Our nervous woman is well. Slowly, very slowly, she has won flesh and color, which means gain in quality and quantity of blood. By degrees, too, she has been able to return to the habits and endurances of health. And now she asks that other question, "I have daughters who are yet young, but how shall I guard them against nervousness?" and again puts forward this single complex symptom in disregard of the states of body which usually accompany it, and are to us matters quite as grave. She knows well that the mass of women are by physiological nature more liable to be nervous than are men. It is a sad drawback in the face of the duties of life, that a very little emotional disturbance will suffice to overcome the woman as it does not do the man, and that the same disease which makes him irritable makes her nervous. Says Romanes, in an admirable and impartial article on the mental differences of men and women, "She is pre-eminent for affection, sympathy, devotion, self-denial, modesty, long-suffering or patience under pain, disappointment, and adversity, for reverence, veneration, religious feeling, and general morality." I accept his statement to add that these very virtues do many of them lead to the automatic development of emotion, which, in its excesses and its uncontrolled states, is the parent of much of the nervousness not due to the enfeeblement of disease.[5]
[Footnote 5: _Journal of Popular Science_, July, 1887.]
With the intellectual differences between man and woman I have here little to do. That there is difference, both quantitative and in a measure qualitative, I believe, nor do I think any educational change in generations of women will ever set her, as to certain mental and moral qualifications, as an equal beside the man. It would be as impossible as to make him morally and physically, by any educational or other training, what the woman now is, his true superior in much that is as high, and as valuable as any mental capacities he may possess; nor does my creed involve for woman any refusal of the loftiest educational attainments. I would only insist on selection and certain limitations as to age of training and methods of work, concerning which I shall by and by have something more to say. Neither would I forbid to her any profession or mode of livelihood. This is a human right. I do not mean to discuss it here either as citizen or physician; but, as man, I like to state for my fellow-man that there are careers now sought and won and followed by her which for him inevitably lessen her true attractiveness, and to my mind make her less fit to be the "friendly lover and the loving friend."[7] Æsthetic and other sacrifices in this direction are, however, her business, not mine, and do not influence my practical judgments as to what freedom to act is or should be hers in common with men. For most men, when she seizes the apple, she drops the rose. I am a little afraid that Mrs. Lynn Linton is right as to this, but it took some courage to say what she said,[6] and she looks at the matter from a more practical point of view, and deserves to be read at length rather than quoted in fragments.
