Nay; the superior acumen and self-possession of women is not
inherent in any peculiarity of their constitutions, and above all, not
in any advantage of a purely physical character. Its springs are
rather to be sought in a physical disadvantage--that is, in the
mechanical inferiority of their frames, their relative lack of tractive
capacity, their deficiency as brute engines. That deficiency, as every
one knows, is partly a derricked heritage from those females of
the Pongo pygmaeus who were their probable fore-runners in the
world; the same thing is to be observed in the females of almost all
other species of mammals. But it is also partly due to the effects of
use under civilization, and, above all, to what evolutionists call
sexual selection. In other words, women were already measurably
weaker than men at the dawn of human history, and that relative
weakness has been progressively augmented in the interval by the
conditions of human life. For one thing, the process of bringing
forth young has become so much more exhausting as refinement has
replaced savage sturdiness and callousness, and the care of them in
infancy has become so much more onerous as the growth of cultural
complexity has made education more intricate, that the two
functions now lay vastly heavier burdens upon the strength and
attention of a woman than they lay upon the strength and attention
of any other female. And for another thing, the consequent
disability and need of physical protection, by feeding and inflaming
the already large vanity of man, have caused him to attach a concept
of attractiveness to feminine weakness, so that he has come to
esteem his woman, not in proportion as she is self-sufficient as a
social animal but in proportion as she is dependent. In this vicious
circle of influences women have been caught, and as a result their
chief physical character today is their fragility. A woman cannot lift
as much as a man. She cannot walk as far. She cannot exert as