Woman in Science — The Future of Women in Science: Summary and Epilogue, Part 1

SUMMARY AND EPILOGUE

Saint-Evremond, the first great master of the genteel style in French literature, who was equally noted as a brilliant courtier, a graceful wit, a professed Epicurean, and who exerted so marked an influence on the writings of Voltaire and the essayists of Queen Anne's time, gives us in one of his desultory productions an entertaining disquisition on _La femme qui ne se trouve point et ne se trouvera jamais_--the woman who is not and never will be found.

The caption of this singular essay admirably expresses the idea that the majority of mankind has, even until the present day, held respecting woman in science.

For them she was non-existent.

Nature, in their view, had disqualified her for serious and, above all, for abstract science.

Never, therefore, in the opinion of these solemn wiseacres, had been found or could be found a woman who had achieved distinction in science.

The foregoing chapters show how ill-founded is such a view regarding woman in times past.

For that half of humanity which has produced such scientific luminaries as Aspasia, Laura Bassi, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Sophie Germain, Mary Somerville, Caroline Herschel, Sonya Kovalevsky, Agnes S. Lewis, Margaret Dunlop Gibson, Eleanor Ormerod and Mme.

Curie--to mention no others--is far from exhibiting any evidence of intellectual disqualification and still farther from warranting any one from declaring that the successful pursuit of science is entirely beyond the mental powers of womankind.

The preceding pages, likewise, afford an answer to those who insist on woman's incapacity for scientific pursuits, and point to the small number of those that have attained eminence in any of the branches of science; who continue to assert that the women named are but exceptions to the rule of the hopeless inferiority of their sex, and that no conclusions can be deduced from the paucity of women who have risen above the intellectual level of their less fortunate or less highly dowered sisters.

They further show that, until the last few decades, woman's environment was rarely if ever favorable to her pursuit of science.

From the days of Aspasia until the latter half of the nineteenth century she was discriminated against by law, custom and public opinion.

Save only in Italy, she was excluded from the universities and from learned societies in which she might have had an opportunity of developing her intellect.

In other countries her social ostracism in all that pertained to mental development was so complete and universal that she rarely had an opportunity of making a trial of her powers or exhibiting her innate capacity.

The consequence was that her mind remained in a condition of comparative atrophy--a condition that gave rise to that long prevalent belief in woman's intellectual inferiority to man and her natural incapacity for everything that is not light or frivolous.

Practically all that women have achieved in science, until very recent years, has been accomplished in defiance of that conventional code which compelled them to confine their activities to the ordinary duties of the household.

The lives and achievements of the eminent mathematicians, Sophie Germain and Mary Somerville, are good illustrations of the truth of this assertion.

It was only their persistence in the study of their favorite branch of science, in spite of the opposition of their family and friends, and in spite of what was considered taboo for their sex by the usages and ordinances of society, that they were able to attain that eminence in the most abstruse of the sciences which won for them the plaudits of the world.

Both were virtually self-made women.

Deprived of the advantages of a college or university education, and denied the stimulus afforded by membership in learned scientific associations, they nevertheless succeeded by their own unaided efforts in winning a place of highest honor in the Walhalla of men of science.

M.

Alphonse de Candolle, in his great work, _Histoire des Sciences et des Savants depuis Deux Siecles_, devotes only two pages to the consideration of woman in science.

She is, to him, a negligible quantity.

And, although a professed man of science, he repeats, without any scientific warrant whatever, all the gratuitous statements of his predecessors regarding the superficial character of the female mind, "a mind," he will have it, which "takes pleasure in ideas that are readily seized by a kind of intuition;" a mind "to which the slow methods of observation and calculation by which truth is surely arrived at are not pleasing.

Truths themselves," the Swiss savant continues, "independent of their nature and possible consequences--especially general truths which have no relation to a particular person--are of small moment to most women.

Add to this a feeble independence of opinion, a reasoning faculty less intense than in man, and, finally, the horror of doubt, that is, a state of mind in which all research in the sciences of observation must begin and often end.

