Antoinette Brown Blackwell

“ Physical and psychical growth in man are not arrested simultaneously. After the body has ceased to grow, the brain-system still enlarging and compacting its highly-mobile structure, mental power increases long after the more rigid, merely mechanical forces have reached their maximum. The same law applies, at least, in equal degrees to woman. If there is any proof that feminine psychical powers normally reach an earlier cessation of growth than the masculine, then, so far as I can learn, no scientist has yet collated the facts and put them before the world in evidence. ”

“ One activity initiates another; the largest individual force maintains those more active adjustments, "simultaneous and successive," between the internal and external, which indicate the most vigorous life. We must look, then, to something more than a direct antagonism, between growth and reproduction, to account for unlikenesses of the sexes in plant or animal. ”

“ I assume that every balanced constitutional activity, though including loss of nutritive elements, is yet a normal aid to constitutional strength. Every action, physical or psychical, involves either integration or disintegration; every use of faculty belongs to the latter class. ”

“ When the excess of assimilative power is diminishing in such a way as to indicate its approaching disappearance, it becomes needful, for the maintenance of the species, that this excess shall be turned to the production of new individuals; since, did growth continue until this excess disappeared through the complete balancing of assimilation and expenditure, the production of new individuals would be either impossible or fatal to the parent. ”

“ Is it true that average women to-day are less versed than average men in abstract thinking, feeling, or acting? Not in New England! Not in any locality where they have equal education. They have not become savants! ”

“ Then, if women normally have equal appropriative powers with men, the surplus nutriment not needed for their smaller physiques may be constitutionally handed over to reproduction. Natural selection has originated an admirably complete system of related provisions to this distinct end. This fact must lead us to the conclusion that the aggregate of feminine force is the full and fair equivalent of all masculine force, physical or psychical. ”

“ In woman, maximum mental power should be reached at a considerably later period than in man, because the greater cost of reproduction, though related chiefly to the physical economy, is indirectly psychical; tending to diminish intellectual action also, and to retard its evolution. The cost of all reproductive provisions fully met, and the child-bearing age at an end, the special constitutional tendency to accumulate reserve force will not be immediately destroyed. ”

“ But, do we forget the inexorable conditions which compel the human father to expend equivalent muscular or mental force to feed, not himself, but his dependents? Whenever man does not interfere, monogamy seems to be the general order of Nature with all higher organisms. Where the cost of obtaining food is great, the parents sustain commensurate burdens in rearing their young; and, with these claims, I think it will be found that monogamy is the primal condition of reproduction. The warlike duty of defense is also borne chiefly by males, and must often be an immense tax on the energies. ”

“ We cannot help admitting that the proportion between the aggregative and separative tendencies must in each case determine the relation between the increase in bulk of the individual and the increase of the race in numbers. ”

“ Among the beings of a lower type, plant and animal, all the more recent observations indicate that Nature herself systematically favors the females––the mothers of the destined races. Nature's sturdiest buds and her best-fed butterflies belong to this sex; her female spiders are large enough to eat up a score of her little males ”

“ In these days, philosophers grow by steady accretions, like every thing else. No full-armed Minerva can be expected to spring by simple heredity from a paternal Jupiter; but the laws of mental inheritance are too little known to enable us to decide that the daughters of the nineteenth century are less gifted than the sons. ”

“ Spencer reasons that birds, as a class, are less in size than mammals, because they habitually expend more muscular energy in flight; and that lions, having a digestive system not superior to men, yet attain to a larger size and are more prolific, because they have a less active nervous system to sustain. ”

“ When the vast weight of past social conditions is considered, that women thus far have failed to acquire large powers of abstract thinking and feeling, affords no reason for supposing that there is a corresponding constitutional lack of ability in this direction. ”

“ When the whole subject has been quantitatively investigated with sufficient exactness, I believe it will be found that, what man has gained in "massiveness," woman has gained in rapidity of action; and that all their powers of body and mind, mathematically computed, are, and will continue to be, real and true equivalents. ”

“ They attain an earlier growth, but, that they reach the highest point even of physical vigor earlier than men, we have no evidence. Many facts indicate otherwise. Men and women live to equal ages, retain their vigor to equal ages—those using the greater force more slowly, those the lesser force more rapidly—thus with uneven steps keeping even pace in physical progress; the greater mobility of all womanly functions being less readily stiffened into inactivity. ”

“ Functions, active hitherto in the interest of posterity, go on now to accumulate in the interest of the individual. Still further, the naturally less overtaxed intellectual faculties of woman now have this advantage also over those of man—an advantage at least as great as the previous disadvantage. ”

“ On the contrary, so far is the earlier physical maturity of woman from necessitating a corresponding earlier psychical maturity, that, in the light of physiological relations, we may deduce the exactly opposite hypothesis. ”

“ Spencer asserts that "a somewhat earlier arrest of individual development in women than in men is necessitated by the reservation of vital force to meet the cost of reproduction," there are so many not yet discounted conditions to be considered that the position cannot be regarded as satisfactorily sustained. There is the "earlier arrest" of physical growth ”