between the mental powers of men and women to result from “a physiological necessity, and [that] no amount of culture can obliterate it.” He further observes (the passages occur in a letter of his to John Stuart Mill) that “the relative deficiency of the female mind is in just those most complex faculties, intellectual and moral, which have political action for their sphere.”
One of the points as regards the inferiority of women which Feminists are willing and even eager to concede, and it is the only point of which this can be said, is that of physical weakness. The reason why they should be particularly anxious to emphasise this deficiency in the sex is not difficult to discern. It is the only possible semblance of an argument which can be plausibly brought forward to justify female privileges in certain directions. It does not really do so, but it is the sole pretext which they can adduce with any show of reason at all. Now it may be observed (1) that the general frailty of woman would militate coetaris paribus, against their own dogma of the intellectual equality between the sexes; (2) that this physical weakness is more particularly a muscular weakness, since constitutionally the organism of the human female has enormous power of resistance and resilience, in general, far greater than that of man (see below, pp. 125–128). It is a matter of common observation that the average woman can