These reasons are," according to de Candolle, "more than sufficient to explain the position of women in scientific pursuits."

[256] They certainly are more than sufficient to explain their position if we choose to accept the author's method of determining one's attainments in the realm of science.

His chief test of one's eminence in science is the number of learned societies to which one belongs.

For De Candolle, membership in one or more such bodies is _prima facie_ evidence of special distinction in some branch of science.

But "We," he declares, "do not see the name of any woman on the lists of learned men connected with the principal academies.

This is not due entirely to the fact that the customs and regulations have made no provision for their admission, for it is easy to assure one's self that no person of the feminine sex has ever produced an original scientific work which has made its mark in any science and commanded the attention of specialists in science.

I do not think it has ever been considered desirable to elect a woman a member of any of the great scientific academies with restricted membership."

[257] When De Candolle insisted on membership in learned societies as a necessary indication of scientific eminence, he must have known, what everybody knew, that such exclusive societies as the French Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of Great Britain have always been dead set against the admission of women members.

It is difficult to imagine that the learned author of the _History of Science and Scientists_ was entirely ignorant of the exclusion from the French Academy of Maria Gaetana Agnesi solely because she was a woman.

And he must have been aware that, had it not been for her sex, Sophie Germain would have been accorded a fauteuil in the same society for her remarkable investigations in one of the difficult departments of mathematical physics.

He must likewise have been cognizant of the attitude of such organizations as the Royal Society toward women, no matter how meritorious their achievements in science.

According to De Candolle's criterion, such women as Mme.

Curie, Sonya Kovalevsky, Eleanor Ormerod, Agnes S. Lewis, Margaret Dunlop Gibson have accomplished nothing worthy of note because, forsooth, their names are not found on the rolls of membership of the Royal Society or the French Academy of Sciences--associations whose constitutions have been purposely so framed as to exclude women from membership.

It would, indeed, be difficult to instance a more unfair or a more unscientific test of woman's eminence in science, and that, too, proposed by one who is supposed to be actuated in his judgments by rigorously scientific methods.

Had any of the women named belonged to the male sex, there never would have been any question of their fitness to become members of the societies in question.

This is particularly true of Mme.

Curie, who, in the estimation of the world, has done more to enhance the prestige of French science than any man of the present generation--a statement that is sufficiently justified by the fact that she is the only one so far who has twice, in competition with the greatest of the world's men of science, succeeded in carrying away the great Nobel prize.

[258] Not only have men, from time immemorial, been wont to point to woman's incapacity for science as evidenced by the small number of those who have achieved distinction in any of its branches, but they have also taken a special pleasure in directing attention to the fact that no woman has ever given to the world any of the great creations of genius, or been the prime-mover in any of the far-reaching discoveries which have so greatly contributed to the weal, the advancement and the happiness of our race.

No one, probably, has expressed himself on this subject in a more positive or characteristic fashion than the noted litterateur and philosopher, Count Joseph de Maistre.

Writing from St. Petersburg to his daughter, Constance, he says: "Voltaire, according to what you affirm--for as to me, I know nothing, as I have not read all his works, and have not read a line of them during the last thirty years--says that women are capable of doing all that men do, etc. This is merely a compliment paid to some pretty woman, or, rather, it is one of the hundred thousand and thousand silly things which he said during his lifetime.

The very contrary is the truth.

Women have produced no _chef d'oeuvre_ of any kind whatsoever.

They have been the authors neither of the _Iliad_, nor the _Aeneid_, nor the _Jerusalem Delivered_, nor _Phedre_, nor _Athalie_ nor _Rodogune_, nor _The Misanthrope_, nor _Tartufe_, nor _The Joueur_, nor _The Pantheon_, nor _The Church of St. Peter's_, nor the _Venus de' Medici_, nor the _Apollo Belvidere_, nor the _Principia_, nor the _Discourse on Universal History_, nor _Telemachus_.

