In such a cross-fire, characterology has to take its place, and it may well be feared that it may share the fate of its sisters and remain a trivial subject like physiognomy or a diviner’s art like graphology.
“From a woman you can learn nothing of women.”
By psychology, as a whole, we generally understand the psychology of the psychologists, and these are exclusively men! Never since human history began have we heard of a female psychology! None the less the psychology of woman constitutes a chapter as important with regard to general psychology as that of the child. And inasmuch as the psychology of man has always been written with unconscious but definite reference to man, general psychology has become simply the psychology of men, and the problem of the psychology of the sexes will be raised as soon as the existence of a separate psychology of women has been realised. Kant said that in anthropology the peculiarities of the female were more a study for the philosopher than those of the male, and it may be that the psychology of the sexes will disappear in a psychology of the female.
None the less the psychology of women will have to be written by men. It is easy to suggest that such an attempt is foredoomed to failure, inasmuch as the conclusions must be drawn from an alien sex and cannot be verified by introspection. Granted the possibility that woman could describe herself with sufficient exactness, it by no means follows that she would be interested in the sides of her character that would interest us. Moreover, even if she could and would explore herself fully, it is doubtful if she could bring herself to talk about herself. I shall show that these three improbabilities spring from the same source in the nature of woman.
This investigation, therefore, lays itself open to the charge that no one who is not female can be in a position to make accurate statements about women. In the meantime the objection must stand, although, later, I shall have more to say of it. I will say only this much--up to now, and is this only a consequence of man’s suppression?--we have no account from a pregnant woman of her sensations and feelings, neither in poetry nor in memoirs, nor even in a gynæcological treatise. This cannot be on account of excessive modesty, for, as Schopenhauer rightly pointed out, there is nothing so far removed from a pregnant woman as shame as to her condition. Besides, there would still remain to them the possibility of, after the birth, confessing from memory the psychical life during the time; if a sense of shame had prevented them from such communication during the time, it would be gone afterwards, and the varied interests of such a disclosure ought to have induced some one to break silence. But this has not been done. Just as we have always been indebted to men for really trustworthy expositions of the psychical side of women, so also it is to men that we owe descriptions of the sensations of pregnant women. What is the meaning of this?