Women are born with intelligence, some men achieve it, and most men have it thrust upon them.
Under the chaotic changes of the industrial revolution, life has been for the male a kaleidoscope of enlarging responsibilities unelected and foreseen. Many men have broken under the strain: many others have developed and a range and brilliance of mind which uses all the reserve energies of the nervous system: they produce geniuses and madmen as never before.
As industry sucks them in, women are being subjected in like manner to this forcing process of intellectual developments but rapidly as they change, they retain the same mental differences from the male.
Woman seems to be less at home with abstract thought: she has a sharp eye for facts, and a good memory for them, but she is not adept to generalization or original interpretation; and she may lose herself and her purpose in details. She is interested in persons rather than in processes or things; she discusses not problems but men, for men are her problems. It is her lot to be occupied with persons…with husband and child; it is man’s fate to be flung into the maelstrom of commerce and industry, and to deal with causes, processes and effects as well as with women and men.
It is easier for a man to interest himself in a book which propounds an idea; a woman’s book must tell a story, of a man.
She is still an animist, and sees divine personalities and heroic wills perhaps there is only an impersonal process of cosmic, social and economic change.
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