They have invented neither algebra nor the telescope, nor achromatic glasses nor the fire engine, nor hose-machines, etc." [259] All this is true, but what does it prove?

It does not prove, as is so frequently assumed, woman's lesser brain power or inferior intelligence.

It does not prove--as the learned Frenchman and those who are similarly minded would have us believe--her incapacity for the highest flights of genius in every sphere of intellectual effort.

Such assumptions are entirely negatived by woman's past achievements in all departments of art, literature and science.

Far from making the inference that De Maistre wished his daughter to draw from his letter, we should, from what we know of woman's ability as disclosed in the foregoing chapters, hesitate to set a limit to her powers, or to declare apodictically that she could not have been the author of works of as great merit as most of those--if not all of them--mentioned as among men's supreme achievements.

The simple fact that Mme.

Curie and Sonya Kovalevsky were able, in sciences usually considered beyond female intelligence, to wrest from their male competitors the most coveted prizes within the gift of the Nobel Prize Commission and the French Academy of Sciences, demonstrates completely that woman's assumed incapacity for even the most recondite scientific pursuits is a mere figment of the masculine imagination.

What women have done "that at least, if nothing else," as John Stuart Mill aptly observes, "it is proved they can do.

When we consider how sedulously they are all trained away from, instead of being trained toward, any of the occupations or objects reserved for men, it is evident that I am taking very humble ground for them, when I rest their case on what they have actually achieved.

For, in this case, negative evidence is worth little, while any positive evidence is conclusive.

It cannot be inferred to be impossible that a woman should be a Homer, or an Aristotle, or a Michaelangelo, or a Beethoven, because no woman has yet actually produced works comparable to theirs in any of those lines of excellence.

This negative fact at most leaves the question uncertain and open to psychological discussion.

But it is quite certain that a woman can be a Queen Elizabeth or a Deborah or a Joan of Arc, since this is not inference but a fact."

[260] In like manner it is quite certain that, in spite of all kinds of disabilities and prejudices and adverse legislation, there have been a large number of women who, in every department of intellectual activity, have achieved marked distinction and won imperishable renown for their proscribed sex.

It is a fact, which admits of no question, that, notwithstanding their being debarred from all the educational advantages so generously lavished upon the dominant sex, women have since the days of Sappho and Hypatia shown themselves the equals and often the superiors of men in the highest and noblest spheres of mental achievement.

Such being the case, what, we may ask, would have been the result had women, from that splendid Heroic Period of which Homer sings until the present, enjoyed all the opportunities of mental development of which men have systematically claimed the exclusive privilege?

[261] What would now be their condition if, from the days of the Muses--who were but learned women apotheosized--women had never been deprived of their intellectual birthright and had been permitted to continue in the path so auspiciously blazed by Corinna--the victor over Pindar--and Arete, the splendor of Greece and the possessor of the mind of Socrates and the tongue of Homer?

What would not now be their intellectual efflorescence, if Plato's dream of twenty-three centuries ago of giving women equal rights with men in all things of the mind could have been realized; if those ardent female disciples of his, who so lovingly followed him through the streets of Athens--"the home of the intellectual and the beautiful"--and hung on his lips during his matchless discourses in the groves of the Academy and on the banks of the Ilyssus, could have continued that race of intellect and genius which was the admiration and the inspiration of all Hellas during the most brilliant period of its marvelous history?

Speculating only on what the gifted daughters of Greece might have achieved, we may easily believe that they would have kept pace with their most highly gifted countrymen, and that, following in the footsteps of Sappho and the other Muses of the "Terrestrial Nine," they would have been worthy rivals of Homer, Pindar and Aeschylus, and would have occupied a prominent place in that brilliant galaxy of genius composed of such luminaries as Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Euclid, Archimedes, Theophrastus, Polygnotus, Diophantus, Pausanias and Thucydides.

To those who base their opinions on what so long has been the absurdly anomalous condition of women and who, in formulating their theories of human progress, completely ignore the fundamental laws of heredity, such conjectures will seem extravagant, if not chimerical.

