Читать книгу Common Sense About Women - Thomas Wentworth Higginson - Страница 7

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What is strength,—the brute hardness of iron, or the more delicate strength of steel? Which is the stronger,—the physical frame that can strike the harder blow, or that which can endure the greater strain and yet last longer? “Man can lift a heavier weight,” says a writer on physiology, “but woman can watch more enduringly at the bedside of her sick child.” The strain upon the system of all women who have borne and reared children is as great in its way as that upon the system of the carpenter or the woodchopper; and the power to endure it is as properly to be called strength.

Again, which is the stronger in the domain of will,—the man who carries his points by energy and command, or the woman who carries hers by patience and persuasion? the man in the household who leads and decides, or the woman who foresees, guards, manages? the mother of the family, who puts the commas and semicolons in her children’s lives, as Jean Paul Richter says, or the father who puts in the colons and periods? It may be hard to say which type of strength is the more to be admired, but it is clear that they are both genuine types.

One grows tired of hearing young men who can do nothing but row, or swing dumb-bells, and are thrown wholly “off their training” by the loss of a night’s sleep, speak contemptuously of the physical weakness of a woman who can watch with a sick person half a dozen nights together. It is absurd to hear a man who is prostrated by a single reverse in business speak of being “encumbered” with a wife who can perhaps alter the habits of a lifetime more easily than he can abandon his half-dollar cigars. It is amusing to read the criticisms of languid and graceful masculine essayists on the want of vigorous intellect in the sex that wrote “Aurora Leigh” and “Middlemarch” and “Consuelo.”

It may be that a man’s strength is not a woman’s, or a woman’s strength that of a man. I am arguing for equivalence, not identity. The greater part played in the phenomena of woman’s strength by sensibility and impulse and variations and tears—this does not affect the matter. What I have never been able to see is, that woman as such is, in the long-run and tried by all the tests, a weaker being than man. And it would seem that any man, in proportion as he lives longer and sees more of life, must have the conceit taken out of him by actual contact with some woman—be she mother, sister, wife, daughter, or friend—who is not only as strong as himself in all substantial regards, but it may be, on the whole, a little stronger.