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An Opinion Embedded in Much Irrelevant Matter
Harper’s Weekly (January 21, 1911) : 23
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      Men have a wasteful, plodding, moral way of making a thing undeniably theirs before they permit themselves public use of it. Women have perpetual receiving-stations on the tips of their fingers, and frankly catch any or all messages then adrift in the air. Women have perpetual receiving-stations on the tips of their fingers, and frankly catch any or all messages then adrift in the air. Men plough through the text-books of a subject before they feel they have earned the right to speak of it at all, and in nine cases out of ten they reach the point where they comprehend the size of the topic too well to talk of it with light learning, or else, in the abstraction of study, they have lost the habit of easy speech altogether.
      A woman’s methods are so different. Technicalities clog her mental action. To dig a fact from its bed of sources would blunt, if not break, her delicate antennae. She deftly secures her matter in quite another way. Her tentacles attract significant matter, and, once caught, it is hers as much as though she had worked for it. On a Tuesday she hears for the first time of Ficino, say; she asks who he is, learns, and on a Wednesday she trippingly, as though it were the mere froth of her information blown off in the carelessness of rapid speech, says, “The man is a bore, he doesn’t take a stand, he fuses, like Ficino himself,” and if any brave spirit has the courage to ask her what she means, she answers with perfect self-possession and a pretty tenderness for the ignorance of her opponent: “Ficino? Ah, I’m sure you know. Neo-Platonist, Florence, fifteenth century, wasn’t he?” — this being the precise extent of the knowledge she had acquired the day before. If through the bungling interest of a masculine mind it comes out that she can elucidate the characteristics of Ficino’s philosophy not a whit further, she does not, as a man would, feel herself proclaimed a fraud, but with all simplicity contends that she owes Ficino nothing; that her connection with him was the merest accident which might have happened to any one. She would like to hear more of him; she expectantly looks around for some one to tell her (her willingness to acquire odd scraps is only less surprising than her invariable and apt use of them when secured), yet, on the other hand, she retains no sharp recollection of when she first heard of him. There is no desire on her part to make her position regarding the old Italian more firm. She considers her insecurity quite legitimate. Women frequently give the impression that, once having realized how little they can have acquired by the study mapped out for them, they have reached the belief that they, in common with the rest of mankind, have been born with whatever knowledge they possess. With bewildering vagueness they murmur, “One just knows things” — an ignoring of sources and authorities that lends a something shady to the origin of their mental possessions, and makes their complacent and frequent flaunting of what they have engagingly audacious.
      This feminine thrift is the only natural argument for a different education for men and women — different that is, in amount. Men are deep, if you will, and vast quantities must be poured in before anything rises near enough the top for using. Women are shallow, and the slightest amount causes a bubble at the brim. That the matter should differ is another subject altogether. We might as well admit at once that the women need less. A dozen interpretations of this phenomonon are at and for the choosing. Men are deep, if you will, and vast quantities must be poured in before anything rises near enough the top for using. Women are shallow, and the slightest amount causes a bubble at the brim. One has simply to choose one’s renderings of one of nature’s simple facts. That girls are born more mature than boys is obvious to any eye. Boys seem in every case to go back to the beginning. Every male youngster seems to carry his generation with a discouraging slide back to primitive days. Girl babies, on the other hand, are the only argument we have which makes the passing on of acquired traits seem at all likely. They come bringing extras with them, and there is a look in their eyes that makes it difficult to know just what tips to give them. There is always the discomfiting possibility that the knowing small things may reply, “Ah yes, we’ve had all that before.” This uncertainty may be a partial explanation of the world’s total funk in its treatment of girls which has resulted in refined avoidance of any education for them whatever. But in spite of their splendid use of the small store they have — and sometimes the infinitesimal amount makes their thrift verge on the heroically magical, even when this trait is compared with the swamped and disabled appearance presented by so many men who are known by their records to contain genuine substance — the opinion of a great number of people seems to be that the women shall continue to subsist on mere nothings, while the men are, as before, to be made unfit for any but laboratory use.
      The women carry what they are permitted to imbibe like gentlemen. It is only the men who become insensible under the administration of strong mental spirits. Facts befuddle the male. Facts befuddle the male. He has to adjust everything else to them, and the more facts he has the more trouble he is put to, so that he is in a continual state of internal discomfort, laboriously matching one thing up against another, only to find, when he has concluded, he would be safe in assenting that the other talkers have gone on their riotous verbal way with daring and dynamic sparks, if with nothing more solid.
      It takes a head to carry heady matter. It takes a head to carry heady matter. The few women who, by reason of a learned and unorthodox father, or some other uncommon and fortunate accident, have been in a position to get essentials before their minds were debilitated with non-essentials, have made such stimulating flights. Why not give their sex fibre to assimilate from the very start? They would keep it all so aired, so supple with usage, and they would never be cowed by undue regard for it. Let the men continue in their character of reservoirs, but by all means prepare the women so that they are able to draw on a stock that otherwise is in danger of becoming sodden and indigestible. There is nothing innately unattractive in solids; it is only the effect they have on men that leads us to believe them so. There is nothing innately unattractive in solids; it is only the effect they have on men that leads us to believe them so. Men go about weighed down, depressed, made cautious and cumbersome, because of stuff inside them which, if respected less, and made to dance more frequently by the sting of a light-minded lash, would be an advantage to all concerned, instead of the painful responsibility it now is. The conversation of women may be shallow, but it is, thank Heaven, presentable; it also exists, which is something, and if a thin, it is still a pungent and keen covering placed over a cavity society has up to now thought proper to them.
 

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