But, when one bears in mind the universal fact that offspring, whatever the sex, inherits its characteristics and its powers from both parents alike;

that the soul, unlike the body, has no sex, and that, so far as legitimate indications from the teachings of biology and psychology can serve as a guide, there is no valid reason for asserting the mental superiority of man over woman, one will be obliged to confess that these surmises are far from being either fanciful or preposterous.

It is then the veriest sophism to predicate woman's incapacity for science and for intellectual achievements of the highest order on what she has not accomplished in the past, or on the comparatively limited number of her contributions to the advancement of knowledge; for up till the present she has, for the most part, been but a dwarf of the gynaeceum, "Cramp'd under worse than South-sea isle taboo."

Had men been compelled to labor under similar conditions, it is doubtful if they would have accomplished any more than women have now to their credit.

Considering woman's past achievements in science, as well as in other departments of knowledge; considering her present opportunities for developing her long-hampered faculties, and considering, especially, the many new social and economic adjustments which have been made within the last half century, in consequence of the greatly changed conditions of modern life, it requires no prophetic vision to forecast what share the gentler sex will have in the future advancement of science.

That it will be far greater than it has been hitherto there can be no reasonable doubt.

That the number of savantes of the type of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Sonya Kovalevsky and Mme.

Curie will be greatly enlarged there is every reason to believe.

That among these coming votaries of science there will be more than one woman who, even in the most abstruse sciences, will stand "Upon an even pedestal with man," seems to be assured by the achievements of many who are now so materially adding to the sum of human knowledge.

Is it probable that the future will bring forth women whose achievements in science will rank with those of Euler, Faraday, Liebig, Leverrier, Champollion and Geoffry Saint-Hillaire?

It would be a rash man who would answer in the negative.

We cannot, as De Maistre seems to do, reason from what they have not done--when everything was against them--to what they may do when conditions shall, in every way, be as favorable to them as they always have been to the dominant sex.

Still rasher would be the man who would attempt to prove the negative of this question.

Mere _a priori_ arguments, based on preconceived bias or on the vague and groundless impression that woman is essentially and hopelessly the intellectual inferior of man, have no more value than gratuitous opinions.

The unprejudiced seeker after truth will insist on a demonstration based on incontrovertible facts.

He will appeal to history to learn what the sex has already accomplished, and to science to inquire if there be anything in the female brain to differentiate it from that of the male, or to preclude woman from attaining the highest rank in the activities of the intellect.

The result of such an investigation will, I think, cause even the most biased person to suspend judgment, if it does not induce him to align himself with those who, finding no differences in the mental endowments of the sexes, have reached the conclusion that the day will come, and, mayhap, in the near future, when the achievements of women will be on a par with those of man.

The facts stated in the preceding chapters seem, not unreasonably, to point to such a conclusion, if, indeed, they do not warrant it as a necessary inference.

A few considerations germane to this discussion will illustrate the danger of forming hasty judgments regarding questions like the one under discussion.

During the last hundred years no country in the world has done more for the education of the masses than the United States.

Everything that money could purchase and ingenuity suggest has been adopted to develop the minds and stimulate the latent talents and genius of our youth.

From the primary schools to the highest and best equipped universities, a special premium has been put on success in study, and the highest rewards have awaited those who should make any notable contribution towards the advancement of knowledge.

But, notwithstanding all the educational advantages our people have enjoyed and all the encouragement they have received to achieve something of supreme excellence, our great country with its teeming millions attracted from the most gifted nations of the Old World has not yet produced a single man who has attained the highest rank in either literature or art or science.

Far from having a preeminent master of song like Homer or Dante, we have not even a poet approaching Goethe or Tasso or Camoens.

We have no Cervantes, no Milton, no Racine, no Moliere.

America has produced no Raphael or Michaelangelo;

no Mozart or Wagner or Tschaikovsky.

Nor has it given us a Descartes, a Leibnitz, a Newton or a Darwin.

