A Woman-Hater Part 95

I say that this prize, and frequent intercourse with those superior women who have won it, would leaven the whole s.e.x with higher views of life than enter their heads at present; would raise their self-respect, and set thousands of them to study the great and n.o.ble things that are in medicine, and connected with it, instead of childish things.

Is there really one manly heart that would grudge this boon to a s.e.x which is the nurse and benefactress of every man in his tender and most precarious years?

Realize the hard condition of women. Among barbarians their lot is unmixed misery; with us their condition is better, but not what it ought to be, because we are but half civilized, and so their lot is still very unhappy compared with ours.

And we are so unreasonable. We men cannot go straight ten yards without _rewards_ as well as punishments. Yet we could govern our women by punishments alone. They are eternally tempted to folly, yet snubbed the moment they would be wise. A million shops spread their nets, and entice them by their direst foible. Their very mothers--for want of medical knowledge in the s.e.x--clasp the fatal, idiotic corset on their growing bodies, though thin as a lath. So the girl grows up, crippled in the ribs and lungs by her own mother; and her life, too, is in stays--cabined, cribbed, confined: unless she can paint, or act, or write novels, every path of honorable ambition is closed to her. We treat her as we do our private soldiers--the lash, but no promotion; and our private soldiers are the sc.u.m of Europe for that very reason, and no other.

I say that to open the study and practice of medicine to women folk, under the infallible safeguard of a stiff public examination, will be to rise in respect for human rights to the level of European nations, who do not brag about just freedom half as loud as we do, and to respect the const.i.tutional rights of many million citizens, who all pay the taxes like men, and, by the contract with the State implied in that payment, buy the clear human right they have yet to go down on their knees for. It will also import into medical science a new and less theoretical, but cautious, teachable, observant kind of intellect; it will give the larger half of the nation an honorable ambition, and an honorable pursuit, toward which their hearts and instincts are bent by Nature herself; it will tend to elevate this whole s.e.x, and its young children, male as well as female, and so will advance the civilization of the world, which in ages past, in our own day, and in all time, hath, and doth, and will, keep step exactly with the progress of women toward mental equality with men.