and emotional reactions. Further than this, women more than men may be said to qualify their judgments of persons and situations by their emotional reactions to them.
The common suspicion that in general women's abilities are less than those of men has seemed to gain strength from the greater number of geniuses and eminent persons there have been among men than among women. Professor Cattell writes in this connection:
I have spoken throughout of eminent men as we lack in English words including both men and women, but as a matter of fact women do not have an important place on the list. They have in all thirty-two representatives in the thousand. Of these eleven are hereditary sovereigns, and eight are eminent through misfortunes, beauty, or other circumstances. Belles-lettres and fiction--the only department in which woman has accomplished much--give ten names as compared with seventy-two men. Sappho and Joan d'Arc are the only other women on the list. It is noticeable that with the exception of Sappho--a name associated with certain fine fragments--women have not excelled in poetry or art. Yet these are the departments least dependent on environment, and at the same time those in which the environment has been perhaps as favorable to women as to men. Women depart less from the normal than men--a fact that usually holds for the female throughout the animal series; in many closely related species only the male can be readily distinguished.[1]