Would any one, from this complete absence in America of representatives of the highest order in literature, art and science, ever dream of concluding that we shall never have such favorite sons of genius and such giants of intellect?

Does our comparative intellectual sterility in the past, and in a country which seemed specially adapted to foster genius and attainments of the highest order, justify any one in inferring that the days of great geniuses, like the days of demigods, are gone never to return?

And yet the number of men in our broad commonwealth who, during the past hundred years, have enjoyed such signal opportunities for attaining distinction in every domain of intellectual effort is incomparably greater than that of all the women so favored since the earliest days of human history.

If, from the first flowering of Greek culture to the present day, as many millions of women had enjoyed all the transcendent advantages of education as have been in the United States so lavishly accorded to the same number of millions of men, who will say that very many of them would not have attained a much higher rank in science, as well as in art and literature, than has yet been reached by any man that America has yet produced?

Who even, on the evidence now available, would be warranted in denying that at least some of these millions of women might have attained the very highest rank in every department of intellectual achievement?

Gray, in his _Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard_, muses on the potential statesmen and the "mute, inglorious Miltons" of those countless multitudes who, for lack of opportunity to develop their inborn gifts, were condemned to pass their lives in obscurity and die, "to Fortune and to Fame unknown."

But how much more truthfully could his words have been applied to that much larger number of women of rare mental powers to whose eyes knowledge "Her ample page Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll," and whose God-given genius was ruthlessly suppressed from the cradle to the grave?

We are still in ignorance as to many of the conditions which are essential to the development of genius and which contribute to its loftiest flights.

We have yet to learn how far the efflorescence of the human mind is aided and modified by heredity, environment, atmosphere, as well as by education, encouragement and other stimuli equally potent.

But we do know that Germany, in spite of its famed universities and its feverish intellectual activity in many departments of knowledge, had to wait many long dreary centuries before it could point to a Goethe, a Schiller, a Humboldt, a Bach, or a Beethoven.

We know that France--so long the reputed center of culture--has so far produced no great epic poet, no Cervantes, no Murillo.

But shall we affirm that she will never give to the world imperishable works like _Paradise Lost_, _Don Quixote_ or the _Immaculate Conception_?

We know that Athens, which during the most brilliant period of its history counted only fifty-four hundred free-born citizens--less than the population of a small modern town--was able to produce within a very brief epoch more men of supreme distinction than all the rest of Europe from the Age of Pericles until the dawn of the Renaissance.

Hers is still the art of the world, the literature of the world, the philosophy of the world, the culture of the world.

For twenty-five centuries her canons of taste and beauty have guided poets, orators, artists; and her matchless productions have been the inspiration, as they have been the despair, of the greatest geniuses of our modern world.

Had the women of Greece not been put under constraint just as they were beginning to exhibit the splendid results of their intellectual activities; had they been encouraged to develop to the utmost their richly-dowered minds, as were the men, a far larger number of them, no doubt, would have been as successful in carrying off coveted prizes in the intellectual arena as was Corinna in her contests with Pindar.

And they would, likewise, as we may easily conceive, have greatly added to the number of masterpieces of Greek intellect in science as well as in art and letters.

But the opportunity for women to test their powers, which was so wantonly snatched from their sisters in the Hellenic world, seems again to be offered to their sex.

This opportunity, as has been stated, is due chiefly to their persistence in claiming the same right as men to intellectual development as well as to the countless proofs they have given that their demands are founded on reason and justice.

What shall be the outcome of the new opportunity for woman to prove her capacity as compared with man's in things of the intellect remains to be seen, but, from indications she has during recent years given of her powers in every branch of scientific inquiry, there can be little doubt that it will be of such character as to place woman on a higher intellectual plane than she has yet occupied.

In physical strength and in the rougher conflicts with the world she will doubtless always remain "the lesser man," but, once she feels in full possession of liberty "To burgeon out of all Within her," she will duly justify her advocates who throughout the centuries have been